Throughout the recent history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, most of the world’s nations, including Western and Arab governments, have officially supported a two-state solution, which would allow Israel to maintain sovereignty within its internationally recognized borders while also establishing a demilitarized Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. But while the proposal has been endorsed by the Palestine National Authority, which acts as a provisional Palestinian government over most of the urban areas of the occupied West Bank, and has received broad support from the international community, it has been rejected by Israel and the United States.
In recent weeks, a growing number of Western nations—including historically pro-Israel stalwarts such as the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Australia—have made a long-overdue push to recognize both Israel and Palestine as sovereign nations. President Donald Trump has responded by sharply rebuking U.S. allies who have recognized Palestine, accusing them of rewarding terrorism. But while Trump has publicly equated these countries’ push for Palestinian statehood with support for Hamas, they have in fact widely condemned the group, which split from the Palestinian Authority in 2007 after forcibly seizing control of the Gaza Strip and remains a rival force to the official governing body.
On August 29, the Trump Administration banned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas from entering the United States, where he was scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly on September 25 in support of a two-state solution. This ban defies the United States’s stated obligation as the U.N. host country to allow visits from world leaders. As Israel continues to insist on controlling all of historic Palestine and Hamas continues to call for an Islamic state in the region, Abbas’s proposal for a small, secular Palestinian state alongside a secure Israeli state has been received by other nations as a welcomed moderate voice. But Trump has justified banning Abbas by claiming that his call for a two-state solution undermines U.S. policy, forcing the Palestinian president to address the U.N. General Assembly remotely.
But while violence and famine conditions have raged across Gaza in Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians, the push by other Western nations to recognize Palestine appears to be driven more directly by their opposition to Israel’s growing colonization of the occupied West Bank, and its repression of Palestinians still living in the region. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits occupying powers from moving civilians onto territories seized by military force, and the U.N. Security Council and International Court of Justice have each confirmed that this provision applies to the Israeli-occupied West Bank. But past administrations of both Republican and Democratic presidents have blocked the enforcement of these resolutions, and Mike Pompeo, the first Trump Administration’s Secretary of State, claimed in 2019 that the settlement blocs were somehow “not inconsistent, per se, with international law.”
The Democratic Party historically opposed Palestinian statehood, and while it has formally supported the idea since 2004, it has insisted that Palestinian statehood only be recognized under conditions agreed to by Israel. Given that current Israeli leaders, including those of the opposition party, have categorically ruled out Palestinian statehood, Democratic leaders’ refusal to pressure Israel to compromise via conditioning military aid conditions or enforcing U.N. resolutions raises questions regarding the sincerity of their stated support for a two-state solution.
Polls show that 78 percent of registered Democrats back the idea of recognizing Palestine—but when a resolution to that effect was placed before the Resolutions Committee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at its August meeting in Minneapolis, it was voted down. Instead, the majority on the committee adopted a competing resolution, supported by DNC chair Ken Martin and seventeen other top party leaders, stating that the creation of a Palestinian state could only come “through direct bilateral negotiations”—despite the fact that such negotiations haven’t taken place in more than a decade. The Resolutions Committee also voted down a resolution calling for conditioning military aid to Israel, also supported by an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters, underscoring the tension between the party’s official two-state position and its leadership’s tacit endorsement of ongoing Israeli control of the occupied Palestinian territories.
It is doubtful, given this state of affairs in addition to the United States’s veto power in the United Nations, that the recent recognition of Palestine by several Western nations will significantly shift the balance of power away from Israel. Indeed, skeptics have suggested that the recognition of Palestine by these Western governments may be more of an effort to appease the widespread public outrage at Israeli war crimes in Gaza than a realistic attempt to end the Israeli occupation.
Meanwhile, the rapid expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank—which now fully surround the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority—presents an additional obstacle to Palestinian statehood, as the loss of Palestinian land to Israeli control has made it impossible to establish a contiguous state. The Israeli government has said explicitly that they are intentionally expanding their colonization efforts to break up the territory toward this end. As a result, a growing number of analysts see the international push for Palestinian statehood as too little too late, and have come to view a “one-state solution,” which would establish a single binational state with guaranteed equal rights for both peoples, as a more viable option.
The one-state solution, however, may be even more difficult to achieve, and no peace settlement of any kind will be possible as long as the bipartisan political leadership in the United States continue to support the Israeli occupation and oppose recognizing Palestinian statehood. But regardless of which form a final agreement may take, any just and lasting peace must be predicated on the equal rights of both peoples—something which the United States continues to refuse to acknowledge.