A two-state solution will not solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Two states will not end a war about one state — because borders cannot solve an ideological war.

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Gaza was the two-state solution.

Figuratively, of course.

Gaza after Israel’s 2005 disengagement was not an “independent Palestinian state.” But Gaza was something enormously important: a real-world test of the basic theory behind the two-state solution.

Israel dismantled every one of its 21 settlements in Gaza, removed more than 8,000 Israelis from their homes, and withdrew its permanent military presence from inside the territory. Here was an opportunity for Palestinians to demonstrate what Palestinian self-government could become when Israelis were no longer living among them: Build institutions, build an economy, build political legitimacy, build infrastructure, build a future.

Build something Palestinians could point to and say: This is what we will do with independence.

Instead, Hamas took power in 2006 and, a year later, after fighting its Palestinian rival Fatah, Hamas violently seized Gaza and established its own government there.

And eventually came October 7th.

That does not mean Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza caused October 7th. Nor does it mean every conceivable Israeli withdrawal must produce the same result. It means something more uncomfortable: Territory is not enough.

For decades, the two-state solution has been marketed as though the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were fundamentally a real-estate dispute. Draw the correct border, remove enough settlements, give Palestinians enough land, provide sufficient economic assistance, put Israeli soldiers on one side and Palestinians on the other. Then peace will emerge.

October 7th exposed the weakness in that theory, because a two-state solution does not merely require two states; it requires two political societies capable of sustaining them.

The word “competency” will make people uncomfortable, but it should not. Competency does not mean intelligence. It does not mean ethnicity. It does not mean that one population is inherently superior to another. It means something much more practical: A competent state must be able to govern.

It needs functioning institutions. It needs a government capable of enforcing laws. It needs some monopoly over organized force (rather than competing militias answering to different political factions). It needs mechanisms for transferring power. It needs public institutions that survive individual leaders. It needs economic administration, courts, security forces and a political culture capable of making decisions that are painful but necessary.

Most importantly, if that state is supposed to exist beside another state with which it has spent generations at war, it needs a government capable of enforcing peace against its own extremists.

That last part matters enormously. Peace is not proven when moderates sign an agreement. Peace is proven when extremists try to destroy that agreement and the government stops them.

Israel has demonstrated this type of state capacity since 1948 — and in important ways even before independence.

Israel has featured governments of the Left, Right and Center. Prime ministers have lost elections. Coalitions have collapsed. Leaders have been prosecuted. Governments have made disastrous decisions and been publicly investigated for them. Israelis protest their government, replace their government, and bitterly disagree over what their government should do.

That is not evidence of perfection. It is evidence of a functioning state.

Palestinian politics has produced something very different. The Palestinian Authority has not held a presidential election since 2005 or a national legislative election since 2006. Mahmoud Abbas’ original four-year presidential mandate expired in 2009, yet he still rules to this day. Hamas, meanwhile, converted its 2006 “electoral victory” into exclusive rule over Gaza after its violent break with Fatah in 2007.

For nearly two decades, Palestinians have therefore lived under two rival Palestinian governments: Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in parts of the West Bank. That is not simply a democracy problem. It is a sovereignty problem. Who speaks for the Palestinians? Who controls the guns? Who has the authority to sign a permanent peace agreement? And, most importantly, who has the ability to enforce that agreement if another Palestinian faction rejects it?

These are not peripheral questions. They are the entire question. A Palestinian state created tomorrow would still have to answer the most basic question of statehood: Who is actually in charge?

This brings us to an even deeper problem with the two-state solution: Two states only produce peace if both states consider the creation of those states the end of the conflict.

That distinction is routinely ignored. If Israel believes a Palestinian state means the Palestinians receive sovereignty and the conflict is over, while a powerful Palestinian movement believes a Palestinian state is merely another stage in the struggle against Israel, the two sides are not agreeing to the same deal. One is agreeing to an end state; the other is agreeing to a new starting position.

And that is where the ideological difference between Zionism and much of Palestinianism becomes impossible to ignore.

Zionism is fundamentally an affirmative ideology. It answers one question: What do the Jewish People need? The answer is Jewish national self-determination in the Jewish ancestral homeland. Zionism does not require France to disappear. It does not require Jordan to disappear. It does not require Egypt to disappear. And it does not require Palestinians to disappear either. A Jewish state and a Palestinian state can therefore exist simultaneously within the logic of Zionism.

The existence of “Palestine” inherently negates Zionism. That is the contradiction few folks wants to confront. Palestinian politics has never fully resolved the contradiction between building “Palestine” and undoing Israel.

In 1947, the United Nations recommended partitioning the land into separate Jewish and Arab states. Palestinian Arab leadership rejected partition. The Arab Higher Committee subsequently reaffirmed its rejection of the plan.

That matters because there was no occupation of the West Bank by Israel in 1947. There were no Israeli settlements in the West Bank. There was no Israeli control of Gaza. Yet partition was still unacceptable.

Why?

Because the argument was not merely about where the Jewish state would be. It was about whether a Jewish state should exist at all.

More than seven decades later, Hamas’ own political documents still define “Palestine” as extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, rejects recognition of Israel, and describes the establishment of a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines as a possible formula of national consensus without surrendering its claim to all of the territory.

That is not a minor semantic distinction. It is the difference between two states and two stages. This is why Gaza matters so much.

Israelis were told for years that separation would make them safer. Get out of Gaza, remove the settlements, end the daily friction, give Palestinians greater control over their own lives, let them govern themselves.

Israel eventually did much of that. The result was not Singapore on the Mediterranean. It was Hamas. It is that territorial withdrawal without political transformation can simply move the battlefield. A border is only peaceful when the people controlling the other side have decided that what lies beyond that border is no longer theirs to conquer. Otherwise the border is merely a military line.

This is the mistake Western policymakers continue to make when they talk about two states as though statehood itself will manufacture moderation. Based on a massive sample size of history, it will not.

A Palestinian flag will not disarm Hamas. A Palestinian seat at the United Nations will not create independent courts. International recognition will not create democratic legitimacy. Foreign aid will not produce a monopoly on force. And drawing a border will not make a population accept that everything beyond that border belongs permanently to somebody else. Those things require political transformation.

This does not necessarily mean there can never be a Palestinian state. It means the sequence matters. The international community has spent decades asking: What must Israel give the Palestinians so that peace becomes possible? Perhaps the more important question is: What must Palestinian politics become so that Palestinian sovereignty becomes safe?

A viable Palestinian state requires far more than territory. It requires legitimate institutions, a unified government, a single security authority, the dismantling or absorption of independent armed groups, an education system that prepares children for coexistence rather than permanent conflict, leaders willing to tell their own population that millions of Israelis are not eventually going anywhere and, above all, an explicit understanding that Palestinian independence would settle the Palestinian claim against Israel rather than strengthen it.

That is the missing piece. You cannot impose borders around an unresolved ideology and call the conflict solved.

The international community remains addicted to the phrase “two-state solution” because it sounds reassuringly concrete: two peoples, two states, two flags, two governments, problem solved.

But conflicts are not ended by flags. They are ended when societies decide what they are willing to live without. Palestinians would have to accept something equally fundamental and, historically, much harder for their political movements to say without qualification: The Jewish state is permanent.

Not until the next war. Not until the next generation. Not until the demographic balance changes. Not until refugees and their descendants overturn its Jewish character. Not until another armed organization becomes powerful enough to challenge it.

Permanent.

That is what peace means.

And that is why October 7th should have fundamentally changed the way the world talks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Gaza demonstrated that removing Israelis from Palestinian territory does not automatically remove the Palestinian conflict with Israel. It demonstrated that self-government does not automatically produce responsible government. And it demonstrated that physical separation cannot substitute for ideological reconciliation.

The question is therefore not whether diplomats can draw two states on a map. They have been drawing those maps for generations. The question is whether Palestinian politics can produce a state whose purpose is to build “Palestine” rather than eventually dismantle Israel.

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