The two-state solution is the only way forward.

The premise treats two states as a fair compromise between equals. It is not. It asks the native to accept permanent partition of their homeland and to surrender the majority of historic Palestine as the price of recognition, while the state built through their dispossession keeps what it took. A framework that begins by accepting the outcome of the Nakba does not resolve the injustice. It ratifies it. Palestinians are asked to call the loss of 78% of their land a fair settlement.

The two-state solution has been the stated position of Western governments for decades. In practice, Israel has spent those decades building colonial settlements across the West Bank, fragmenting Palestinian territory into enclaves, annexing Jerusalem, and eliminating the territorial basis for any Palestinian state. A solution named for two states cannot function when one party has destroyed the conditions for the second to exist. Calling it the only way forward while refusing to reverse the policies that make it impossible is holding a position that lets colonisation continue under the cover of a peace process.

The framework did not emerge from Palestinian self-determination. It was imposed by external powers as the ceiling of what Palestinians could demand. Its origins trace to the 1947 UN partition plan, drawn up by a body in which Palestinians had no vote, which handed 55 per cent of their homeland to a minority settler population that owned less than 7% of the land. Every version since has followed the same logic: a settlement designed to accommodate the colonial project, then presented back to the colonised as the limit of their political horizon. Self-determination means a people choosing their own future, not consenting to a partition they never chose.

To call two states the only way forward treats a colonial power bent on regional expansion as a reluctant negotiator, and grants it more time to expand. The formula avoids naming the actual situation. What exists between the river and the sea is not a border dispute awaiting negotiation. It is a colonial regime conducting genocide, apartheid and military occupation, seeking domination and expansion. These are not deviations from a peace process.

The two-state solution proposed an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, roughly along the pre-1967 occupation boundaries, with Jerusalem as its capital, formalized under UN Security resolution 242 (1967). It was the basis for the "Middle East Peace Process" negotiations framework, but only formalised through an interim agreement meant to be a five-year transition: the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995. Three decades on, the so-called peace process has been used as a cover to accelerate Israeli colonization in the West Bank. Israel has tripled the colonial settler population in the West Bank, it has ignored the 2004 ICJ ruling that the separation wall is illegal, the 2024 ICJ finding that its presence in the occupied territory is unlawful and must end, and the ICJ provisional measures in the genocide case.