The long conflict between the Jewish State and the various foreign tyrannies and terrorist organizations committed to its destruction has produced a diplomatic doctrine that has undergone a kind of canonization. Treated as scripture, it is entirely detached from reality.
I’m referring, of course, to the Two-State Solution. What began nearly a century ago as a blueprint for the partition of British Mandate-era Palestine has been elevated into a sacred formula. Questioning it is considered extremism.
Yet it is precisely this immunity from scrutiny that has allowed a dangerous fantasy to serve as the basis for seemingly endless, ever-escalating political pressure on Israel, including recognition by the United Nations and 157 of its 193 members of a non-existent country. Should it ever materialize, it would almost certainly become Israel’s implacable, irredentist enemy.
When the UN, the European Union, and most governments use the term Two-State Solution they mean that Israel would withdraw from, and a Palestinian state would be created in, the so-called West Bank and the Gaza Strip – with a capital in East Jerusalem – on or very close to the lines that existed before the Six-Day War of June 1967.
The late Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban referred to those boundaries as “Auschwitz borders” – for good reason. Withdrawing to them would be stage one of a two-stage Final Solution – a forced retreat behind indefensible borders inevitably followed by an assault on the Jewish State with catastrophic consequences.
Size matters, more than even many of Israel’s friends and supporters appreciate.
To describe Israel as a small country is to understate the issue. The Jewish State is about the same size as the state of New Jersey.
The West Bank is a little smaller than Delaware.
Gaza is roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C.
Picture New Jersey being told that its stability and legitimacy require it to give up a Delaware-sized portion of itself and accept another territory beside it double the size of the nation’s capital, knowing that the lands to be surrendered are largely inhabited by people – including legions of heavily armed murderers, bombers, rapists and religious fanatics – who not only hate New Jersey but aim to destroy it and annihilate or expel nearly all its citizens.
Now add a critical detail: the New Jersey land involved in this “solution” includes narrow corridors and high ground that overlook roads, cities, and infrastructure in the state’s remaining territory.
New Jersey would never agree to such a scheme; and Israel will never agree to it, either. In the real world, small distances magnify danger, and hostile regimes do not become benign because diplomats demand it.
Nor will any Israeli government agree to sharing – Two-State Solution code for dividing –Jerusalem.
There is zero chance of that happening.
No Israeli government is going to agree to a return to anything remotely resembling the 1949 armistice line reality in which Israel’s capital – the historic and spiritual center of the Jewish people – was a frontline border town. Calling this abomination “sharing” is a rhetorical way of selling the re‑division of a city that Israel deliberately reunified in 1967.
Between 1948 and ‘67, Jordan controlled the Old City and East Jerusalem, expelled the Jewish residents of the Jewish Quarter, and barred Jews altogether from the Western Wall, the Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery, and other holy sites, in open breach of the armistice commitment to free access. Synagogues were destroyed or left in ruins; Jewish gravestones were used as paving and latrines; and the city lived with a hard military line through its middle, with sniping and fortifications.
When Israel liberated East Jerusalem, it abolished Jordan’s discriminatory regime, guaranteed freedom of access for all faiths, and then codified in Basic Law that Jerusalem, “complete and united,” is the capital of Israel. Since then, mainstream Israeli politics has treated “no re‑division of Jerusalem” as a red‑line consensus.
Proposals to share sovereignty over Jerusalem almost always translate, on the map, into carving the city again into separate sovereign zones or international enclaves. So, sharing in practice isn’t a neutral formula of coexistence but a euphemism for undoing Israeli reunification and reinstating the very division whose consequences Israelis remember all too clearly.
When pressed to concede that Israel cannot survive a return to the 1967 lines or the redivision of Jerusalem, two-state advocates reach for their fallback promise: the new Palestinian state would be a non-militarized democracy.
Notice the term. Non-militarized is a carefully chosen word. It means the new state would refrain from building certain types of forces, while retaining internal security services, dual-use capabilities, and the sovereign right to revisit constraints whenever it chooses.
In other words, Israel would have to rely on its new neighbor’s promise not to rearm rather than a system that prevents rearmament.
That system is called demilitarization. It requires intrusive, enforceable limits: no army, no heavy weapons, no foreign forces, binding inspection and interception rights, and external control over borders and airspace.
Opponents of demilitarization argue that the Palestinian state would need a force capable of combating domestic terrorist groups.
Really?
If you need an army, instead of state and local police departments, to suppress your own terrorists, you have already conceded that the state is built atop an armed movement, not above it. Besides, a force strong enough to crush Hamas would be strong enough, with a change of orders or leadership, to join Hamas.
The expectation that the Palestinian state would be a parliamentary democracy is equally unserious, given the history of Palestinian extremism and terrorism. Elections don’t prevent extremist takeovers. Hitler and Hamas – and Turkey’s Islamist strongman – all came to power through elections and parliamentary processes.
Elections don’t immunize societies against radicalization; and they don’t stop security services from seizing control.
Consider Israel’s largest, most dangerous enemy – Iran’s Islamist regime – which, as of this writing, is still in power after reportedly slaughtering more than 30,000 of its citizens in the recent uprising. Iran stages elections and calls itself a republic, while remaining a clerical fascist dictatorship with a global terrorist arm.
The so-called international community didn’t stop the mullahcracy. To the contrary; after helping the regime take power in 1979, European governments – and American Democratic administrations – appeased and enriched it while it sought to develop nuclear weapons and built the largest and most diverse ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East, with several thousand short- and medium-range systems capable of striking targets across the region and parts of Europe.
Which brings us to the core myth holding the whole two-state thing together: the belief that outside assurances can substitute for strategic depth.
Israel can’t rely on promises and guarantees from “the world” that has failed to stop Iran from arming proxy armies, and murdering Americans, Iranian dissidents, and Jewish community members abroad.
The Jewish State can’t rely on paper assurances from a so-called international community that has proven incapable of preventing a country-sized concentration camp – North Korea – from becoming a nuclear armed power.
Israel can’t even rely on U.S. assurances. If the United States couldn’t prevent a Communist revolutionary from conquering Cuba, only 90 miles from Florida – and turning the island nation into an adversary bold enough to covertly intervene in conflicts across Latin America and as far away as the Middle East and southern Africa – how will the U.S. prevent the new Palestinian state from becoming an antidemocratic threat to Israel?
There is also an obsolete political assumption embedded in the Two-State Solution: parity, the insistence on “two states for two peoples.” It’s a piece of diplomatic machinery built for 1947, not for the world that exists after 1948, 1967, Oslo, and October 7. The parity idea baked into the UN partition plan (two roughly equivalent states, side by side, sharing an economic union) was a contrivance for a late‑Mandate exercise, not a binding constitutional principle.
Clinging to that obsolete symmetry today does more than misrepresent reality; it forbids honest consideration of any arrangement that does not look like a cartoon of equal flags on equal poles.
Once you treat parity as sacred, anything more modest or asymmetrical becomes unsayable in polite diplomatic company. For example, a permanently demilitarized Palestinian microstate – Gaza with a real security buffer along Israel’s border, plus a small and tightly controlled West Bank exclave under explicit Israeli security primacy – may be the outer edge of what Israel could ever tolerate.
But because the canon demands a “sovereign, viable” peer of Israel, any such model is dismissed in advance as an insult, a Bantustan, a violation of “rights,” rather than evaluated on the only terms that ought to matter now – namely, if it would save lives, stabilize borders, and prove enforceable over time.
The parity condition crowds out discussion of microstate or protectorate‑style solutions not because those are unworkable – European micro‑states are sovereign but explicitly subordinated, protected, and structurally demilitarized – but because they puncture the political theater on which the Two‑State Solution now depends.
As long as diplomats are obliged to pretend that the only acceptable outcome is an equal Palestinian state commanding Israel’s high ground and chokepoints, serious exploration of more limited, securable configurations will remain off the table, not on their merits, but because they expose how far the discourse has drifted from reality.
All that said, even the most minimalist alternative to the Two-State Solution could not be created by a single “recognition” ceremony or communique; it would require a phased, performance‑based process that starts with security and only then cautiously widens Palestinian civil authority. A workable arrangement would have to begin with verifiable dismantling of armed groups, strict external control of borders and airspace, and years of monitored demilitarization before anyone can talk honestly about locking in permanent political status.
Territorial contiguity is yet another structural illusion of the Two-State Solution – specifically, the outrageous demand for a corridor linking Gaza and the West Bank. Any plan that carves a sovereign land bridge from Gaza to the West Bank would bisect Israel, permanently exposing its narrow coastal and central corridors to the kinds of infiltration, arms smuggling, and surprise attack that have defined every iteration of Palestinian militancy from 1948 to October 7.
That’s a bridge too far, to put it mildly.
Finally, there is the Jordan factor, a risk that is rarely talked about openly because it exposes how fragile the entire plan is.
Jordan’s population is majority Palestinian by all serious estimates, even if the exact number is uncertain. The monarchy has survived through a blend of security control, tribal alliances, and external subsidy. But the monarchy isn’t guaranteed to last forever. If Jordan destabilizes and a Palestinian state exists west of the river, the possibility of a political union can’t be waved away as impossible.
Should that happen, Israel would face a contiguous hostile country on both sides of the Jordan River, with depth, manpower, and strategic continuity.
The international community would not stop it. International law provides no veto over voluntary unions between sovereign states. Outside powers could condemn it, withhold recognition, or impose sanctions – but they would not fight a war to prevent it.
Israel would be left, as always, to fend for itself.
That is why, in the end, Israel’s security doctrine is built on a simple premise: it must be able to defend itself by itself. That is realism.
The Two-State Solution is the opposite of realism. Its proponents ask Israel to trade precious land and strategic depth for a peaceful mirage, resting on promises that are likely to vanish when tested.
They as – and pressure – in vain. Israel will not comply.
Our sages understood how a traveler in the desert can die chasing phantom water. Israelis, who have tragically had to bury the victims of earlier illusions – and fatally flawed conceptions –know better than to treat a mirage as a solution.