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00:00Let's talk about the two-state solution.
00:03Israel living alongside the new state of Palestine.
00:07It's long been seen as the answer but remains elusive.
00:15With the war in Gaza, it's back in the headlines.
00:17The only real solution is a two-state solution over time.
00:21A lasting end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can only come through a two-state solution.
00:26A future in which two states live side by side.
00:29Live side by side in peace and security.
00:32So what do people actually mean when they talk about a two-state solution?
00:36How long has the idea been around?
00:38And why do some people think that it's become more of an avoidance strategy that lets politicians off the hook?
00:44They use this as a tool to absolve themselves of responsibility.
00:49It's a form of escapism.
01:00The two-state solution is all about deciding how this land is divided, who lives there and who controls it.
01:07Now you might think it's about getting Israelis and Palestinians to agree on a simple split.
01:12But there's nothing simple about it.
01:14Just look at the map for a start.
01:16This is Israel.
01:18And then you have the Palestinian territories which are under Israeli military occupation and cut off from each other.
01:25Gaza's here.
01:26Israel's war has left the Strip in ruins.
01:29And the West Bank is more like a patchwork of Palestinian land because of all the settlements Israel has built over the years.
01:36These are illegal under international law.
01:38There are now 700,000 Israeli settlers living on Palestinian land.
01:43And it makes the path to a Palestinian state much more complicated.
01:47If this was meant to be a question of two states and if it was a question of drawing a border, believing a border would have been drawn a long time ago.
01:55The problem is that this has never been about a line.
01:58It's about the rights of individuals.
02:01It's about history.
02:03The region of Palestine has been fought over for thousands of years and controlled by different ancient kingdoms and empires.
02:10In more modern times, it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
02:13But the British took control there during the First World War and it later became known as British Mandate Palestine.
02:20The population was 78% Muslim, 11% Jewish and 10% Christian, according to a census in 1922.
02:28Now, even before they took control, the British supported the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
02:34It was stated in a letter known as the Balfour Declaration.
02:41That was the aim of a movement called Zionism.
02:44It encouraged Jews to move to British Mandate Palestine.
02:47And in the 1920s and 30s, more and more did.
02:50Many were fleeing persecution in Europe.
02:53But the growing Jewish population led to tension with the local Arab population, the Palestinians.
02:59Jewish and Arab armed groups cropped up and there was violence.
03:04In response, a British commission suggested partitioning the land.
03:08But there was no support for the idea.
03:14In the 1940s, the question of what should happen in Palestine grew more urgent.
03:22So did pressure to establish a Jewish homeland, especially after World War II and the Holocaust.
03:29In 1947, the British asked the United Nations to make recommendations on the future government of Palestine.
03:36And this is what they came up with.
03:38Another partition plan, which allocated 56% of the land to a Jewish state and left 43% for an Arab state.
03:46The remaining land, including Jerusalem with all of its holy sites, would be under international control.
03:52The UN General Assembly voted to adopt the plan.
03:55Jewish leaders accepted it, but Arab leaders rejected it.
03:58They saw it as deeply unfair, especially because the Arab population was the majority.
04:04The following year, Israel went ahead and declared itself a state.
04:08And five Arab nations went to war with Israel.
04:11Israel calls it their war of independence.
04:13Palestinians call it the Nakba, which means catastrophe.
04:17Because in that fighting, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes.
04:23Many ended up in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
04:26By the way, that's important to know about.
04:28Because when people talk about a future Palestinian state,
04:31one of the big questions is whether all those Palestinians and their descendants will get to go back.
04:36What's called the right of return.
04:40Now, after the 1948 war, Israel ended up with 78% of the land.
04:46So more than the UN partition plan.
04:48That left 22% for Palestinians to live in.
04:51Split between the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Jordan controlled, and Gaza, which Egypt controlled.
04:57Those borders became known as the Green Line.
05:00They're still the internationally recognized borders of Israel.
05:03And it's more or less the division that many people have in mind when talking about a two-state solution.
05:09But then, in 1967, there was another war.
05:13Israel pushed out Jordan and Egypt, seized control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza and imposed a military occupation.
05:21Many, many, many countries then started to put pressure on Palestinians to say,
05:25you must recognize Israel's existence.
05:28You have to recognize that Israel took over 78% of your historic homeland.
05:33And instead, let's try to get back that remaining 22%.
05:38The Palestinian side, the idea of territorial partition was very, very difficult.
05:43But by the 1970s, there were some who were pushing, saying,
05:48look, we're never going to get all of historic Palestine.
05:51We can build a state on a portion of liberated Palestine.
05:55And in 1988, there was an official shift.
05:58By that point, the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization,
06:02had become the main group representing Palestinians and their cause.
06:06Its chairman, Yasser Arafat, declared the independence of Palestine.
06:18And although the declaration was mostly symbolic, it was important,
06:22because Arafat also made it clear that he accepted the principle of partition and the existence of Israel.
06:29That helped pave the way for the Oslo Accords,
06:32a pair of agreements which are seen as the beginning of the peace process.
06:36It started out with secret talks in Norway's capital.
06:39That's where the name comes from.
06:41And it led to this moment.
06:46The Israeli and Palestinian leaders shaking hands on the White House lawn.
06:50After decades of fighting, they declared their commitment to peaceful coexistence.
06:55So what were the details of Oslo?
06:58Well, in the first agreement in 1993, the two sides formally recognized each other, which was a big deal.
07:05They set out a timetable for Israel to start withdrawing from parts of the occupied territories
07:10and for Palestinians to get more autonomy.
07:13That led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority, or PA,
07:17although its power was and still is limited.
07:20It's more like a local council than a government.
07:22And the PA only operates in parts of the Palestinian territories,
07:26because in the second Oslo Agreement, the West Bank was carved up into three administrative areas.
07:32What the peace process was all about was not about Israel accepting the 78%
07:38and letting Palestinians live freely in the remaining 22%.
07:42Instead, what it was about was Israel takes the 78%, puts it in its pocket,
07:47and then negotiates over the remaining 22%.
07:51Now, the Oslo Accords were interim arrangements.
07:54They were only supposed to last five years.
07:57And in that time, the two sides were meant to negotiate the really tough stuff,
08:02what are called the permanent status issues.
08:04So things like how to share Jerusalem.
08:07The city has huge religious importance for both sides, and they both see it as their capital.
08:12The issue of Palestinian refugees and whether they get the right of return we mentioned earlier.
08:17What to do about all the Israeli settlements, security arrangements, and where you draw those final borders.
08:23So Oslo looked like it was heading in the direction of a two-state solution,
08:28but it wasn't actually spelled out.
08:30The Oslo Accords are sometimes remembered as having sort of promised a two-state solution.
08:38That is absolutely and completely false.
08:41It's very, very carefully drafted in order to avoid mentioning anything about Palestinian statehood.
08:48Still, the two sides were talking to each other.
08:51There was a lot of diplomacy going on, and many people felt optimistic about it.
08:57There were a lot of peace conferences on all kinds of levels.
09:00Grassroots, politicians, journalists, artists.
09:04There was a hope in the air.
09:06But there was opposition to the peace process too, on both sides.
09:12In Israel, there were big protests against Oslo.
09:15Close to half of the society that said, we're not on board with this process.
09:19We're talking to terrorists.
09:22Israeli withdrawal from territory that is an essential part of the land of Israel.
09:26In 1995, a Jewish nationalist who rejected the peace process assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
09:33So very early on, one of the main architects of the Oslo Accords was gone.
09:40There was also opposition on the Palestinian side, for lots of reasons.
09:44There are many Palestinians still, and they were also in the late 90s,
09:50who didn't agree with the path of Arafat, namely that the Palestinians should recognize the state of Israel.
09:58There are many Palestinians who believe that all Palestine belongs to the Palestinian people.
10:04Israel took it from them in 1948.
10:07And they feel that there is no room for compromise.
10:11That was the position of some armed groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad,
10:15who carried out attacks on Israel.
10:18There were also Palestinians who opposed Oslo because of their frustration about how little it was delivering.
10:24Israel never fully withdrew from the territory it promised, and it kept building settlements.
10:30We'll come back to that in a minute.
10:35That this was a cover for effective Israeli annexation.
10:39Just a complete disillusionment with diplomacy, a complete disillusionment with negotiations,
10:45with the Oslo process, and so on.
10:48By the end of the 90s, Oslo's five-year time frame was up,
10:52and the peace process was basically on life support.
10:55There was a push to save it at Camp David, the US president's country retreat.
11:10But the summit ended without an agreement.
11:12And if anything, there was more distrust as both sides blamed each other for the failure.
11:19Soon after that, frustration and anger boiled over.
11:23The trigger was this visit by a senior Israeli politician to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem,
11:29a super-inflammatory move.
11:31Check out our episode on Al-Aqsa if you want to understand why.
11:34There were riots, and it led to an uprising known as the Second Intifada.
11:40Palestinians staged huge protests.
11:42Some carried out attacks on Israel.
11:44And Israel used heavy military force against Palestinians.
11:48It was more than four years of intense conflict.
11:58But they weren't completely extinguished.
12:00There were many more attempts over the years to get the peace process back on track.
12:05And the two-state solution became the stated goal of all that diplomacy.
12:11They begin to say maybe one of the problems with Oslo is it didn't spell out any end point.
12:17So let's spell something out. Let's give something to the Palestinians.
12:23And this is when you begin to have open declarations from the United States
12:27that there should be an entity called Palestine at the end.
12:30But while the international community seemed to be doubling down on the two-state idea,
12:35there were other developments pulling momentum in the opposite direction.
12:39Let's run through three major ones, starting with settlements,
12:42which Israel kept on expanding even during the height of the peace process.
12:47It was as though the Oslo agreements gave Israel the green light to build and expand settlements.
12:55With the thinking being, and they used to say this,
12:57we have to take every hilltop and then we can negotiate down.
13:00And that's why between the years of 1993 to the year 2000,
13:04that's why we saw virtually a doubling in the number of settlers from 200,000 to almost 400,000.
13:14Once you are not ready to freeze the settlements,
13:18you give the message that you don't agree to a Palestinian state.
13:24Because if you have an intention to continue to build on Palestinian ground,
13:29so for sure you have no intention to evacuate it.
13:33Then there's the way that politics on both sides have developed since the early 2000s.
13:38On the Israeli side, there's been a strong shift to the right
13:42and fewer politicians who back the two-state idea.
13:45An ultra-nationalist ideology that was once thought of as extreme has now become part of the mainstream.
13:52Settlers who openly call for the full annexation of all Palestinian territory are government ministers.
14:00And in a speech at the UN, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held up a map of Israel that covered the whole land.
14:09On the Palestinian side, the challenge is more about who actually speaks for the Palestinian people.
14:14Because it's not that clear.
14:16You've got the PLO, which still represents Palestinians internationally.
14:20Arafat was the chairman, but he died in a suspected poisoning in 2004 and was replaced by Mahmoud Abbas.
14:27Abbas is also the president of the PA.
14:29But the PA doesn't operate in Gaza anymore.
14:32Because after elections in 2006, Hamas ended up in control there.
14:36So Palestinian leadership is already split.
14:39And then there are bigger questions around legitimacy.
14:43There haven't been elections since that vote in 2006.
14:46These days, Abbas is pretty unpopular.
14:49He's seen as old and out of touch.
14:51And the PA is accused of being corrupt and working too closely with Israel.
14:56The Palestinian Authority not only does not have any credibility and no longer has any capacity,
15:03it's virtually disintegrating in the West Bank.
15:06On the other hand, polls show that Hamas and its leader Ismail Haniyeh are more popular than Mahmoud Abbas.
15:12But several countries classify Hamas as a terrorist organization and refuse to recognize it as a representative of Palestinians.
15:20So where has all of this left the peace process?
15:23Well, dead, basically.
15:25The last time there were direct negotiations about a two-state solution was in 2014, during the Obama administration.
15:32So a decade ago.
15:33You need credible leaders in Israel and Palestine, which we don't have.
15:40You need serious mediation from outside, which we don't have.
15:44And you need a mobilized regional and global public opinion to support the two negotiating parties.
15:52But it's nowhere on the horizon right now.
15:55This is where the U.S. also comes in for a lot of criticism.
15:59Because while it's always had an important role as a mediator, the U.S. is also Israel's biggest ally and protector.
16:06The Americans have such a leverage over Israel.
16:11Israel is politically, economically, diplomatically, internationally and obviously militarily totally dependent on the United States.
16:22They never really took measures to push Israel.
16:26They just, you know, condemned Israel.
16:30With talking, you don't get anything.
16:33And then there's everything that's happened since October 7th, 2023.
16:40Around 1,200 people were killed in Hamas' attacks on Israel.
16:44That's according to the Israeli authorities.
16:46In response, Israel vowed to wipe out Hamas.
16:50Its war on Gaza has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
16:57The U.N.'s highest court said there's a plausible risk of genocide.
17:04And against that horrifying backdrop, talk of the two-state solution is back.
17:10It's once again being presented as the only option for lasting peace by a range of world leaders and organizations.
17:17The United States continues to believe that the best viable path, indeed the only path, is through a two-state solution.
17:38What's the Palestinian position?
17:40Well, the two-state solution remains the stated goal of the PLO.
17:44Hamas' position is less clear.
17:46In 2017, they published a document that did accept the formation of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders.
17:53Some took it to mean that Hamas was open to diplomacy.
17:56But Hamas has never explicitly recognized Israel, and it maintains its right to use violence against the occupation.
18:03As for Israel's current position, well, officials from the prime minister down have repeatedly rejected the idea of a two-state solution.
18:11Is there still a chance for a two-state solution?
18:13I think it's about time for the world to realize the Oslo paradigm failed on the 7th of October, and we need to build a new one.
18:20And in order to build a new oneโฆ
18:22But does that new one include the Palestinians living in a state of their own? Is that what it includes?
18:28I think the biggest question is what type of Palestinians are on the other side.
18:31It's what Israel realized on the 7th of October.
18:33Do they have a state?
18:34The answer is absolutely no.
18:36It's not that the two-state solution is absolutely, utterly, forever impossible.
18:41It's just politically very, very unlikely and would require such a coincidence of interests and political determination that its likelihood is extremely slim.
18:50So there's a lot of skepticism.
18:52Plus, there's an accusation that all the talk of a two-state solution is actually part of the problem.
18:59Those words have become the fig leaf.
19:01It's become a way of placating Palestinians.
19:04It's very, very convenient to believe that there is a solution somewhere on the shelf.
19:12And one day we will take it and use it.
19:15But it's not there anymore.
19:17Some people argue that there needs to be a more drastic change in mindset to one that's more realistic about the current situation,
19:26where you've got one state, the state of Israel, that has almost total control over Palestinian life
19:32and enforces a system of discrimination that human rights groups describe as apartheid.
19:38The argument goes, why not focus on fixing that with a one-state solution?
19:44So rather than dividing the land, you focus on how to govern it and ensure everyone's rights are protected, regardless of their religion or ethnicity.
19:54We have one state. We don't have to create it.
19:58We have to create a new regime, only to turn it from an apartheid system to a democracy.
20:04I don't want to oversimplify it. Right now, it seems unsinkable.
20:09It's not like we will do magic and this will work.
20:14But at least I can see a road somewhere.
20:18Oftentimes, people talk in terms of escapism.
20:22Oh, this will be undone with one-state solution. It will be undone with a two-state solution.
20:29But what we really need to focus on is ending that violence.
20:35Will Palestinians, do they want to have their own separate entity, their own separate state?
20:42Certainly some do. But the vast majority are not looking to have a state.
20:48The vast majority are looking to have that their rights are enshrined and protected.
20:53And that's got to be the starting point.
21:00We've done lots of other explainers related to Israel and Palestine.
21:04Here's one we filmed in East Jerusalem. This one is all about the U.S.-Israel relationship.
21:12For more UN videos visit www.un.org
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