It’s time to abandon winner-takes-all politics in Israel

A two-state solution remains the only solution

The Jewish Chronicle asked me to write about the chances for a settlement in the Middle East. My first thought was to cling to the received wisdom that no compromise is possible. Whatever people might say in public, the dynamic and dominant forces on both sides push against the notion that Palestinians can have their own state in the occupied territories alongside Israel.

Israel has moved ever further rightwards since the failed Oslo peace negotiations of the 1990s. In the minds of most Israelis swapping land for peace is discredited.

On the other side, the global left denounces Israel as a white settler state and believes it has no right to exist. (The abolition of Israel is what that tortuous label “anti-Zionism” means.) Hamas wants an Islamic state from the river to the sea.

And yet the more I looked at it the more I felt that the extremists had led both their peoples to disaster, and that the old compromise of a two-state solution remained the only way forward.

Here is how I argued it out.

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Only a desperate opportunist fighting to save his career (and to stay out of the dock) would insult his truest ally. But that is what Benjamin Netanyahu did when he rejected Joe Biden’s two-state solution.

The US president and every friendly and half-friendly European and Arab government want a settlement, as does the Palestinian Authority, as do all decent people.

Yet scratch the surface and the two-state solution can seem like a pious myth.

It is invoked but not believed.