PUBLISHED BY

WorldView

By Ishaan Tharoor

with Mikhail Klimentov

The world cares about the two-state solution again. Is it too late?

People protest outside United Nations headquarters

where a UN conference on a two-state solution for

Israel and the Palestinians takes place on Tuesday.

(Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images)

On the ground, a viable Palestinian state seems more impossible than ever. In the West Bank, more than half a million Jewish settlers are entrenched on territory once central to the emergence of a Palestinian state. Settler vigilantes have carried out myriad attacks on Palestinians in their midst, while the broader settler project seeks to expand further into the West Bank and instigate removals of more Palestinians living there. Some top Israeli officials are clamoring for outright annexation of the land by Israel.

In Gaza, little civilian infrastructure remains after 21 months of war; whole cities in the densely-populated territory have been wiped off the map while its besieged, immiserated population is locked in a daily struggle for survival. Looming in the background is the possibility of Gaza’s more than 2 million inhabitants being forced to “voluntarily emigrate” from their war-blighted homeland.

In Israel, the two-state solution — the idea of separate Israeli and Palestinian states existing side-by-side — is a nonstarter, especially after the trauma of militant group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel. Leading Israeli diplomats have declared it dead. Israeli lawmakers overwhelmingly backed a parliamentary resolution last year rejecting Palestinian statehood. And the Israeli right seeks a permanent reality where Palestinians remain within a greater Israel as second-class citizens with fewer rights, or are compelled to leave all together.

In the United States, the Trump administration has given up the idea of Palestinian statehood — something successive U.S. administrations for the past two decades paid lip service to, even if they failed to help realize it. A large proportion of Republican lawmakers have aligned themselves with Israel’s right and would balk now at the moves made by previous Republican presidents to restrain Israeli behavior, or their earlier rhetoric acknowledging Palestinian claims and rights.

The current U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said in June that he didn’t believe a separate Palestinian state would emerge “in our lifetime.” If one did get forged, the devout Christian evangelical suggested in a different interview, it could be carved out of a “Muslim” country that chose to host millions of exiled Palestinians.

Recently, though, the two-state solution has regained traction. A joint French and Saudi-backed effort at the United Nations this week called on all U.N. member states that have not yet recognized Palestine to do so by Sept. 5, if a long list of conditions — many of them directed toward Israel — are not met. France intends to recognize a Palestinian state, and Britain and Canada also appear ready to follow suit, unless Israel rapidly addresses their concerns about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. If they end up recognizing a Palestinian state, they will be joining the overwhelming majority of the world’s countries in doing so.

“Canada condemns the fact that the Israeli government has let the situation deteriorate in Gaza to this extent,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney.

“We must work on the ways and means to go from the end of the war in Gaza to the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” French foreign minister Jean-Nöel Barrot told U.N. delegates this week. In his view, the two-state solution is the sole realistic option for lasting peace, and he called on governments that shared this vision to work to “incentivize” Israel to address their concerns.

The U.S. and Israel boycotted the proceedings at the United Nations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an inveterate opponent of the two-state solution, described the event as “unproductive and ill-timed.” The State Department waved it away as a publicity stunt. “Our focus remains on serious diplomacy: not stage-managed conferences designed to manufacture the appearance of relevance,” spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters.

Proponents of the effort argue it’s the only way out of the current crisis. “Recognition is not about punishing Israel or granting Palestinians an unearned victory,” wrote Saudi commentator Ali Shihabi earlier this summer. “It is a necessary political step to reintroduce the possibility of a negotiated peace. It empowers diplomacy and offers Palestinians a stake in a future built on governance, not resistance.”

Strengthening the cause of Palestine in international forums, the argument goes, could breathe new life into a long moribund diplomatic track. “The Israelis used to claim that they have no partner for peace in the Palestinian side,” a senior Egyptian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities, told me Thursday. “The problem now is there is no partner for peace in Israel.”

The official added that Israel would not be able to deepen ties with its Arab neighbors in the absence of a Palestinian state. “Without that,” the official said, Israelis “will never enjoy peace and stability and integration in this region.”

But such arguments have been ignored in Israel, where Netanyahu is using European censure as a means of whipping domestic support. The country’s most prominent opposition leader, Yair Lapid, also denounced France’s decision to recognize Palestine. “The Palestinians should not be rewarded for October 7 and for supporting Hamas,” Lapid said.

Critics of Israel also are skeptical of the emphasis on the two-state solution, for which myriad obituaries have already been written over the past decade.

“It is far easier to call for a two-state solution than it is to confront the reality of Israeli domination of a de facto single state,” wrote Middle East scholars Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami in Foreign Affairs. “It is easier to affirm the existence of a Palestinian state than to do the extraordinarily difficult things it would take to truly create one.”

“The priority today is to end the butchery in Gaza, which will not be done without imposing material costs on the Israeli government that is perpetrating it and depriving it of the weapons with which it does so,” wrote Hussein Agha, a former Palestinian negotiator, and Robert Malley, a former U.S. diplomat focused on the Middle East. “Beyond that is a need to reimagine creative approaches to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that renounce deceit and pretense, put aside the illusory goal of hard partition between two states, and seek a different pathway to dignified coexistence between the two peoples.”

1,000 Words

(Andrii Nesterenko/EPA/Shutterstock)

(Tetiana Dzhafarova/AFP/Getty Images)

Ukraine’s parliament approved legislation Thursday restoring the independence of the country’s two main government anti-corruption bodies — a move demanded by Kyiv’s international partners as well as tens of thousands of enraged Ukrainians who protested on the streets of the capital and other cities. The legislation passed by a comfortable margin, and demonstrators outside parliament cheered the result when it was announced.

The protests, the largest in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, erupted last week when parliament voted to place two government agencies under the supervision of the country’s prosecutor general, an ally of President Volodymyr Zelensky. The two bodies were created after Ukraine’s 2014 pro-democracy revolution and were seen as vital to the country’s bid to join the European Union. Critics said last week’s law would effectively neutralize them, and Zelensky quickly reversed course.

Talking Points

• Special envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee will enter Gaza Friday to inspect food distribution sites and develop a plan to ensure more food gets to civilians amid growing international anger over mass starvation there. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the two officials intended to hear “firsthand about this dire situation” in the enclave.

• The U.S. will raise tariffs on some Canadian goods from 25 percent to 35 percent, with the higher tariff entering into effect on Friday, the White House said Thursday.

• The Senate’s Republican-led Appropriations Committee is recommending a major increase in Ukraine aid in next year’s defense budget. The panel on Thursday approved an $852 billion defense budget framework that includes $800 million in long-term military support for Ukraine. The full Senate will consider the spending package in coming weeks and then work with the House to finalize the legislation later this year.

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Prisoners speak out

(Alex Brandon/Pool/AFP/Getty Images)

One detainee was beaten unconscious. Others emerged from the dark isolation room covered in bruises, struggling to walk or vomiting blood. Another returned to his cell in tears, telling fellow detainees he’d just been sexually assaulted.

They called it “La Isla” — The Island — the cell where Venezuelans deported from the United States by the Trump administration said they suffered some of the worst abuse of their 125 days in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.

The Washington Post interviewed 16 of the more than 250 men who were deported by the United States to CECOT, held there for four months and then released this month to Venezuela as part of an international prisoner swap.

The matching firsthand accounts across multiple interviews offer the most complete view yet of conditions inside the mega prison, where inmates are denied access to lawyers and almost all contact with the outside world — and where about 14,000 Salvadorans remain incarcerated. Few detainees have ever left CECOT, and fewer have spoken publicly of their experience there.

The Post has found that many of the detainees had entered the United States legally and were actively complying with U.S. immigration rules.

Many of the men had fled political oppression and extreme poverty under Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a U.S. adversary. Some had been granted permission to live and work in the United States. At least two arrived in the U.S. as refugees seeking safety from persecution in Venezuela.

CECOT “seemed like it was for animals,” said detainee Julio Fernández Sánchez, 35. “It was designed for people to go crazy or kill themselves.”

At 5 a.m. on July 18 — after months of abuse — the detainees were loaded onto buses, unsure where they were headed. Then a man in a uniform with a Venezuelan flag on one sleeve stepped onto Molina’s bus. They were going home.

Several of the men, who had once fled Venezuela, said they were genuinely grateful to Maduro for negotiating their release when it seemed no one else would. Still, some said they’d leave for the U.S. again, perhaps once Trump leaves office.

Not Roger Molina, a detainee who had previously been vetted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and federal law enforcement, flown to the U.S. and conditionally accepted into a State Department resettlement program for refugees.. Having survived CECOT, he doesn’t think he could do it again.

“The American Dream,” he said, “became a nightmare.” — By Samantha Schmidt, Helena Carpio, María Luisa Paúl, Silvia Foster-Frau, Teo Armus and Aaron Steckelberg