Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long resisted the concept of a two-state solution, but rarely so explicitly as in the months since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent war in Gaza. U.S. President Joe Biden insists, however, that there’s a path forward for an independent Palestine in cooperation with Netanyahu’s government.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long resisted the concept of a two-state solution, but rarely so explicitly as in the months since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent war in Gaza. U.S. President Joe Biden insists, however, that there’s a path forward for an independent Palestine in cooperation with Netanyahu’s government.
“I think we’ll be able to work something out … I think there’s ways in which this could work,” Biden recently told reporters, referring to a potential postwar deal that could establish a Palestinian state while also overcoming his Israeli counterpart’s objections.
What Biden seemed to have in mind was a Palestinian state that would be both independent and demilitarized. Axios has reported that State Department officials have already been tasked with looking into what a demilitarized Palestine would look like “based on other models from around the world.”
There is growing acceptance of the idea in the international community as a possible way out of the current conundrum—namely, by assuaging Israeli security concerns and handing Palestinians a state of their own to end the cycle of violence. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said that Australia may recognize a Palestinian state if it was “demilitarized.” There even appears to be backing from some significant players in the Arab world. “We are ready for this state to be demilitarized,” said Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi during a November 2023 news conference in the presence of the Spanish and Belgian prime ministers. Sisi is a close ally of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which presumably would have been consulted by Cairo.
But a minefield of diplomatic challenges needs to be navigated to make this idea a success. None of the existing states and territories without armed forces compare the uniquely difficult circumstances faced by Israelis and Palestinians, and none offers a model that can simply be adopted to resolve one of the most intractable conflicts in one of the world’s most restive regions.
Nearly 40 countries and territories do not have a standing army, and nearly all are relatively small in size and population. Many are island states, such as Grenada, famous for its nutmeg exports, or Dominica, known for its natural hot springs and tropical rainforests. Many have protection from bigger, well-armed states such as the United States, or from NATO for some of those that lie in Europe.
Liechtenstein, however, has neither a military nor NATO membership, and yet it indirectly benefits from NATO’s protective umbrella.
“If there’s a war, there will be many other countries that will be crossed first,” Liechtenstein’s ambassador to the European Union, Pascal Schafhauser, told Foreign Policy in his office in Brussels. Tucked between Austria and Switzerland, the landlocked nation coordinates policing efforts with its immediate neighbors and is, by default, protected by militarily stronger neighbors such as Germany and France in the extended region. The roughly 40,000 inhabitants of Liechtenstein reside in a peaceful and prosperous region, and they have not yet found a compelling reason to reverse the decision that led to demilitarization of the country in 1868.
Liechtenstein and Palestine, however, could not be any more different. While Liechtenstein’s geography and equally prosperous neighbors guard it from external threats, the Palestinian territories are cheek-to-jowl with Israel—their arch foe. Furthermore, an independent Palestine would still have to reckon with a meddlesome Iran, which is likely to keep aiding nonstate armed groups—such as Hezbollah and the Houthis—in firing rockets at Israel and challenging the stability of any arrangement.
Costa Rica is often hailed as a paragon of development in the Latin American region. While there are many factors behind its success, at least one of them is widely considered to be demilitarization. Back in 1948, Costa Rica abolished the military, and unlike some of its neighbors, it hasn’t been embroiled in coups and military takeovers since. Instead, it has spent the money that would go toward a defense budget on human development. Unlike Palestine, however, none of its neighbors are trying to invade its territory or instigate an armed uprising.
The changing internal security dynamics in Costa Rica nonetheless offer a lesson. In a recent paper titled “The Myth of Demilitarization in Costa Rica,” Markus Hochmüller and Markus-Michael Müller highlight the fact that crime is on the rise there, and that there are calls to hand increased powers to heavily armed special policing units such as the Fuerza Especial Operativa. This illustrates the danger that even a basic policing structure could be militarized at a later stage.
Haiti, on the other hand, is a classic example of how a demilitarized state can be crippled internally by local armed gangs. The United Nations Security Council has once again agreed to send foreign troops to help the government reclaim the neighborhoods and essential infrastructure that have been seized by criminal gangs.
If Hamas doesn’t agree to disarm, and other armed groups in Gaza are not on board with the final settlement, there are similar worries of continued unrest, not just between these groups and Israel, but also between them and the authorities of an independent Palestinian state.
The case of the Solomon Islands’ embrace of Beijing shows that even if demilitarized a state can choose belligerent military allies that can reshape broader security dynamics in a region. For a long time, the Pacific nation had been under Australia’s security influence, but midway through 2023, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare met with his Chinese counterpart and signed an agreement to boost policing cooperation that would allow Beijing to train its police officers.
The Palestinian territories are vastly different from any of these countries, as it fears an imminent threat from its own neighbor, faces disunity over what qualifies as a settlement within its own population, and is the victim of an Iranian agenda to expand its regional influence.
From the Israeli perspective, being absent on the ground in Gaza could result in another Oct. -like attack by insurgents who don’t recognize Israel’s right to exist.
Eran Lerman, a former deputy national security advisor of Israel, told Foreign Policy that at best, Israel would accept a “1.8-state solution” with serious restrictions that would keep Palestinians from pursuing their own independent policies in matters of defense.
“First, we need to retain some sort of control of borders so we can see what’s coming in,” Lerman said. “Secondly, we need to have a say on how many and what kind of arms Palestine can keep and on the size of the police and security forces it can have to ensure it doesn’t turn into a military in the future.”
Netanyahu has instread proposed a “state minus,” which would include limitations on sovereignty and guarantees to Israel beyond demilitarization, which observers say is more in sync with the public mood among Israelis.
“Would a Palestinian state be allowed to enter into a military agreement with Iran? Or to conduct military exercises with Hezbollah?” said Daniel Schwammenthal, the director of the American Jewish Committee’s Transatlantic Institute in Brussels. He argued that “Palestine must agree to not enter into defense agreements with enemy states of Israel,” for instance.
Nour Odeh, a Palestinian political analyst, said the key question from Palestinians’ point of view was not whether a prospective state has a military, but rather the final border settlement.
“Is it going to be Bantustan or on the ’67 borders? That’s more important,” she told Foreign Policy over the phone from Ramallah, referencing Palestinian fears that Israel intends to keep control of large chunks of the West Bank in a way that keeps Palestinian lands disjointed. “If Israel would not attack, would not invade, if there are international guarantees to that effect, then having a military is not exactly a Palestinian priority, in my opinion,” she added.
But not every Palestinian may feel the same way. Schwammenthal pointed out that according to a recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 72 percent of Palestinians backed Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. He said that proved that support for an armed movement Palestinians was high.
Sisi, the Egyptian president, has proposed that the security concerns of both Israelis and Palestinians could be answered if a multinational security force was deployed to facilitate the transition. “There can also be guarantees of forces, whether NATO forces, United Nations forces, or Arab or American forces, until we achieve security for both states, the nascent Palestinian state and the Israeli state,” he said back in November. Some Israeli intellectuals backed the idea of a multinational and committed force, but they want to try that out in Gaza first to see if it works.
And all this presupposes that Netanyahu, or any conceivable successor, would earnestly consider consenting to the creation of any independent Palestinian state at all.
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