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........