Long-standing US support for a two-state solution in Israel appears to have been decisively abandoned today, with a joint news conference between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, in which Trump declared himself to be perfectly comfortable with a “one-state solution.”
Despite the huge implications of the shift away from Palestinian independence as US policy, Trump presented himself as interested only in peace, and not worried what exact form it takes. At the same time, he urged Israel to “hold back” on expanding settlements in the occupied territory.
Netanyahu appeared to hold back a bit of scrapping the two-state solution narrative outright, but did demand that under any situation in which the Palestinians are nominally given a state that Israel would retain total security control over all of the Palestinians’ lands.
Israeli officials have pointed toward this goal in the past, insisting that the Palestinians, even if they ever got a state, could never be allowed control over their own borders. This appears to extend that to internal Israeli control over their security, meaning that a two-state solution would effectively maintain the Israeli occupation.
Given this demand, the one-state versus two-state question apparently doesn’t matter a lot to Israel, either, as Israel either ends up annexing Palestine and keeping the Palestinian populace under military control, or grants Palestine “independence” and continues to occupy the Palestinians forever anyhow.
