President Trump came forward with a nonsensical statement on Wednesday as he dangerously backed away from the two-state solution, which has been central to America’s Mideast policy for more than 20 years and remains the only just answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“So, I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like,” Mr. Trump, who has no experience in Middle East peacemaking, said at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, adding, “ I can live with either one.” There is no conceivable one-state solution that both parties will like. Smiling by Mr. Trump’s side, Mr. Netanyahu, who has steadily undermined the prospect of a Palestinian state, clearly believed his vision was the one the new American president had in mind.
The two leaders seemed almost giddy in their first official meeting, which was intended to show how Mr. Trump can be a better friend to Israel than President Barack Obama was, even though Mr. Obama completed a new 10-year, $38 billion defense agreement with Israel.
Mr. Trump voiced optimism about getting a “great peace deal” between Israel and its neighbors. While Mr. Trump did urge Mr. Netanyahu to “hold back” on settlements in the West Bank and said Israel must make compromises, he offered no details on any peace initiative, and the vagueness of his remarks suggests he has no inkling of how to move forward. His willingness, however, to lend credence to those who would deny a separate state to the Palestinians will certainly make peace harder to achieve. Palestinians have long sought their own state and are sure to reject the idea of having their lands annexed by Israel, even if offered some kind of limited autonomy.
The two-state solution began to take shape after the 1993 Oslo accords and was endorsed by President Bill Clinton in 2001. As recently as December, the United Nations Security Council reaffirmed its “vision of a region where two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, live side by side in peace within secure and recognized borders.”
The last peace negotiations collapsed in 2014, and in recent years, Israel’s right-wing government has so greatly expanded settlements in the West Bank that the options for establishing a Palestinian state in that territory may be nearly foreclosed. This has led to increased talk among Israelis of the “one-state solution,” in which Israel subsumes the West Bank formally while incorporating the Palestinian population or somehow shifting the Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt. The likeliest outcome, given the growth rate of the Arab population, is that Israel would be confronted with a miserable choice: to give up being a Jewish state — or to give up being a democratic state by denying full voting rights to Palestinians.
Palestinians reacted with anger and bafflement to Mr. Trump’s policy shift. “This is going to give Israel a free hand to do what it wants,” said Mosheer Amer, an associate professor at the Islamic University in Gaza City. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians’ chief negotiator, raised the specter of “apartheid” and called for “concrete measures in order to save the two-state solution.”
Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Netanyahu said how Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries would be persuaded to pull back from the two-state solution. The two leaders want the Arab countries, now on better terms with Israel because of a shared hatred of Iran, to join with Israel in prodding the Palestinians into an agreement, rather than having Israelis and Palestinians first negotiate a deal that would then lead to peace with the broader Arab world.
Given what Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, there is less reason than ever to believe that he can succeed where so many other presidents have failed.