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The Two-State Solution: What It Requires, and Why It Has Stalled

For decades, the two-state solution has been described as the international consensus answer to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians — two sovereign states, living side by side, with the 1967 armistice lines as the baseline for borders. Diplomats have invoked it at the United Nations. American presidents have staked legacies on it. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have sat across from each other with maps and percentages and proposed land swaps. And yet, in 2025, a viable Palestinian state looks further away than at any point since the Oslo Accords were signed on the White House lawn in 1993.

This is not an accident of geography or culture. It is the result of specific, documented political choices — most consequentially, the relentless expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which has changed facts on the ground in ways that are increasingly difficult to reverse. To understand why the two-state solution has stalled, you first have to understand what it actually requires.

What International Law and Diplomacy Require

The legal and diplomatic architecture of a two-state solution rests on several foundational pillars. UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted unanimously in November 1967 following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai, and the Golan Heights, called for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of every state in the region. Resolution 338 (1973) reaffirmed 242 and called for direct negotiations. Together they established the 1967 lines — the Green Line — as the reference point for any territorial settlement.

Beyond the border question, a genuine two-state outcome requires at minimum three additional elements that international actors have long identified:

The Structural Killer: Settlement Expansion

No single factor has done more to undermine the two-state framework than the growth of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, the transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory is prohibited. The International Court of Justice reaffirmed in its July 2024 advisory opinion that Israel’s settlement enterprise violates international law and that Israel is obligated to cease settlement construction and make reparations for the damage caused.

The numbers tell the story. At the time of the Oslo Accords in 1993, approximately 110,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem). According to Peace Now and Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, that number had grown to roughly 700,000 by 2024 across more than 130 officially recognized settlements and over 100 unauthorized outposts. These settlements are not scattered randomly — they are concentrated along major road arteries, in the Jordan Valley, around Jerusalem, and in the central West Bank highlands, precisely the areas that would form the geographic spine of any Palestinian state.

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, has documented how the settlement infrastructure — roads reserved for Israeli use, military buffer zones, settler-controlled land registrations — has fragmented the West Bank into disconnected Palestinian population zones. Bimkom, an Israeli planning rights group, has mapped how Israeli planning law has been applied asymmetrically: approving settlement growth while systematically denying Palestinian building permits in Area C, which constitutes roughly 60 percent of the West Bank and remains under full Israeli civil and security control under the Oslo framework.

The Biden administration issued executive orders and verbal condemnations of settlement expansion, and the Trump administration before it had explicitly blessed the settlement enterprise, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declaring in 2019 that the U.S. no longer considered settlements inconsistent with international law — a position the international legal community overwhelmingly rejected. What neither administration did was alter the material reality on the ground.

The Right of Return: The Question Negotiators Have Avoided

Palestinian refugees and their descendants — dispersed across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and beyond — represent one of the largest and longest-standing refugee populations in the world. Their legal claim to return or compensation under Resolution 194 has never been extinguished by any treaty. Yet virtually every framework proposal, from the Clinton Parameters (2000) to the Olmert-Abbas talks (2008), has offered Palestinian negotiators the choice between accepting a severely limited return to Israel proper or receiving compensation — effectively trading a UN-recognized right for a negotiated settlement figure.

Scholar Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University has argued in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020) that the consistent pattern of American-mediated negotiations has been to present Palestinians with a framework already shaped by Israeli red lines, and then describe Palestinian rejection of those terms as intransigence. The refugee question is the sharpest illustration: no Palestinian leadership has the political legitimacy to formally extinguish the right of return without a credible offer that addresses the actual human situation of millions of people living in camps or in legal limbo.

Shifting Palestinian Views on Whether Two States Remains Viable

Palestinian public opinion on the two-state solution has undergone a significant and measurable shift in recent years. The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), which has conducted regular polling in the West Bank and Gaza for more than two decades, reported in late 2023 that support for the two-state solution among Palestinians had dropped to its lowest recorded level — below 34 percent — with growing proportions either backing a one-state framework or expressing the view that no political solution is viable in the foreseeable future.

This is not ideological hardening for its own sake. It reflects a rational assessment of observable reality: settlements continue to expand, movement inside the West Bank remains restricted through checkpoints and permit systems documented by OCHA oPt, and East Jerusalem’s Palestinian population has faced systematic displacement through residency revocation, home demolitions, and settlement construction in neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, documented in detail by Ir Amim.

The two-state solution is not dead as a legal or diplomatic concept. The parameters for what it requires are clear, documented, and grounded in international law. What is dying — or has already died in the estimation of a growing number of Palestinians — is the belief that the international community has the will to impose the conditions necessary to make it real. That gap, between the framework on paper and the architecture being built in concrete and stone across the West Bank, is where the solution has stalled.

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