Before US president George W. Bush gave his well-known Rose Garden speech declaring support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it was only peace activists on the far Left who spoke of, let alone advocated for it.
Yitzhak Rabin reportedly laughed at the notion of a Palestinian state, leaving the term out of any document he signed. A month before his assassination, the prime minister told the Knesset that he was willing to give the Palestinians “an entity which is less than a state.”
In his Rose Garden speech, Bush said, “It is untenable for Israeli citizens to live in terror. It is untenable for Palestinians to live in squalor and occupation. And the current situation offers no prospect that life will improve. Israeli citizens will continue to be victimized by terrorists, and so Israel will continue to defend herself. In the situation, the Palestinian people will grow more and more miserable. My vision is two states, living side by side in peace and security... Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born.”
All of a sudden, Bush put a Palestinian state on the table and the two-state solution became mainstream. President Barack Obama took Bush’s support of a two-state solution and transformed America’s position of support for it into being the only acceptable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Everyone knows... a lasting peace will involve two states for two peoples: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people,” he said.
In response to the turning tide of expectation for a two-state solution, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “In my vision of peace, in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect. Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government. Neither will threaten the security or survival of the other…
“If we receive this guarantee regarding demilitarization and Israel’s security needs, and if the Palestinians recognize Israel as the State of the Jewish people, then we will be ready in a future peace agreement to reach a solution where a demilitarized Palestinian state exists alongside the Jewish state.”
A deteriorating situation
WITHIN A few years of continued Palestinian intransigence and terrorism, it was becoming clear that Palestinians weren’t interested in peace. Yet, in 2013, almost two-thirds of Israelis (63%) and more than half of Palestinians (53%) still supported a two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
By 2016, less than half of the Israeli population would support it. While the Democratic Party still saw the two-state solution as the only one, the Republican Party platform that year declared that it didn’t view the two-state solution as the only solution to the conflict and would support any one that the Israelis and Palestinians would negotiate together.
During the first Trump administration, the “Deal of the Century” was proposed, which would have created a Palestinian state and flooded it with $50 billion of foreign investment. The Palestinians immediately rejected the Trump plan. By the time the Biden administration came into power in 2021, support among Israelis for the two-state solution fell to 43% and among Palestinians to 42%.
This didn’t stop president Biden from declaring, “A two-state solution is the only way to guarantee the long-term security of both the Israeli and the Palestinian people – to make sure Israelis and Palestinians alike can live in equal measures of freedom and dignity. We will not give up on working toward this goal.” Yet, for all its insistence that the two-state solution is the only end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Biden administration was the first one in decades to not suggest a peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians.
MANY HAVE suggested that along with the 1,200 mostly Israelis killed on October 7, 2023, and the thousands of subsequent deaths in the war that followed the attacks, the two-state solution died as well. Support for it among Israelis and Palestinians has never been lower. Even among those who still maintain that the two-state solution is the only one to Israeli-Palestinian conflict there is a recognition that it will take decades until it is realized.
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization’s mission to Israel during an interview with Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov that a lesson learned from past conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians was that “There can be no sovereign entity west of the Jordan River [other than Israel and] no other armed forces except for the IDF.
“When we see what happened on October 7, 2023, we see the logic because the short distance, less than one mile from Jabalya to the kibbutzim around the Gaza Strip, is a huge temptation,” he said, “and in life, you cannot have guarantees that you have 100% accurate intelligence all the time. We learned it the hard way.” Harkov wrote that “Sa’ar urged Conference of Presidents member organizations to speak out against a Palestinian state, which he said would be ‘a cancer in the heart of our homeland.’”
Jewish and pro-Israel organizations found promoting the two-state solution a safe space on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They felt that declaring their support for a two-state solution was in line with Israeli policy as long as the Jewish state hadn’t reversed course on its support for it. Many organizations had also fallen to inertia and reflexively supported the two-state solution because that was the official bipartisan Pro-Israel policy to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
NOW IN 2025, post-Oslo, after October 7, still in the midst of the Gaza war, and in the return of a Trump era, Israeli policy has changed. Netanyahu has reversed course from his support of the Oslo Accords and the two-state solution, saying, “l will not compromise on full Israeli security control over all the territory west of Jordan – and this is contrary to a Palestinian state.”
It is time for American Jews and their leading pro-Israel organizations, from the Conference of Presidents to AIPAC and AJC, to end their support and promotion of the two-state solution. There doesn’t need to be a public reversal of the policy, but these organizations need to stop making statements supporting it.
Organizations like Democrats for a Pro-Israel Majority must begin educating elected officials and leaders in their party about factors that led to the failures of the Oslo Accords and the impossibility of a safe two-state solution. They must encourage their party to end its promotion of an unrealistic solution to the conflict that Israel and her people no longer support.
The baseline qualifier for an American pro-Israel organization should be promoting policies that are in line with mainstream Israeli policy. Support for archaic and failed policies should be disqualifiers and considered fringe positions in the pro-Israel community.
The writer is a certified interfaith hospice chaplain in Jerusalem and the mayor of Mitzpe Yeriho, where she lives with her husband and six children.