The last hope

A long-mooted two-state solution between Israel and Palestine could offer a path to peace after the bloodiest fighting in decades. But how might it look – and would the will still exist to achieve it?

- Harriet Sherwood

The “day after” the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza may still be weeks or months away. But it will come. “When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next,” said US president Joe Biden recently. “And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution .”

Against a backdrop of repeated cycles of violence and a military occupation lasting more than half a century, diplomats and analysts agree that lasting peace must follow the bloodiest fighting between Israelis and Palestinians for decades.

The two-state solution to the bitter conflict that has beset the region for almost a century – dividing the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean to carve out two independent, sovereign Israeli and Palestinian states existing side by side has repeatedly been endorsed by world leaders.

But it has proved impossible for Israel and the Palestinians to reach an agreement. And, since talks brokered by John Kerry, then the US secretary of state, collapsed in 2014, and as Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have proliferated, the consensus has been that the two-state solution is dead.

That view has been reinforced by opinion polls conducted shortly before Hamas's deadly assault on Israeli citizens on 7 October. In September, a Pew Research Center survey found that only 35% of Israelis believed "a way can be found for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully" - a decline of 15 percentage points since 2013.

And a Gallup poll found that just 24% of Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem supported a two-state solution, down from 59% in 2012. Young Palestinians were significantly less enthusiastic than their parents.