The Two-State Solution Is Dead. Let’s Stop Pretending Otherwise.

By Mphuthumi Ntabeni | Opinion

For years, the international community has repeated the same tired refrain that the only path to peace in Palestine is through a Two-State Solution. Presidents come and go, summits are staged, diplomats pose for photos, but the facts on the ground never change. Or rather, they do change—just not in the way we’re told they will, but for the worse.

While the world debates theoretical borders, Israel has made its vision unmistakably clear in practice. There is one regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It is not democratic. And it is not equal. The world must finally face this truth. The Two-State Solution is no longer a road to peace. It is a mask for permanent apartheid.

Partition in Palestine has never been a neutral or noble idea. It was, from the beginning, a tool of imperial governance. The British Peel Commission in 1937 and the UN Partition Plan of 1947 were less about justice than they were about managing colonial withdrawal and privileging one group’s settler-national aspirations over another’s indigenous existence.

What followed was not peaceful separation, but a great catastrophe—Nakba in Arabic. The mass displacement and dispossession of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, when Zionist militias destroyed hundreds of villages and seized vast tracts of Palestinian land. For Palestinians, the Nakba is not a past event but an ongoing reality, symbolising the loss of homeland, identity, and the right of return. It stands at the heart of Palestinian collective memory, resistance, and the struggle for justice and self-determination.

This wasn’t accidental. As Israeli historians like Ilan Pappé have shown, it was part of a deliberate plan to ensure a Jewish demographic majority. Rashid Khalidi calls it what it was: a colonial war of dispossession. Yet even after the Nakba, the mirage endured. With the Oslo Accords in the 1990s came the promise of “two states living side by side.” But Oslo wasn’t a peace plan—it was a carefully managed delay tactic. While Palestinians waited for sovereignty, Israel manufactured facts on the ground.

Today, more than 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The land that was supposed to become a Palestinian state is now carved up into militarised enclaves, disconnected by checkpoints, walls, and settler-only roads. Gaza remains under a punishing blockade, its people caged, bombed, and forgotten.

East Jerusalem, the presumed capital of a future Palestinian state, has been unilaterally annexed, and its Palestinian residents pushed out by legal sleight of hand and bulldozers. Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship live as second-class citizens under dozens of discriminatory laws. Those in the West Bank live under military rule. Those in Gaza are effectively stateless. Refugees remain in limbo, denied the right to return to homes they were forced from.

The Two-State Solution has become a diplomatic fantasy used to excuse this apartheid state, as B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International now all plainly call it. It’s time we call it what it is: a smokescreen.

Now, with Gaza in ruins and over 30,000 Palestinians killed in less than a year, some Western governments, France, UK and others, have suddenly begun threatening to recognise a Palestinian state if Israel doesn’t restrain itself. But recognise what, exactly? A fragmented, besieged pseudo-state without borders, sovereignty, or freedom of movement? What they offer is not justice, but symbolism on a delay timer—conditional statehood held out like a carrot to slow Israel’s assault and manage public outrage.

This belated performance of morality is not just hollow. It is insulting. For decades, these same states armed Israel, defended it at the UN, criminalised Palestinian resistance, and silenced dissent in their own countries. Now they act as if recognition is a gift they can bestow on a brutalised people, rather than a legal and historical right long denied.

The real question has never been about how to divide the land, but how to share it. There are only two moral and political options left on the table: a single democratic state with equal rights for all, or a bi-national confederation that ensures freedom of movement, collective security, and cultural autonomy for both peoples.

Neither path is easy. But unlike the Two-State farce, they begin with a basic principle of equal human dignity. This includes the right of return for Palestinian refugees, full citizenship, and the dismantling of discriminatory legal systems. Anything less is not peace but apartheid by another name.

Palestinians have been articulating this vision for decades. Civil society movements like BDS are growing globally. Even among Jewish and Israeli intellectuals, support is rising for alternatives rooted in equality, not ethno-national domination.

We’ve been here before. In South Africa, the apartheid system propped up the Bantustan system for years, calling it Separate Development, while calling for “reform.” It was only when apartheid was named and shamed, when the demand became one person, one vote, that meaningful change began.

Clinging to the Two-State Solution isn’t pragmatic. It’s dishonest. It asks Palestinians to accept permanent displacement, truncated sovereignty, and a state in name only. It asks the world to keep funding occupation while pretending to fund peace. And it asks us, the global public, to suspend reality.

It’s time to stop begging for what has already failed. Justice will not come from carving up what remains. It will come from reckoning with what was taken, and building, together, a new political vision where no one group dominates and no person is denied their rights.

From the river to the sea, all who live there deserve freedom, equality, and justice. Anything else is apartheid. And the time for illusions has ended. The morality of what world we want to build hinges on the Palestinian issue.