The Two‑State Delusion

Something’s wrong when Zionists say, “I support a two‑state solution.”

They say it like it’s a moral high ground. Like the words constitute a peace plan. Like decades of settlement expansion, military occupation, and open rejection of Palestinian statehood can be waved away with one magic phrase.

One Ethnostate, All Along

Let’s start with the obvious: from its founding in 1948, Israel has systematically blocked the emergence of a real, sovereign Palestinian state and worked to entrench a single Jewish‑controlled regime.

Whenever “peace negotiations” have taken place, Palestinians have never been offered a genuinely independent state with control over borders, airspace, security, resources, and free movement. At best, they’ve been promised a demilitarized, chopped‑up Bantustan under Israeli domination – a rebranded continuation of occupation, not freedom.

Meanwhile, Israel has built an entire system – laws, roads, settlements, walls, checkpoints – designed to preserve a system of Jewish supremacy throughout the land. The International Court of Justice has explicitly called this occupation and settlement project illegal and has urged Israel to dismantle its settlements and end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The Settlement Map Reveals the Reality

If Israel ever intended to allow a contiguous Palestinian state, it had a very strange way of showing it.

Since 1967, Israeli governments of every stripe have green‑lit and subsidized a massive settlement enterprise across the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. As of late 2024, there were roughly 740,000 Israeli settlers living in those areas, according to EU‑sourced and UN human rights data relying on Peace Now.

Even if you split hairs over the exact number, the direction is unmistakable: more land keeps being taken, with more fragmentation of any prospective Palestinian territory. Roads, fences, and military protection are laid out to integrate settlements into Israel while carving Palestinian communities into isolated cantons.

And no, Israel didn’t do all this on the cheap.

• Israeli anti‑settlement watchdog Peace Now, using state budget data, estimates at least tens of billions of shekels in “surplus” public spending on settlements beyond what comparable communities inside Israel would receive over the past two decades.

• A 2025 review of road budgets found around 7 billion shekels (about $1.9 billion) earmarked in recent years specifically for West Bank settlement roads and bypass highways that serve Israeli settlers.

If Israel meant to “dismantle settlements later,” why invest this heavily in permanent infrastructure that entrenches them and shreds any viable map for a Palestinian state? Does anyone seriously believe the Israeli government intends to relocate hundreds of thousands of settlers, undo billions in public investment, and hand back the land?

Israeli Leaders Keep Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

You don’t have to guess what Israeli leaders intend. They’re telling you.

In September 2025, at the Ma’ale Adumim settlement deep in the occupied West Bank, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted:

“We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us.”

He pledged to double the city’s population and expand E1 settlement construction, a move that Israeli and international analysts say would effectively sever the northern and southern West Bank and make a contiguous Palestinian state practically impossible.

Netanyahu has also told foreign governments – including the United States – that he has spent “years” blocking the creation of a Palestinian state and that he “will not compromise on full Israeli security control over all territory west of the Jordan River.” That means no real sovereignty for Palestinians, ever.

His far‑right ministers are even less subtle. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich insists there’s “no such thing as a Palestinian people” and has declared that “there will never, and can never be, a Palestinian state in our land.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben‑Gvir says preventing Palestinian statehood is his “life’s mission” and openly pushes for policies critics describe as ethnic cleansing.

So, when Zionists say, “Of course I support a two‑state solution,” a reasonable follow‑up question is: Have you heard what Israeli leaders are actually saying?

The “Solution” That Maintains Apartheid

There’s another piece of this that rarely gets said out loud in Zionist spaces.

The standard “two‑state solution” preserves the core of the existing Jewish-supremacist order. The “Jewish State” would:

• Keep its racist immigration system, where Jews anywhere can claim automatic citizenship while Palestinian refugees are barred from returning.

• Maintain an artificial Jewish majority, achieved in part by excluding millions of Palestinians from citizenship and political power.

• Continue second‑class status for Palestinian citizens and maintain discriminatory structures that human rights groups now widely describe as apartheid.

Under this vision, Palestinians would be asked to trade their right of return and real equality for a truncated, demilitarized entity – while the “Jewish and democratic” state keeps all the structural advantages.

The two‑state delusion also rests on a racist premise: that a “Chosen” people can’t live as equals with the non‑Jewish “other” and must instead be partitioned into separate ethnostates. In practice, that logic has meant preserving Jewish supremacy over the land and treating Palestinian presence as a threat to be managed, fragmented, or removed.

Ask this: Why should a Palestinian family with centuries‑deep roots in Hebron, Nablus, or Bethlehem be required to move to a new “Palestinian state” to enjoy equal rights, while a Jew from Brooklyn with no known ancestral connection to the land is invited to take over that family’s home and call it “return?”

This seems like nothing more than a continuation of a movement that has repeatedly refused to confront the deep racial hierarchy at its core by insisting that Palestinian equality must mean Palestinian removal. If your “solution” is premised on locking in ethnic privilege on one side and permanent dispossession on the other, what exactly are you solving?

Why So Many Zionists Cling to the Phrase

Here’s the really strange part: many of the loudest supporters of the “two‑state” formula are people who’ve spent much of their lives demonizing Palestinians.

They talk about Palestinians as terrorists, “human animals,” or demographic threats – and then insist they want a Palestinian state next door. It strains credulity to think people who’ve spent years disparaging Palestinians are now motivated by concern for Palestinian welfare. When they invoke a “two‑state solution,” it sounds far more like a strategy to manage the “problem” of Palestinians than a commitment to Palestinian freedom.

If I were trying to buy time to keep confiscating Palestinian land while minimizing global outrage, I’d do exactly what Israelis have done: insist I “support a two‑state solution” sometime in the undefined future – whether that’s 77 or 770 years from now – while making the map of a real Palestinian state impossible in the present.

That’s not compassion; it’s boundary management via deception. It’s the fantasy of ethnically sorting the population so the “Jewish State” can stay demographically Jewish without having to confront what was done to achieve that.

Other Zionists, especially those who identify as “liberal Zionists,” may feel uncomfortable with naked apartheid but still can’t imagine giving up Jewish supremacy as a political organizing principle. For them, “I support a two‑state solution” functions as a kind of moral fig leaf – a way to sound humane without demanding real transformation of the system that created the catastrophe in the first place.

And then there are the cynics: people who know, based on the facts right above, that a Palestinian state isn’t coming, but won’t cop to their acceptance of endless Israeli oppression. So, they repeat the phrase because it’s the socially acceptable thing to say at the JCC, at a dinner party, on campus, or on CNN.

What those Zionists don’t seem to grasp is that, outside those bubbles, “I support a two‑state solution” is increasingly interpreted as code for accepting endless Israeli oppression. That can be bad for one’s personal brand – and may even reveal something darker.

A Palestinian American friend once told me that Zionism has a way of hardening the heart – of teaching people to look straight at immense suffering and believe the system doing the harm is worth defending … with the right hasbara.

The Delusion, in Plain English

When you put all this together – decades of settlement expansion, vows never to allow Palestinian statehood, international rulings on illegality and apartheid, and a “solution” that keeps Jewish supremacy in place – the phrase “two‑state solution” stops sounding like diplomacy and starts sounding like denial.

That’s why Professor Padraig O’Malley’s book, “The Two‑State Delusion: Israel and Palestine – A Tale of Two Narratives,” hits so hard. It names what many of us in the Jewish community were trained early on not to see:

• There’s already one de facto state between the river and the sea.

• That state is structured to privilege Jews and dominate Palestinians.

• And the political class running it isn’t planning to dismantle that system in favor of equality.

So, when Zionists say they support a “two‑state solution,” they’re often doing one of two things:

• Clinging to a fantasy that lets them avoid confronting Jewish supremacy, or;

• Knowingly using a dead slogan to launder a racist status quo they have no intention of ever changing.

Either way, it isn’t liberation. It isn’t justice. It isn’t peace.

In fact, to this former Zionist, it’s increasingly looking like ZBS (Zionist bullshit). It’s a delusion – and it’s time to say so out loud.

Let’s get real by dramatically expanding the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement until Palestinians gain full equality throughout Palestine‑Israel, with the right of refugees Zionists ethnically cleansed to return.

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