Two States or Not Two States? Leadership and Peace Making in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Abstract

The debate around the viability of the so-called ‘Two-State Solution’ and the perspective of an alternative ‘One-State Solution’ began to attract renewed the attention after the collapse of the Oslo process. We suggest that instead of debating the viability of rival constitutional schemes, a more fruitful approach to the issue of peace making in Israel/Palestine should focus on the structural elements of the picture more than on future possible outcomes of the diplomatic process. This article focuses on the role of the two leaderships by analysing their historical background, discourses and policies in order to understand to what extent the debate on the TSS/OSS dichotomy reveals the hidden logic of the alternatives. Our aim is to describe the ‘primordial soup’ that enables discussion and decisions with respect to the different scenarios addressed by the debate. We conclude that the TSS/OSS alternative hardly identifies meaningful coalitions for peace making and the attainment of either of the two solutions seems to be unlikely without a dramatic change the very identity of Palestinian and Israeli leadership; the rhetoric about the ‘missed opportunities’ of negotiation contributes instead to obscure the resilience of the status quo.