In Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, Ian Lustick borrows a joke from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. A man tells his therapist that his brother thinks he is a chicken. Why not have him treated? I would,’ the man replies, ‘but I need the eggs.’
When I interviewed Lustick some years ago, I asked who was still collecting eggs from the two-state solution long after the conditions for it had vanished. He replied: American administrations, the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government, and what he called the ‘peace process industry’. By that, he meant the international institutions, NGOs, and experts whose careers rest on the promise of a settlement that never materialises.
That joke stayed with me as the West Bank moved to the centre of mainstream media coverage. Journalists have been attacked by settlers on camera. Israeli army commanders and officials have been publicly questioned about settler violence. All of it has unfolded to the sound of an alarm so old it has become part of the furniture: the two-state solution is under threat.
In much of Western politics and media, criticising “extreme settlers” is the cheapest form of criticism there is. One can condemn settler violence, denounce Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and perhaps blame Benjamin Netanyahu for wrecking the prospects of peace, all without asking more difficult questions about the Israeli state or the support that sustains it.
This kind of criticism leaves room for a comforting assumption: the problem is this government. Remove it and another Israeli partner, ready for peace, may yet appear. With Israelis voting on 27 October, where is that partner?
The leading alternatives to Netanyahu do not fundamentally disagree over settlement or control of the West Bank. Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief often cast as the man who could lead Israel out of the Netanyahu impasse, has pledged that no Palestinian state will be established under any government he forms.
Naftali Bennett, who now leads Yachad, his joint list with Yair Lapid, once served as director-general of the Yesha Council, the settlers’ umbrella body. He has also proposed annexing Area C, which covers more than 60% of the West Bank. Even Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats and, by Israeli standards, a dove, called talk of a Palestinian state destructive.
Since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, the settler population has grown from about 250,000 to more than 750,000. Much of this growth occurred during the peace process itself, under governments the world regarded as moderate.
One of the busiest years for settlement construction was 2000, under Ehud Barak. In 2008, while Ehud Olmert was negotiating with Mahmoud Abbas after Annapolis, Israel began building more settlement homes in the West Bank than in any year under his predecessor, Ariel Sharon. Olmert has since found a second career on Western television warning about the consequences of the first.
Most Palestinians stopped waiting for that partner long ago. Experience has taught us that settlement is not a policy of the Israeli system. It is the system. That doesn’t make Israeli politicians the same; they don't all treat every form of violence against Palestinians the same way. But the real disagreements are about how to manage, regulate, and institutionalise that violence, and how much violence can be used before the political and diplomatic bill becomes too high.
In August, when the Housing Ministry opened bidding on some 1,200 homes in E1, the corridor east of Jerusalem that would cut the West Bank in two, Eisenkot objected only to the timing, while calling a Palestinian state a “grave mistake”. He had no quarrel with the map, only the calendar.
When settler violence is presented as the exception, and reduced to the extremism of Netanyahu and his allies, it becomes possible to maintain the image of another Israel, one that is moderate, merely waiting for its turn to govern and resume the peace process.
That is how the promise of two states outlives every fact on the ground. Its political power never rested on its feasibility. It has always lain in the capacity to sustain a particular political fantasy about Israel. That fantasy separates Israel as a political system, to be allied with, from the ‘incidental’ excesses of that state.
Decades of ‘peacemaking’ and billions in funding have entrenched it so deeply that questioning it now seems harder than questioning Israel’s violations themselves.
This fantasy survives through fragmentation. In Gaza, the genocide is treated as an excessive use of otherwise legitimate force. In the West Bank, the violence is treated as an extremist deviation from Israel’s political order, one that an election result could end at any moment.
And inside Israel, abuses against Palestinian citizens are framed as threats to an established democracy. Read the mainstream Western press on each, or listen to European and even American officials, and you could be forgiven for thinking they were describing three different countries.
Perhaps these are the new eggs in Lustick’s joke. The West can go on condemning what it sees, so long as it keeps waiting for an Israel that does not exist. On 27 October, Israelis will vote, and the wait will be renewed, as it has after every election before. Its arrival was never the point. The longer the West keeps waiting for the Israel it imagines, the less it has to deal with the one that is already here.
Izzeddin Araj is a Palestinian journalist and researcher. He is the Executive Director of Al-Araby Al-Jadeed and the former Editor-in-Chief of the Arabic network Ultra Sawt. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from The Graduate Institute, Geneva (IHEID).
Follow Izzeddin on X: @ArajIzzeddin
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