STOCKHOLM – Is there any possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians, or must we simply get used to periodic wars that deny both sides the tranquility and stability they seek?

It is easy to be pessimistic. The history of the region is littered with failed peace plans, collapsed diplomatic conferences, and thoroughly disillusioned mediators. Everything seems to have been tried, and nothing seems to have worked. Everyone is left assigning blame to anyone but themselves.

Yet to give up on diplomacy is to accept the unacceptable: eternal war. That is why, even amid the horrors of the latest Gaza war, talk of an eventual two-state solution remains alive and has actually grown louder.

At his November 3 press conference in Tel Aviv, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken went further in describing a lasting solution than any US official has in a long time – if ever. A two-state solution, he averred, is “the only guarantor of a secure, Jewish, and democratic Israel; the only guarantor of Palestinians realizing their legitimate right to live in a state of their own, enjoying equal measures of security, freedom, opportunity, and dignity; the only way to end a cycle of violence once and for all.”

Blinken is right. Ensuring an “equal measure of security, freedom, opportunity, and dignity” for everyone between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is the only ultimate solution. European leaders acknowledged this reality back in 1980 with the Venice Declaration. The nine members of the European Community (at the time) proclaimed that, “the Palestinian people, which is conscious of existing as such, must be placed in a position, by an appropriate process defined within the framework of the comprehensive peace settlement, to exercise fully its right to self-determination.”

By that time, Arab governments had given up on trying to erase the state of Israel. Following their failure in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, they finally agreed to make peace. But as the Venice Declaration recognized, true regional peace would not be possible until the Palestinian issue was settled.

In the optimistic early 1990s, the Oslo Accords showed what was possible. Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat (an ex-terrorist) and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (an ex-general) shook hands on the White House lawn. The path to a two-state solution had been established, even if crucial details remained to be settled.

But the Oslo process eventually failed, owing to opposition boiling up among Israelis and Palestinians alike. The earlier optimism gave way to Palestinian terrorism and illegal Israeli settlements, and it has been downhill ever since. While successive US administrations have made repeated attempts to revive the peace process, none has made it a top priority. Until October 7, the Biden administration had left the issue on a back burner, hoping that the region would remain calm while it concentrated on other matters.

For its part, the European Union long maintained a forward-looking commitment to the Middle East peace process, and issued a detailed pronouncement, in December 2009, calling for “a two-state solution with the State of Israel and an independent, democratic, contiguous, and viable State of Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.” But Europe’s interest in the issue also waned over time. Though there were various reasons for this, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s consistent efforts to make serious peace talks impossible surely played a significant role.

Moreover, politicians in America, Europe, and Israel began to convince themselves that the Palestinian issue could simply be forgotten, since more Arab countries had begun to establish formal diplomatic relations with Israel. “If the Arab world no longer cares about the Palestinians,” they thought, “Why should we?”

Now that the political quagmire and humanitarian disaster in Gaza has returned the issue to the fore, it is clear that there can be no resolution without some decisive steps toward a two-state solution.

But we should not harbor any illusions. The obstacles are huge. Among the most concerning is the apparent increase in support for violence among Palestinians who have grown frustrated to the point of despair. Hamas is not the only organization that sees terror as the best way forward. In the West Bank, too, the Palestinian Authority has lost control of some areas where it is supposed to provide security and order.

Another major obstacle is the inclusion of fundamentalist Jewish settlers in the current Israeli government. There are now an estimated 700,000 people living in illegal settlements scattered across territory that is supposed to belong to a future Palestinian state. Many of these settlers are armed, and since October 7 have been violently forcing hundreds of Palestinians from their homes. Some even dream openly of demolishing the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, so that they can rebuild the biblical Temple in Jerusalem (which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC, and again by the Romans in 70 AD).

Extremists on both sides want to control all of the land between the river and the sea by whatever means necessary. If either is allowed to gain further ground, this war will become even deadlier than it already is.

The key, then, is to use the renewed prospect of a two-state solution to galvanize moderate forces on both sides – and to do so fast, before more people succumb to fatalism or despair. Such a reopening will not happen without strong, sustained international engagement by the US, the EU, and the other Arab states. With Russia having ostracized itself with its war of aggression against Ukraine, the international community will need a new format to replace the previous Middle East Quartet (the EU, the US, the United Nations, and Russia).

Though upcoming elections in the US and elsewhere may divert attention next year, the issue should be made a top priority thereafter. We must never give up on diplomacy. We have now been reminded of what the alternative looks like.

RAMALLAH – For some people, the bloody war in Gaza may have shattered the 35-year-old consensus that the only feasible solution to the region’s troubles is to have two states, Israel and Palestine, living peaceably side by side. Yet others suggest that the horrors we have witnessed since October 7 could augur the revival of that very goal.

In recent statements, American, Palestinian, and Arab officials have all stressed that a two-state solution must emerge phoenix-like from the ashes of this war. Reasonable people everywhere can only hope that this might still provide the framework for a definitive and mutually agreed end to a century-old struggle.

The timing of this renewed interest is ironic. November is when Palestinians commemorate the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) 1988 “Declaration of Independence,” which was adopted from exile in Algeria at the height of the first intifada. All Palestinian factions – including the most radical of the period – accepted the partition of Palestine and Israel’s de facto existence within its pre-1967 borders.

In making that breakthrough declaration, the PLO officially identified only one major condition for peace: the 22% of Palestine comprising the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip must be liberated of all Israeli settlers. Otherwise, the territory could never be viable as the space for a sovereign, independent state with its own natural resources and recognizable borders.

Immediately following the Algiers declaration, Palestinian economists started grappling with the economic implications of a two-state configuration. In 1990, a comprehensive PLO-led study concluded that a contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital, could indeed be economically viable. But, given the weak resource base, the miniscule land area, and the expected challenges of absorbing Palestinian refugees and returnees, viability depended, to begin with, on Israel’s military withdrawal and evacuation and the dismantlement of settlements. Without such a retreat by Israel, economic development could not be assured, because no investor would have confidence in Palestinian sovereignty.

The 1993 Oslo Accords, which the PLO accepted, fell far short of meeting this condition. Instead, they provided largely civil autonomy to the Palestinian Authority (PA) amid continued Israeli settlement, which forced economic planning into the hitherto unknown domain of “sub-sovereign state-building.” Over the subsequent five years, interim negotiations were supposed to reach a “permanent status” agreement on all contentious issues; and such an outcome was almost achieved at Camp David in 2000.

But those negotiations ultimately failed, leading to the 2000-05 outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada, which quickly turned violent, and an overwhelming Israeli military response. A two-state solution came to seem even more distant, and the PA’s already limited jurisdiction was further reduced. The Fatah-Hamas (West Bank-Gaza) division since 2006 created not only political disunity, but also greater economic distortions and a range of dependencies on the pre-eminent Israeli economy, which was experiencing a long boom.

For the past 20 years, Palestinian economists (including me) have devoted much time and energy planning for a Palestinian “national economy” within the two-state configuration. Yet in arguing that a coherent, independent, productive Palestinian economy could still be built even under occupation or siege, we implicitly abandoned the earlier PLO maxim that there can be no development without sovereignty.

Now, the economic legacy of Oslo is clear. Israel dominates – and can easily manipulate – the Palestinian macroeconomy, from currency and fiscal revenues, trade channels, and labor markets to energy, natural-resource access, and all the other attributes of economic viability. So it is no longer credible to argue that an independent Palestinian state could arise amid the archipelago of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the eco-demographic strangulation of East Jerusalem, and now the destruction of Gaza and the humanitarian catastrophe to which its 2.2 million non-combatants are being subjected.

Even the most starry-eyed economist would be humbled by the scale and complexity of the reconstruction effort that this war has necessitated. Making matters worse, an indirect outcome of the war is that the Palestinian economy in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is also collapsing.

Well before October 7, Palestinian economic development had become a chimera, especially with the rise of an Israeli government fully committed to the agenda of religious nationalists and messianic settlers. They have pushed the West Bank’s three million Palestinians to the brink since the war began, explicitly calling for their forceful subjugation or displacement.

As The Elders (an independent group of global leaders) argued in a recent open letter, the international community must move quickly if it hopes to turn today’s catastrophe into a last-gasp opportunity to achieve – or to impose, if need be – a two-state outcome. Of course, many of the Israelis currently in power consider such an idea radioactive. But since the extremism within the current Israeli coalition cannot be ignored, it will need to be contained, especially by peace-loving Israelis and their US allies.

Even at this dark hour, there may still be a chance to forge a “real” two-state deal, because we already know what it must include. The original PLO prerequisites for economic viability are as valid today as they were 35 years ago, because they represent the only material basis for a viable and permanent political solution.

For decades now Palestinian economists and planners have been preparing the economic foundations of a sovereign state of Palestine. We have continued pursuing this goal despite seeing its prospects recede before our eyes. Having peered into the bottomless pit of this war, are there still enough Israelis and Palestinians with the courage and political foresight to opt for peace instead of more violence?

BERLIN – In 1951, just six years after World War II, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany signed the Treaty of Paris, establishing the European Coal and Steel Community.

It was a remarkable achievement, considering that France and Germany had fought three major wars between 1870 and 1945, leading to millions of deaths, the ravaging of lands and cities, and territorial conquest on both sides. Even decades later, my Belgian mother, who fled the German occupation of Brussels as a child with her mother and brother, trembled at the sight of a German customs uniform. Yet these former enemies agreed to pool their coal and steel production in ways that would prevent them from forging weapons to be used against one another ever again.

At a stroke, a handful of visionary statesmen – Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet of France, Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, and Alcide de Gasperi of Italy – laid the foundation for a new European future. The “Old Continent” of religious and nationalist wars, great-power intrigue, secret diplomacy, and the endless redrawing of national boundaries (with little regard for the people within them) became a new kind of political entity. After being conceived as a community, it eventually grew into a “union” of nation-states that retained enough of their sovereignty to act both independently and together.

It is a familiar story, but one that bears repeating in these dark days of war between historic and seemingly permanent adversaries. In the Middle East, the war between Israel and Hamas has put the concept of a two-state solution – a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one – back on the table. US President Joe Biden has told Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that it is “the only way forward” over the longer term, once Hamas’s ability to attack Israel or Israelis is destroyed. For the Palestinian people to recognize Israel’s right to exist and contribute to a lasting peace, Biden reasons, they must be able to envision a future of independence, security, and prosperity for themselves.

Yet in the two decades since the failure of the Oslo Accords – which mapped out a path to peace in the early 1990s – demographic and geographic realities have complicated matters. Owing to the growing Israeli-Arab population within Israel and the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank under an Israeli government opposed to Palestinian statehood, the prospect of population exchanges and land swaps has become more difficult and politically fraught.

Under these changing conditions, supporters of a two-state solution have had to get more creative. One alternative, proposed by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin in 2015, is to establish a kind of confederation, which would bring the proposed two states closer together through freedom of movement across state borders and joint decision-making on issues affecting the entire territory. Similarly, Israeli human-rights lawyer May Pundak envisions a “two-state solution 2.0,” wherein a two-state confederation would share a homeland, following the model of the European Union.

Yet after the horrors of Hamas’s October 7 attack and the ongoing Israeli response (which has already killed thousands of civilians), how could the two sides ever choose to move closer together rather than further apart? Here, the European experience offers three important lessons.

First, the shooting must end, and the cost of the conflict must be high enough to create support for bold, enduring changes on both sides. In the current conflict, providing lasting security for all Palestinians and Israelis likely will require engagement by the US and multiple Arab governments and their militaries, both on site and at one remove. Only after security is achieved – probably following new Israeli and Palestinian elections – can the cataclysm of this latest round of violence become an impetus for envisioning a new future.

Second, it helps to start small. Do not begin with an outline of two separate states and a long list of issues to resolve between them. Instead, find the equivalent of the European Coal and Steel Community. Given its scarcity, the most important shared interest for Israelis and Palestinians is probably water. Joint management of water conservation, desalination, and usage would make it much harder for this critical resource to be weaponized. Another possibility is the joint production of green energy, including fuel, which would have commercial and ecological benefits and would reduce Palestinian dependence on Israeli supplies. 

Third, engagement with well-meaning and likeminded third parties is key. For economic cooperation to work, the market must be large enough for a free-trade zone or a customs union to make sense. The seed for the European Economic Community was Benelux, a customs union between Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Agreed in 1944 and established in 1947, it became a full “Economic Union” in 1958, providing a prototype for the European Economic Community. A natural starting point for Israelis and Palestinians would be some kind of free-trade area that includes Jordan and Egypt, with Saudi Arabia and one or more of the Gulf States added soon thereafter.

New thinking requires new thinkers. The Israeli and Palestinian groups that will be most receptive to real change are likely to be drawn from women, young people, and Israeli Arabs, many of whom have been caring for the survivors of the October 7 attack and engaging in other civic activity within Israel. Climate activists, ecologists, public-health authorities, and professionals in other fields that transcend national boundaries are also natural allies. Supporters of a lasting peace should be organizing and funding new social movements and political coalitions.

Is this vision pie in the sky? Perhaps. But without a compelling and plausible strategy for the day after, the day after may never come. Europe transcended two millennia of wars triggered by deep ethnic, religious, political, and cultural divisions to create a new political entity. So, too, can the Middle East.