Two-State Delusion

For more than three decades, the “two-state solution” (TSS) has functioned as the default formula for resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It appeared in diplomatic communiqués, peace plans, and international resolutions as a self-evident horizon, two peoples, two states, living side by side between the river and the sea. Yet by the mid-2010s, a growing number of analysts began to argue that the two-state formula had become less a realistic project and more a form of political theatre. Among the starkest voices was Padraig O’Malley, whose 2015 book The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine – A Tale of Two Narratives contends that the two-state solution is no longer viable and persists mainly as a comforting illusion for the international community.

A decade later, in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack and Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, Hussein Agha and Robert Malley have issued a further, sobering verdict. In their 2025 book Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine and the widely discussed essay “What Killed the Two-State Solution?”, they describe the two-state paradigm as a “dangerous gimmick” that allows political leaders to avoid confronting the realities of occupation, domination, and mutual trauma.

This essay examines why O’Malley characterises TSS as a delusion, how later authors, including Ian Lustick, Jonathan Kuttab, Peter Beinart, and Agha & Malley, converge on the claim that the two-state formula is effectively dead, and what alternative frameworks have begun to emerge. It also integrates the post-1945 legal principle that “might does not make right,” highlighting the tension between de facto control and legitimate sovereignty in a land repeatedly conquered, from ancient empires through the Ottoman period to the present.

Padraig O’Malley’s “Two-State Delusion”

Padraig O’Malley is a veteran mediator and conflict analyst whose earlier work on South Africa and Northern Ireland shaped his approach to Israel–Palestine. In The Two-State Delusion, he weaves interviews with Israeli and Palestinian officials and ordinary citizens into a narrative that foregrounds the power of competing stories, what he calls “two narratives,” to block compromise.

For O’Malley, the two-state solution is a delusion in at least three senses:

• Conceptual delusion. The idea of two states presupposes that both societies can accept clear borders, reciprocal recognition, and shared sovereignty arrangements (especially in Jerusalem), yet in practice neither public has been prepared for the concessions this would entail. When O’Malley tested concrete details, removal of settlements, division or sharing of Jerusalem, withdrawal from parts of the West Bank, support for TSS among his interviewees declined quickly.
• Structural delusion. The physical and administrative fragmentation of Palestinian territory, settlements, bypass roads, checkpoints, and the Area A/B/C divisions, has produced what amounts to a Swiss-cheese geography incompatible with a viable sovereign Palestinian state. The two-state map evoked in diplomacy bears little resemblance to the map on the ground.
• Psychological delusion. Both societies carry deep historical traumas, Shoah and Nakba, that structure perception in ways that make the “other” appear as an existential threat rather than a partner. As long as collective memory is mobilised in zero-sum terms, elite commitments to TSS are undermined by popular fear and mistrust.

O’Malley is not alone in pointing to narratives and trauma as central obstacles, but his distinctive contribution is to show how the two-state proposal has been remarkably poorly explained to the populations whose lives it would transform. The plan lived largely in diplomatic rooms and think-tank diagrams rather than in the political education of Israelis and Palestinians. In that sense, he argues, it was never truly owned by either side and thus never rose above the level of an elite script.

From “Two-State Delusion” to “One-State Reality”

In the years following O’Malley’s book, a cluster of scholars and commentators moved from cautious support for TSS to declaring it dead. Among the most influential is political scientist Ian S. Lustick, whose 2019 book Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality argues that negotiations framed around two states are now “doomed and counterproductive.”

Lustick’s argument complements and extends O’Malley’s:

• He contends that there is already “one and only one state” between the river and the sea, Israel, which exercises decisive control over the entire territory. The two-state solution, he argues, obscures this de facto one-state reality behind a fictional horizon of future partition.
• He describes TSS as a “dead solution walking,” kept alive by the habits and interests of elites in Israel, Palestine, the United States, and Europe. Continued attachment to TSS prevents serious thought about how to democratise the existing single polity to secure equal rights for all inhabitants.
• He emphasises that Israeli military victories and the “Iron Wall” strategy, far from encouraging compromise, entrenched maximalist attitudes in Israeli political culture, while the memory of the Holocaust has been deployed in ways that frame almost any territorial concession as a step toward existential annihilation.

Where O’Malley speaks of a delusion bound up with narrative incommensurability and territorial fragmentation, Lustick speaks of a failed paradigm that has lost contact with empirical reality. Both conclude that continuing to speak of TSS as if it were on the verge of realisation misleads the public and obscures the need for alternative frameworks.

Other authors amplify particular aspects of this critique:

• Hani Faris (ed.), The Failure of the Two-State Solution: The Prospects of One State in the Israel–Palestine Conflict (2013). This collection argues that the impasse after Oslo reflects structural incompatibilities between territorial partition and entrenched settlement patterns. Contributors explore organisational steps, locally and internationally, that would be needed to move toward some form of bi-national or one-state arrangement.
• Jonathan Kuttab, Beyond the Two-State Solution (2020). A Palestinian human-rights lawyer, Kuttab explains that the two-state solution he once supported is “no longer viable” and proposes a rights-based one-state framework that attempts to meet the core existential needs of both Israeli Jews and Palestinians, security, identity, equality, and freedom of movement, within a single democratic polity.
• Virginia Tilley and other one-state theorists. The broader one-state discourse, to which Faris, Tilley, and others contribute, takes for granted that TSS has effectively failed and asks how a shared state might be structured to avoid domination by one national group over the other.

Liberal Zionist Pessimism: Peter Beinart’s Turn to Equality

The declaration that “the two-state solution is dead” is not confined to Palestinian or post-Zionist thinkers. In 2020, liberal Zionist commentator Peter Beinart published “Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine,” explicitly opening with the claim that “the two-state solution is dead” and calling on liberal Jews to abandon Jewish–Palestinian separation and embrace equality.

Beinart’s trajectory is emblematic:

• In earlier work he defended a classic liberal-Zionist two-state vision.
• By 2020, he had concluded that settlement entrenchment, the political drift of Israeli society, and the absence of a credible Palestinian state-building horizon made TSS unrealisable.
• He now argues for one binational state with full equality, casting this shift as a return to Jewish ethical sources that privilege dignity and justice over ethnic supremacy.

Reporting and interviews after the destruction of much of Gaza have deepened his conviction that a framework premised on permanent Jewish privilege cannot be reconciled with a universalist Jewish ethics, and that any viable future must be built on equal rights in a shared political space.

Hussein Agha & Robert Malley: From Peace Process to “Dangerous Gimmick”

The most significant 2025 contribution to the “two-state delusion” discourse is Hussein Agha and Robert Malley’s Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine. Longtime participants in and observers of the peace process, they now offer a sweeping indictment of its underlying assumptions. Their book, and the essay “What Killed the Two-State Solution?”, argue that the faith in TSS became a way for Western leaders, especially in Washington, to avoid confronting the realities of occupation and dispossession.

Several core themes in Agha and Malley’s work echo and sharpen O’Malley’s concerns:

• Dueling narratives, not just borders. Like O’Malley, they insist that the conflict has always been about clashing historical narratives, Shoah and Nakba, exile and return, rather than merely technical disagreements about lines on a map. They criticise the Oslo-era focus on “leaving narrative issues for later,” arguing that this strategy hollowed out the legitimacy of any agreement.
• Two states as a “dangerous gimmick.” Malley has described the two-state solution as a “dangerous gimmick” deployed by politicians who either have nothing else to say or want to deflect from their own moral culpability. The phrase encapsulates their argument that invoking TSS now functions less as a concrete plan and more as a rhetorical device to avoid taking responsibility for ongoing violence and structural inequality.
• Failure of U.S. mediation. They argue that the United States was never an honest broker, it repeatedly shielded Israel from meaningful pressure, tolerated settlement growth, and defined “realistic” solutions in ways that centred Israeli security at the expense of Palestinian rights. As a result, the peace process served more to manage conflict than to resolve it.
• From 7 October and Gaza to the end of an era. In their view, the horrors unleashed since October 2023, Hamas’s mass killing and hostage-taking, Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza, and mass civilian deaths, did not represent an aberration but the culmination of decades of failed diplomacy and deepening structural violence. The war, they suggest, marks the end of the Oslo era and the final discrediting of the two-state paradigm as commonly imagined.

Where O’Malley diagnosed TSS as a delusion largely because realities on the ground had drifted too far from diplomatic maps, Agha and Malley go further, they argue that the peace process itself often rested on self-deception and deceit. The two-state formula, as implemented, became a way to talk about “peace” while entrenching a regime of unequal rights and permanent occupation.

“Might Does Not Make Right”: Post-1945 International Law

All of these authors operate against the backdrop of a crucial shift in international law after 1945, the explicit repudiation of conquest as a legitimate basis for title to territory. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter obliges member states to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The idea that war, even a defensive war, automatically justifies annexation has been rejected.

UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted after the 1967 war, explicitly stresses the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and calls for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the conflict as part of a just and lasting peace. Although the scope and sequencing of withdrawal remain heavily contested, the normative principle is clear, even defensive wars do not confer a right to annex territory.

This post-1945 norm stands in stark contrast to earlier eras in the region’s history. Ancient empires, Crusader kingdoms, Mamluks, Ottomans, and the British all acquired and lost control of “historical Israel” through conquest or imperial transfer, the late Ottoman Empire effectively ceded control of much of its Arab provinces through war, diplomacy, and mandate arrangements. In that earlier legal universe, victory often did translate into sovereignty. By contrast, the contemporary legal order explicitly separates de facto control from de jure title.

For O’Malley and the later critics, this has two implications. First, the enduring occupation of the West Bank and the repeated devastation of Gaza cannot be justified as conferring legitimate sovereignty simply because Israel holds overwhelming military power. Secondly, any viable post-TSS framework must grapple simultaneously with facts on the ground (who controls what) and normative constraints (what can be legitimately recognised) rather than assuming that the former automatically determines the latter.

If the Two-State Solution Is Dead, What Comes Next?

If TSS is indeed a delusion or dead paradigm, the obvious question arises, what replaces it? None of the authors discussed here offer a simple blueprint, but several broad families of proposals can be discerned.

• One democratic state (“from the river to the sea”). Abunimah, Kuttab, Faris, Tilley, Beinart, and others advocate some form of single democratic state encompassing Israelis and Palestinians, with equal citizenship and constitutional protections for collective identities. This model takes the existing one-state reality as its starting point and seeks to transform it from an ethnically stratified system into a non-hierarchical polity. Kuttab’s work is particularly notable for specifying the “existential needs” of both communities, security, cultural continuity, freedom of movement, and political equality, as non-negotiable design constraints.
• Confederation and shared sovereignty. A second set of thinkers proposes a looser confederation between Israeli and Palestinian entities, in which sovereignty is shared over certain domains (Jerusalem, borders, security, water) and peoples might enjoy rights of residence and movement across both jurisdictions. This approach attempts to preserve some form of dual national self-determination while acknowledging the impracticality of a clean physical partition.
• Rights-first approaches. Influenced by human-rights and anti-apartheid struggles, a third approach de-prioritises statehood as such and focuses instead on ensuring equal individual and collective rights, civil, political, economic, and social, for everyone between the river and the sea. In this view, whether the arrangement is eventually labelled a single state, a confederation, or some other construct is less important than ending the entrenched hierarchy of rights that currently divides Jews and Palestinians.
• Managed transitions and international trusteeship. Given the depth of trauma, mistrust, and destruction, particularly after the 2023–24 Gaza war, some commentators doubt that Israelis and Palestinians can, in the short term, negotiate their way into a radically new constitutional order by themselves. They instead imagine various forms of international trusteeship, robust peacekeeping, or multilateral guarantees as transitional mechanisms while new political institutions are built and narratives slowly shift.

O’Malley is cautious about solutions. He suggests that some form of shared polity “between the river and the sea,” integrating Israelis and Palestinians, might ultimately be necessary, but his work is more persuasive as diagnosis than as blueprint. Agha and Malley likewise resist offering a tidy alternative and instead urge that any future framework must start by facing honestly the “moral wreckage” of past decades, the depth of Palestinian dispossession, and the psychic investments on both sides in mutually exclusive narratives.

Conclusion: Beyond a Delusional Paradigm

Padraig O’Malley’s description of the two-state solution as a “delusion” is not a casual provocation. It captures a core insight, that for many years, the international community, and often Israelis and Palestinians themselves, have spoken as if the two-state solution were just over the horizon even as structural realities made its implementation ever less plausible. The gap between diplomatic language and material conditions has grown so wide that the formula increasingly functions as a kind of incantation, a way to signal virtue and continuity without committing to the transformations that real peace would demand.

Subsequent writers have deepened and hardened this critique. Lustick’s “one-state reality,” Faris’s and Kuttab’s one-state proposals, Beinart’s liberal-Jewish plea for equality, and, most recently, Agha and Malley’s indictment of the peace process as a “dangerous gimmick,” all converge on a common point, the old paradigm cannot deliver. At the same time, post-1945 international law insists that sovereignty cannot be legitimated simply by force of arms, even when cloaked in self-defense or historical claims. The fact that successive empires ruled the land now claimed by Israelis and Palestinians through conquest does not license a return to pre-Charter norms where victory automatically justified annexation.

If there is a fragile consensus emerging from this literature, it is that any post-TSS future must be built around three interlinked commitments:

• honest reckoning with narratives of trauma and dispossession on both sides, rather than their deferral;
• firm adherence to the principle that “might does not make right” in law and politics, even when military asymmetry is stark;
• a shift from the abstract pursuit of “two states” to concrete arrangements, whether one state, two states plus confederation, or another model, that guarantee equal rights and security for every person living between the river and the sea.

In that sense, to declare the two-state solution a delusion is not to renounce the search for peace. It is to insist that genuine peace can no longer be sought within a framework that has become a mask for ongoing domination. O’Malley’s work, and the more recent analyses by Agha and Malley and others, invite us to confront, without illusions, the moral and political choices that remain when a long-cherished paradigm finally collapses.