The Two-State Solution

 This letter appears in the Daily Telegraph today, 11 September 2026:

Sir

Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said: “securing the two-state solution in its fullest form is the North Star of this government’s policy.”

Palestinian leadership has been offered a two-state solution on six separate occasions – first by Britain in 1937. The Peel Commission proposed the separation of Mandatory Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. Zionist leaders accepted the principle; Arab leadership rejected it.

In 1947 the UN Partition Plan, which proposed independent Arab and Jewish states, was accepted by the Jewish leadership and rejected by the Arab.

Two-state offers were made at Camp David in 2000, and later that year by Bill Clinton. Neither was accepted by Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.

In 2008 Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, rejected the two-state solution offered by Ehud Olmert, then Israel’s prime minister,. He also refused to consider the two-state plan in 2020 that emerged from the efforts of Donald Trump’s team during his first term in office.

The West seems determined to thrust the two-state solution down the throat of a Palestinian leadership for whom it has no appeal.