Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A One or Two-State Solution

Abstract

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains one of the complex issues of our time that no one knows how and when it will end. For over 70 years, Israel and the stateless Palestinians have infrequently clashed over the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea in the Middle Eastern region. Both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples claim the disputed land, called ‘Palestine’, to be their homeland. Hence, several erudite scholars, foreign governments and intergovernmental organisations have for decades been searching for a pragmatic and acceptable political solution to the protracted armed conflict that ensued. For long, the traditional two-state solution has been propagated in the international community. But in recent years, a ‘realistic’ one-state solution is being considered in some quarters as an alternative to what some now see as an ‘impractical’ twostate solution. This paper, hinged on the triangulated theories – Constructivism and Pacifism, critically examines the one and two-state solutions with a focus on the pros and cons. For the study, the historical approach was adopted, and data were gotten from secondary sources. The paper concludes that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is neither the two nor one-state proposal. Evidently, the realities on ground in Palestine have rendered the two-state paradigm an illusion while the one-state model eliminates the core aspiration of the Israelis and Palestinians