President Biden has ended the Security Council’s failed eight-year pursuit to achieve a nebulous two-state solution embodied in Resolution 2334 (2016) - replacing it with his own specific two-state solution contained in United States of America Draft Resolution S/2024/448 - adopted by the Security Council 14-0 as Resolution 2735 on 10 June.
Biden’s two-state solution is clear and unambiguous:
“The Security Council reiterates its unwavering commitment to the vision of the two-State solution where two democratic States, Israel and Palestine, live side by side in peace within secure and recognised borders, consistent with international law and relevant UN resolutions, and in this regard stresses the importance of unifying the Gaza Strip with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority”.
The Security Council accepted this Biden solution without objection or amendment. After eight years going up a dead end road it was more than time for the Security Council to abandon Resolution 2334.
However there is a problem with Biden’s solution: It has no chance of ever being accepted by Israel because, as opposed to the Oslo Accord, it denies the Jewish people the right to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in any part of the 'West Bank' – the biblical and historic heartland of the Jewish people – recognized and authorized by articles 6 and 25 of the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and preserved by article 80 of the United Nations Charter.
Any solution which does not acknowledge these vested rights in the Jewish people will end up in the dustbin of history. Biden’s proposal is dead in the water. Its endorsement by the Security Council in Resolution 2735 now leaves the Security Council exposed as an Emperor without clothes.
Another very different two-state solution that could satisfy Israel’s justifiable objection is the revolutionary Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine solution (HKOPS) - first published in the Saudi Government-controlled Al Arabiya News on 8 June 2022 - which asserts:
“The Palestinian problem can only be solved today if it is redefined. The issue in this day and age for people should be not so much the ownership of ancestral land but more the critical need to have a legal identity—a globally respected citizenship that allows a person to operate in the modern world.”
HKOPS calls for the unification of Jordan, Gaza and part ofthe West Bank into one new territorial entity to be governed by Jordan’s current Hashemite rulers – noting:
“Jordanians and Palestinians are as similar as any people can be. They are Sunni Arabs from the same neighborhood. Merging them will not create any long-term ethnic or sectarian fault lines.”
The remaining part of the West Bank would become part of Israel.
Withdrawal of recognition of the Palestinian Authority would follow.
Redrawing the international border between Israel and Jordan could achieve these outcomes without anyone - Jew or Arab – having to leave his current home.
The United Nations and its principal officers Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Tor Wennesland - United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and the Secretary-General’s Personal Representative to the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, as well as the Envoy of the Secretary-General to the Quartet – have not allowed themselves to utter the phrase “Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine” even once in the last two years.
They now need to urgently break their silence and consider replacing Biden’s stillborn two-state solution with the HKOPS two-state solution - as the world continues to erupt into an ever-increasing frenzy of Jew-hatred since 7 October 2023 and Lebanon, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iran threatens to become one huge killing field unless this 100-years-old conflict between Arabs and Jews is resolved very soon.
David Singer is an Australian lawyer active in Zionist causes whow writes: Please join my Facebook Page: “Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine supporters”
Author’s note: The cartoon — commissioned exclusively for this article — is by Yaakov Kirschen aka “Dry Bones”- one of Israel’s foremost political and social commentators — whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli and international media publications for decades.