Out of nowhere, President Donald Trump has now opened up to his endorsement of the two-state solution between Palestine and Israel.

The two-state solution is the idea that dividing both Israel and Palestine will create peace between the two; two states, “In peace and security.” However the two-state solution is not accomodating for Jerusalem, which the two both claim in part, it does not consider current settlements and/or where borders would be placed, and where Palestinian refugees will then reside. Although the solution seems to make a push towards a more peaceful world, it lacks the depth that would be needed for the peace to be sustainable.

“I like the two-state solution. Yeah. That’s, what I think, that’s what I think works best. I don’t even have to speak to anybody. That’s my feeling. Now you may have a different feeling. I don’t think so, but I think two-state solution works best,” said President Trump.

Now sure, we are always welcome to our freedom of thought here, but there is more to the problem than his statement bluntly entails.

Let us start with the Israeli cooperation: it is nonexistent. They seized land from Palestine years ago, and now the resolution would pose a pivot point for the justification of that. Rewinding back to 1967 the Arab countries reluctantly divvied up their possessions in Resolution 242 and it has been nothing short of a problem since. 

And that does not even get to the start of the problem.

“From the steady colonisation of the Palestinian area, you can see that there has been no attempt on the part of Israel to comply with any part of the resolution,” said Ghada Karmi, a British-Palestinian author in an article for Al Jazeera.

“But in the US-based Journal of Palestine Studies, lawyer and Georgetown University professor Noura Erekat wrote that Israel has used Resolution 242 to justify the seizure of Palestinian land,” said Farah Najjar, writer for Al Jazeera.

“When Israel declared its establishment in May 1948, it denied that Arab Palestinians had a similar right to statehood as the Jews because the Arab countries had rejected the Partition Plan,” wrote Erekat.

This occurrence way back in 1967 was not only an Israeli victory, but an American- however, as history entails, outsiders dividing countries has never had a pretty ending. Not to mention, Palestinians are experiencing a complete-control by Israel, in their West Bank and Gaza Territories.

However, reserving that statement to these two areas is not necessarily true, Israel has majority of control in regards to Palestine. This is a sole reason that dividing the two could cause problems, not only in the fall of societal structures, but a power-vacuum issue as well.

Furthermore, “The Gaza Strip, home to about two million people, has been under siege for more than a decade. In 2007, after the election victory of Hamas and the group’s assumption of control over the territory, Israel imposed a strict land, aerial and naval blockade,” said Najjar.

If this system were to hypothetically be imposed, we would then see Israeli Jews banned from an Arab Palestinian state, which is scary because we have the potential for an ethnic cleansing or transfer in one state, and in the other, Israeli Arabs would be Israeli citizens. Therefore we would have a refugee crisis and an imbalance between the two, potentially worse than current circumstances.

In the end, “The idea of separating Israeli Jews and Arab Palestinians into two separate states is logical, but practically it involves other issues which remain obstacles,” said Moshe Dann, writer for The Jerusalem Post.

Although we, as Americans, may think an idea is great, it is important to realize the systems functioning below the surface.