Israel Can Delay Justice – But It Can’t Stop It

Right, so the two-state solution is dead. No matter how many politicians still talk about it as the only way forward, its corpse has been left to rot while world leaders continue to invoke it as a hollow diplomatic mantra. Gaza has been razed to the ground and Israel is now making moves towards annexing the West Bank, erasing what remains of the Palestinian territories, but for those of us who have come around to the reality of a one state solution, an apartheid one state built on the eradication of the Palestinian people must never be what comes next. None of this has happened by accident, nor was it the inevitable collapse of a peace process that simply failed to resolve a decades-old conflict. The two-state solution was deliberately killed—by bulldozers carving Israeli settlements deep into Palestinian land, by bombs reducing Gaza to rubble, and by successive Israeli governments that never intended to allow Palestinian sovereignty to exist in the first place. What has replaced this illusion is not peace but a one-state reality that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, but its a reality defined by permanent Israeli domination, mass displacement, and institutionalised apartheid. So if there can be only one state, what does it need to look like and what needs to happen to get there?
Right, so there is no longer any meaningful possibility of two independent states. Israel has systematically destroyed that option through decades of land theft, de facto annexation, and, most recently, genocidal violence in Gaza and legislating to make their West bank annexations more final and complete. The only question now is whether the existing one-state reality will remain an apartheid state or be forced—through resistance and global pressure—into becoming a state of equal rights for all its inhabitants, if that can even be countenanced as a possibility. Israel will never voluntarily dismantle its system of Zionist supremacy; it will only do so when the cost of maintaining apartheid becomes greater than the cost of abandoning it. This is the lesson of South Africa, of Algeria, and of every anti-colonial struggle in modern history. What makes this one different is the lack of will to see it happen.
The two-state solution did not simply collapse under the weight of mutual distrust. It was systematically destroyed through a combination of settlement expansion, legislative annexation, and demographic engineering. As Al Jazeera observed just this month, Israel is no longer content to expand settlements quietly; it is now openly legalising and annexing large portions of the West Bank, treating the land as if it were already sovereign Israeli territory. Outposts that were once illegal even under Israeli law are being retroactively legalised, thousands of acres of Palestinian farmland are being declared “state land,” and new roads and infrastructure connect settlements directly to Israel, bypassing Palestinian communities altogether.
This is not a matter of opinion; it is a violation of international law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in its 2004 Advisory Opinion on the Wall (Case 131) that Israel’s settlement policy constitutes a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, specifically Article 49(6), which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its population into occupied territory. In July 2024, the ICJ went further, describing Israel’s settlement policy as “systematic annexation” and an attempt to extinguish Palestinian self-determination. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 8(2)(b)(viii)) codifies such settlement activity as a war crime. Yet Israel has ignored these rulings with impunity, protected by US diplomatic shielding and European economic complicity.
If the West Bank has been annexed by stealth, Gaza has been obliterated by firepower. The destruction of Gaza since October 2023 has gone far beyond any rational military objective. Entire neighbourhoods have been flattened, critical infrastructure has been obliterated, and over two million people have been displaced, according to UNRWA. Netanyahu’s proposal to build a so-called “humanitarian city” in Rafah is nothing less than a plan for a vast internment camp. His government’s leaked discussions about deporting Gazans to “third states” make clear that this is not simply a war against Hamas but an attempt to permanently remove Palestinians from their land. This is ethnic cleansing by design, a continuation of the logic of the 1948 Nakba. Press TV’s analysis of Israeli policy in West Asia underscores this point: the aim is not only to neutralise Palestinian resistance but to reshape the region by erasing Palestinians as a demographic and political reality.
This was never inevitable. It has been enabled by decades of international complicity. The United States continues to arm Israel and block UN action, while European powers hypocritically condemn settlements even as they trade in Israeli spyware, arms, and tech components. Arab governments, meanwhile, have abandoned Palestinians through normalisation deals that prioritise trade and security over justice. The two-state solution has not merely withered—it has been deliberately strangled.
The result is a one-state reality, but it is not a state of equal rights. It is a system of apartheid, as documented by Amnesty International in its 2022 report, Human Rights Watch in its 2021 study “A Threshold Crossed,” and B’Tselem in its 2021 declaration that Israel is “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” Palestinians live under different legal regimes depending on where they are, but all are subordinate to Israeli authority. Palestinian citizens of Israel are subjected to systemic discrimination; West Bank Palestinians are governed under military law, facing land confiscations, home demolitions, and arbitrary arrests; and Gazans are treated as an enemy population subject to siege and bombardment.
The demographic and geographic fragmentation is deliberate. Maps show how the West Bank is carved into disconnected enclaves by settlements and military zones – Area A under Palestinian Authority control, B under joint control and C under Israeli control, but look how fragmented those Palestinian areas are.
Gaza, what is left of it, is effectively a prison, blockaded by air, land, and sea. This is not a temporary security measure; it is a permanent system of control. Netanyahu and his far-right allies have abandoned even the pretence of supporting Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu’s 2019 statement that “no settlements will ever be uprooted again” was not a gaffe; it was policy. Zionism, as a political ideology cannot coexist with equal rights for Palestinians because it is founded on the principle of maintaining demographic dominance over them.
If there was ever doubt about Israel’s intentions for Palestinians, Netanyahu’s Gaza policy has erased it. The future Israel envisions is one of permanent domination, forced displacement, or expulsion. Netanyahu’s Rafah “humanitarian city” is a euphemism for mass internment, a concentration camp within the concentration camp or open air prison that Gaza already effectively was, a way to confine Palestinians away from their homes indefinitely. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly advocate for encouraging “voluntary migration” of Palestinians—but that is simply a thinly veiled call for ethnic cleansing. This is not an aberration but a continuation of the settler-colonial logic that Ariel Sharon articulated decades ago when he urged settlers to “grab every hilltop” to make territorial compromise impossible.
Given this reality, negotiations are meaningless. Israel will never voluntarily dismantle its system of supremacy. The only way to force change is through a combination of Palestinian resistance and global pressure, replicating the strategy that ended apartheid South Africa.
Palestinian resistance is legally recognised under UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 (1982), which affirms the right of peoples under colonial domination and foreign occupation to struggle, including through armed resistance. This does not legitimise attacks on civilians, but it affirms the legitimacy of resisting occupation itself. Civil and armed resistance in the West Bank and Gaza, from mass protests to the Houthis’ maritime blockade, is not just a moral right; it is a strategic necessity. Without Palestinian resistance, the international community would have long ago normalised Israel’s apartheid as the status quo.
Global pressure is equally essential. The BDS movement—boycotts, divestment, and sanctions—is slowly gaining traction. High-profile victories such as Maersk’s divestment, Norway’s KLP pension fund cutting investments in settlement-linked companies, and the British Medical Association severing ties with Israeli-linked Palantir are early signs of a broader economic shift. Legal isolation is beginning too. The ICJ’s advisory opinions and ongoing ICC investigations are laying the groundwork for travel bans and arrest warrants against Israeli officials, which will gradually stigmatise them internationally. The historical precedent is clear: as the UN Centre Against Apartheid archives document, white South Africa only abandoned apartheid when sanctions, boycotts, and isolation made the system economically and politically unsustainable.
Any solution designed to be “acceptable” to Israel will be unjust. Justice cannot be dictated by the oppressor’s demographic fears or security obsessions. Palestinian rights to land, return, and equal citizenship are enshrined under international law and cannot be bargained away for Israeli comfort. The two-state illusion failed precisely because it sought to accommodate Israeli settler-colonialism rather than dismantle it. As with South Africa, the liberation struggle must prioritise the rights of the oppressed, not the privileges of the oppressor.
So although Israel might not right now think they face such a choice, thre is one before them that they will have to reconcile with, I hope sooner rather than later. It can entrench its apartheid, risking ongoing pariah status and growing internal instability, or it can accept equality. Demographics are not on Israel’s side; UN population data shows Palestinians at or near parity with Israelis across historic Palestine, and their higher birth rates will soon create a clear majority. The longer Israel tries to maintain Zionist supremacy, the more violent and unstable the situation will become. But as history shows, no apartheid regime can last indefinitely. White South Africans once vowed they would “rather die than live under black majority rule,” yet within a generation, they were forced to choose democracy or international exile.
Israel can delay equality for years, even decades, but it cannot stop it. 2 million in Gaza, closer to 3 million in the West Bank, you cannot relocate all of these people and the alternative, if permitted to happen under the world’s gaze, doesn’t bear thinking about. Apartheid is always temporary. The two-state illusion has been buried beneath settlements, siege, and war crimes; what remains is one state. The question now is whether it will remain a fortress of apartheid or be forced—through resistance and pressure—into becoming a democracy of equal rights.
The moral duty of the international community is obvious, but never before have so many governments been so devoted to the oppressor against the oppressed. Neutrality is complicity. Every state that continues to trade with Israel, every corporation that invests in its economy, and every government that shields it diplomatically is complicit in maintaining apartheid. BDS campaigns, legal action, and grassroots activism are not symbolic gestures; they are the only tools left to accelerate justice and save the Palestinian people who’s land has been ripped from beneath their feet.
As in South Africa, the end will not come because Israel chooses justice but because Palestinians and their allies make the cost of injustice unbearable. And when it does, history will record that the two-state illusion died not in the name of peace but because it was always a lie—and that freedom only came when the world stopped believing it and got real.
Small gestures can make a big difference, even the largely symbolic ones. The throwing of plastic bottles filled with grain into the Mediterranean, to float in hope to Gaza’s shores has gone viral on social media and shown up Netanyahu’s ally in starvation, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi particularly. Get all the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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