New Maps Show How Israel Has Thwarted Hopes for a Palestinian State

Palestinians collect belongings from their evacuated homes after the Israeli Army issued a number of short-term access permits for residents of the occupied West Bank refugee camp of Tulkarm, on June 17th.Photograph by Majdi Mohammed / AP

The breakneck expansion of settlements in the West Bank has rendered American talk of a two-state solution increasingly irrelevant.

By David D. Kirkpatrick

 

August 29, 2026  The New Yorker

Ten years ago, Frank Lowenstein, then the United States special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, presented President Barack Obama with maps of settlements by Israeli Jews in the occupied West Bank. The maps revealed that a chronic problem had turned critical. The expansion of settlements crisscrossing the West Bank threatened the hope of establishing a contiguous Palestinian state there. As Jews and Palestinians lived in roughly equal numbers in Israel and the territories it had occupied since 1967, those settlements also imperilled Israel’s claim to be both Jewish and democratic. By gradually accomplishing a de-facto annexation of the West Bank, the settlements would require Israeli Jews either to rule over a resentful non-Jewish population of about equal size or to surrender the Jewish identity of their state. From the perspective of the United States, either scenario would undermine the stability of the region.

Obama was in the final weeks of hinterntional lawis Presidency, and Lowenstein’s maps helped persuade him to let the United Nations Security Council pass a resolution condemning the settlements, which most of the world had long considered violations of international law. (The U.S. declined to exercise its veto and abstained from the vote.) In a speech a few days later, on December 28, 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry defended that decision with a stark warning that settlement expansion was “increasingly cementing an irreversible one-state reality.” He continued, “Is ours the generation that gives up on the dream of a Jewish democratic state of Israel living in peace and security with its neighbors? Because that is really what is at stake.”

Ten years later... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/new-maps-show-how-israel-has-thwarted-hopes-for-a-palestinian-state    

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