Why the two-state solution feels more hopeless than ever

Until around a year ago, Shai Ben-Yaish had been working on the creation of an industrial zone in southern Israel.

It was to include Gaza.

"Those factories were supposed to bring salaries for more than 20,000 families in Gaza," Mr Ben-Yaish, a mayor candidate in the city of Sderot, told RTÉ News.

Prior to 7 October, people like Mr Ben-Yaish were at the forefront of what often felt like grandiose plans to establish all kinds of joint ventures with Gaza: industry, agriculture and fishing.

They felt grandiose in part because of the strict and suffocating land, air and sea blockade that Israel had enforced on Gaza for the better part of two decades.

That blockade led to horrendous living conditions, abject poverty and high levels of unemployment in the enclave.

The return of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister in December 2022, at the helm of a far-right and ultranationalist government, made things feel even more hopeless.

But the Arazim Industrial Zone would have been a step in the right direction - a few paces toward a two-state solution.

Now, Mr Ben-Yaish cannot imagine any of that.

His sister, his brother-in-law and his nephew were killed by Hamas militants - by bullets straight to the head.

"They took these dreams, and they attacked our villages. You know what happened on 7 October," he said.

"I now think we are a long way from creating this path to a solution."

His pessimism is reflected on both sides of the conflict.

But, of course, 7 October did not occur in a vacuum.

While it undoubtedly marked the beginning of a new, deadly and highly unpredictable chapter in the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a decades-old one.

Though Hamas fighters attacked southern Israel from Gaza, it was the situation in the occupied West Bank - some 50km away - that they cited as one of their primary justifications.

There, Mr Netanyahu's government had approved the rapid expansion of illegal Israel settlements. Palestinians had faced increasing levels of violence from settlers.

In the face of the death and destruction that the Israeli military has wrought on Gaza, the issue of settlements in the West Bank can feel small scale.

But, at its heart, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a modern territorial dispute - one of two nations, one land.

The more settlements that Israel builds in the West Bank, the more Palestinian land and territory is encroached upon.

"I know there's a lot going on in the world right now, and especially in the Middle East. Why is this going on? It is for the land. It's for this piece of land that everybody's fighting about," Yaser Alkam, a resident of Turmus Ayya, a town in the West Bank, said.

On a basic level, Mr Alkam pointed out, the settlements make it hard to pinpoint the borders of the West Bank - since they divide Palestinian cities, villages and towns.

"I don't think Ireland itself knows where the Palestine it recognised is," he said.

"I mean, they recognise the state of Palestine. Can you tell me or can you go to any official in Ireland and ask them: what are the borders of this state that you've recognised?"

It is a situation that is also making Palestinian politicians feel hopeless.

"Almost every day of the past 30 years, if you look at the satellite images, you can verify that Israel was etching away at Palestinian territory. It was expanding settlements. It was exerting pressure. It was making it difficult for passage of goods. Gaza was placed under a total blockade," Dr Sabri Saidam said.

"One of the most important laws of physics is that action will have equal and opposite reaction. I've never seen in history that a nation that's occupied is received with roses. Obviously, people will struggle, will fight for their independence," Dr Saidam, the Deputy Secretary General of the Fatah party, which controls the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, said.

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On one level, there is the theory that 7 October has upended the status quo to such an extent that many people will come around to the idea of the two-state solution.

In several senses, Israel had lulled itself into a literal, but altogether false, sense of security.

The political establishment had come to believe that it could occupy and subdue Palestinians without ever seriously entertaining the idea of a Palestinian state - that it could live in relative bliss thanks to the strength of its military, which would protect it from the consequences of its subjugation.

But the pain and hurt on the Israeli side is palpable, even a year later.

Of course, that many Israelis are opposed to the two-state solution probably comes as no surprise, not least to the activists in Ireland who have long been fighting for this cause.

But a two-state solution is not going to be realised without them.

The reality is that many of the ordinary Israelis who were in favour of recognising a Palestinian state, or at least taking steps towards that goal, lived in the border communities closest to Gaza.

They were, of course, the ones most affected by the violence on 7 October.

Those people include the likes of Meira Yadgar, a retired teacher whose interview with RTÉ News struck a chord because of its sheer, unfiltered honesty.

She once worked on cross-border educational initiatives. But now she said she simply doesn't care about the plight of the Gazans.

She doubled down when she was reminded of the more than 40,000 of them who have been killed by the Israeli military.

"I don't think about them. I don't care," she said.

"After what they have done to us, to our young people, to the people all around the Kibbutzim here, I don't care about them."

But the one glimmer of hope in her response was what she said about the two-state solution.

It was not a never.

It was that it was just "too early" to think about it.

"It might change later on," she said.

Amid all the death and destruction, amid all the gloom and cynicism, there is hope there.

"To many Palestinians, the window has closed," Dr Saidam said.

"Yet, I remain optimistic. I always feel that there is the goodness of pain - there is the solution that comes out of the cracks of pain."

"I'm certainly hopeful that the anguish we're going through will pose an opportunity for everybody to wake up and say, 'hey, enough with the bloodshed'."