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Was the Two-State Solution a Casualty of October 7?

Dr. Munr Kazmir
3 min readSep 21, 2024

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Israel’s former Prime Minister Naftali Bennet says yes.

Naftali Bennett, Prime Minister of Israel arriving at COP26 World Leaders Summit of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference at the SEC, Glasgow. Photograph: Alan Harvey/ UK Government. (Photo: COP26)

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has declared that the events of October 7, 2023, marked the definitive end of the two-state solution as a viable path to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

“You’ve said you don’t believe in a two-state solution,” ABC News’ Linsey Davis asked Mr. Bennett on September 4, 2024. “Why not a two-state solution? And what would be your proposed solution?”

“Because they’ll kill us,” Bennett answered simply.

“There’s no way to live in peace?” prompted Davis.

“Not with people who want to kill you,” the former Prime Minister answered. “Well, what we’ve learned over the past 30 years is every time we gave the Palestinians a piece of land, instead of building it into a beautiful Singapore, they turned it into a terror state and began killing Israelis.”

“It happened first in the ’90s when we did Oslo [Accords],” he added. “It happened the second time in 2005, when we gave them all of the Gaza Strip, and they began shooting rockets at us. And later on Oct. 7 — we’re not going to kill ourselves a third time. It’s a horrible, horrible idea to inject a terror state on our borders.”

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