Israel has approved another major expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank, intensifying an argument that has become increasingly difficult to avoid: governments can continue declaring support for a two-state solution while simultaneously allowing the physical conditions required for two viable states to disappear. Israel’s government argues that Jewish communities have historical and security claims to the territory and that settlement construction should not be treated as the fundamental cause of a conflict that predates 1967. Palestinians argue that settlements fragment the territory on which a future Palestinian state would have to exist and gradually convert what was supposedly a temporary occupation into a permanent political reality. The international debate usually becomes a legal argument over settlements or an ideological argument over competing historical claims. I think the more revealing question is institutional: at what point do temporary facts on the ground become sufficiently permanent that political leaders lose the ability to implement the solution they continue claiming to support?
The geography matters because sovereignty requires more than diplomatic recognition. A viable state needs territory across which a government can move people, enforce laws, build infrastructure and sustain an economy. The West Bank is already divided by Israeli settlements, military areas, Palestinian population centres and a complex network of roads and administrative jurisdictions. More than 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem combined, meaning any future partition must now account not for temporary outposts alone but for large communities containing homes, schools and infrastructure. The more deeply these communities become embedded, the greater the political cost of removing them. Settlement construction therefore creates path dependence: decisions made today alter which political options remain realistically available tomorrow.
This is what makes the issue different from an ordinary housing dispute. A government can approve several thousand homes and argue correctly that no individual project determines the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet cumulative political change often occurs through precisely this mechanism. No single settlement eliminates the possibility of partition, but each additional settlement increases the eventual cost of partition slightly. Governments can therefore undermine a policy without ever formally abandoning it. Political outcomes are sometimes produced incrementally enough that nobody has to take responsibility for choosing them.
Israel’s security argument deserves serious consideration. The West Bank overlooks major Israeli population centres and is geographically narrow enough that Israeli strategists have historically feared what could happen if hostile forces operated there. The 7 October 2023 attacks strengthened public scepticism towards the assumption that territorial withdrawal automatically produces peace. Israelis can reasonably ask what prevents a future Palestinian state from becoming another platform for rockets or armed attacks. Simply telling Israelis that international law requires withdrawal does not answer the security problem they believe withdrawal would create.
But security cannot become an infinitely expandable justification either. If Palestinian sovereignty is postponed until Israel experiences zero security risk, statehood can be postponed permanently because no political arrangement can guarantee zero risk. Every state lives with some insecurity generated by neighbours. The pursuit of absolute security can become incompatible with the sovereignty of everyone around you, because eliminating every possible external threat eventually requires controlling the political choices and territory from which threats might emerge. A sustainable settlement therefore needs acceptable risk managed through institutions, not the impossible elimination of risk altogether.
Palestinians face an equivalent obligation. A future Palestinian state cannot demand complete sovereignty while tolerating armed organisations operating independently of the government. Sovereignty means not only freedom from Israeli control but responsibility for preventing Palestinian territory from being used to attack Israel. Hamas’s actions demonstrated the consequences of a political system in which an armed organisation can exercise military power outside a universally legitimate state structure. Any credible Palestinian settlement therefore requires one legitimate monopoly on organised force, accountable to political institutions rather than factions.
This is where the philosophical idea of the state becomes practical. Weber’s monopoly on legitimate violence is not merely an academic definition. Two states cannot coexist securely if one contains armed organisations capable of independently deciding when to begin war with the other. Equally, Palestinian government cannot become meaningfully sovereign if Israeli forces retain a permanent discretionary right to enter Palestinian territory whenever Israel judges intervention necessary. Security arrangements must constrain both the non-state actor and the stronger neighbouring state, otherwise sovereignty exists only for one side.
Settlement expansion makes solving that institutional problem harder because it increases the number of Israeli civilians whom Israel will insist on protecting inside territory Palestinians expect to govern. Protecting scattered settlements requires roads, military deployments and security zones, which then fragment Palestinian jurisdiction further. The settlements and occupation therefore become mutually reinforcing: settlements require security infrastructure, and the security infrastructure makes withdrawal more difficult, which allows settlements to become more permanent.
Some form of land swaps remains the most plausible way to handle large settlement blocs close to Israel’s pre-1967 boundary. Israel could retain particular areas containing large populations while Palestine receives equivalent territory elsewhere. This avoids pretending hundreds of thousands of people can simply be relocated easily. But land swaps work only while the geography remains sufficiently coherent that Palestine receives a genuinely viable state rather than disconnected enclaves formally labelled sovereign. The objective cannot merely be mathematical equality in square kilometres; territorial quality, connectivity and economic functionality matter.
Recognition of Palestine by more Western governments over the past year was partly intended to preserve this political endpoint. Yet recognition without territorial viability risks becoming increasingly symbolic. A Palestinian embassy in another capital does not compensate for a state unable to exercise coherent authority at home. This is the gap between legal sovereignty and effective sovereignty. International recognition can strengthen a claim, but institutions and geography determine whether the claim becomes governable reality.
Israel also needs to confront the alternatives if two states become impossible. Permanent control over millions of Palestinians without equal political rights creates an obvious democratic contradiction. Annexation accompanied by full equal citizenship would fundamentally alter the demographic and national structure of Israel. Mass expulsion would be morally indefensible and contrary to international law. Indefinite occupation therefore cannot be treated as the absence of a decision. Maintaining the status quo is itself a political choice whose consequences accumulate over time.
This is why settlement policy should be evaluated through its long-term constitutional implications rather than simply through security or historical entitlement. Israel defines itself as both Jewish and democratic. Preserving both becomes progressively harder if one state permanently governs two national populations while political rights differ according to territorial or national status. The two-state solution survives partly because it attempts to reconcile Israeli and Palestinian self-determination rather than requiring one people permanently to dominate the other.
Palestinian politics meanwhile needs institutional reform just as urgently. National elections remain long overdue, the Palestinian Authority suffers from weak legitimacy and Hamas cannot be allowed to convert armed power into a permanent veto over Palestinian politics. International pressure on Israel therefore should be accompanied by serious demands for Palestinian political renewal. Self-determination means the right of Palestinians to govern themselves, not the right of one Palestinian faction to govern indefinitely without renewed consent.
The regional opportunity remains Saudi normalisation. Israel wants deeper integration with the Arab world; Saudi Arabia has repeatedly linked normalisation to meaningful progress towards Palestinian statehood. That creates bargaining space because each side possesses something the other values. Israel can receive regional legitimacy and economic integration, Palestinians can receive a credible sovereignty pathway, and Gulf states can help finance reconstruction and institutional development. This is more promising than expecting either Israelis or Palestinians to make enormous concessions simply from moral persuasion.
The central problem is time. Every year without a settlement changes the geography, politics and psychology of the conflict. More settlements are built, more Palestinians lose faith in diplomacy, more Israelis conclude separation is unsafe and another generation grows up knowing primarily the violence and failures of the previous one. Political possibilities depreciate when institutions fail to use them.
That is why today’s settlement decisions matter even if no single announcement destroys the two-state solution. The danger is cumulative. Governments can spend decades saying that final borders will eventually be negotiated while making those borders progressively harder to draw.
A two-state settlement does not require Israelis and Palestinians suddenly to trust one another or agree about history. It requires something more modest and more difficult: both peoples accepting that their own right to self-determination cannot logically depend on permanently denying the same right to the other. Settlement expansion matters because it increasingly tests whether that principle remains physically possible rather than merely diplomatically fashionable.
