THE UNCERTAINTY DEPARTMENT
Program on Conflict Resolution and Transitional Justice
Conflict Analysis Series
Dr. Leila Mansour-Fitzgerald, Senior Fellow
One hundred years after the British Mandate institutionalized the conditions that have produced the current crisis, the international community’s response to Palestinian governance remains structured around frameworks that have demonstrably failed. The Oslo process, premised on the viability of a two-state solution, has produced not two states but one state with permanent military occupation, 720,000 settlers across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and a governance architecture specifically designed to manage Palestinian aspirations rather than address them. This essay examines the structural reasons for the failure of successive diplomatic frameworks and argues that effective resolution requires acknowledging what those frameworks have been unwilling to acknowledge: that the conditions for a viable Palestinian state have been progressively destroyed by policies implemented under the protection of the same international framework that claims to be pursuing peace, and that the gap between proclaimed principles and operative conduct has become the primary obstacle to the resolution it claims to seek.
The British Mandate for Palestine (1920–1948) did not create the conflict between Jewish and Arab populations of the region; it created the institutional architecture through which that conflict would be managed and, ultimately, through which one side’s aspirations would be systematically privileged over the other’s.
The Mandate administration created parallel governance structures: the Jewish Agency as an institutional infrastructure for Jewish self-governance, economic development, and land acquisition, operating with British protection and significant international financial support; and a fragmented set of local Arab institutions without comparable organizational capacity, financial resources, or international recognition. The institutional asymmetry was not incidental to the Mandate’s design; it was implicit in the Balfour Declaration’s commitment to facilitate a Jewish national home while protecting “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities” — a formulation that acknowledged Palestinian presence while declining to recognize Palestinian political rights.
The asymmetry compounded over the Mandate period. Jewish immigration, land purchase, and institutional development proceeded under conditions that allowed the Jewish community in Palestine to develop the organizational capacity required for eventual statehood. Palestinian organizing was repeatedly disrupted — by British military action, by the fragmentation of political leadership, by the lack of external state sponsors committed to Palestinian institutional development at comparable scale.
The 1948 outcome was not an accident of war but the product of the institutional asymmetry the Mandate had created. The state that emerged had the organizational capacity, international recognition, and military capacity to defend and consolidate its position. The Palestinian population that remained or was displaced had none of these.
The international response to the 1948 displacement of approximately 700,000 Palestinians — the Nakba — established the template for Palestinian governance that has persisted through every subsequent diplomatic initiative: the substitution of humanitarian management for political resolution.
UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948) affirmed the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes or receive compensation. It was passed as a declarative resolution with no enforcement mechanism. UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) was established to provide humanitarian services to the displaced population while political resolution was deferred. Both the right of return and the provision of humanitarian services have remained operative for 75 years — the right of return as an unimplemented principle, the humanitarian services as a substitute for implementation.
The Cold War instrumentalization of the Palestinian issue compounded the humanitarian deferral. Both superpowers maintained relationships with Arab states whose support for Palestinian rights was declarative and whose strategic calculations frequently led them to subordinate Palestinian interests to their own. Palestinian political leadership was sustained as a political project by external state sponsorship that provided resources but also imposed constraints — donor relationships that gave external patrons influence over Palestinian political choices in ways that did not always serve Palestinian interests.
The Oslo Accords (1993–1995) were premised on a specific theory of incremental resolution: that Palestinian acceptance of Israeli security requirements in the short term would create the conditions for Palestinian political rights in the longer term, and that the process of economic development and Palestinian Authority institution-building would produce the conditions for viable statehood.
The theory was falsified by subsequent events, but the falsification process is analytically important. The Oslo architecture created a Palestinian Authority with governance responsibilities but without sovereignty — responsible for providing services to Palestinian populations while lacking the authority to protect them from settlement expansion, movement restrictions, or military operations. The Authority became dependent on international donor support for its operational capacity, which created accountability to donors rather than to the Palestinian population it was nominally governing.
Settlement expansion continued and accelerated throughout the Oslo period and every subsequent diplomatic initiative. The settlement enterprise — which requires the ongoing appropriation of Palestinian land, the construction of infrastructure that physically prevents Palestinian territorial contiguity, and the installation of a population whose security requirements justify permanent Israeli military presence — is structurally incompatible with the two-state solution that the international community claims to be pursuing. The settlements are not an obstacle to peace on the path toward a two-state solution; they are the destruction of the territorial conditions that a viable Palestinian state requires.
By 2024, approximately 720,000 Israeli settlers reside in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in communities whose removal would require a level of political will that no Israeli government has demonstrated any intention of exercising. The settlement enterprise has created facts on the ground that make the Oslo-era two-state framework not merely difficult but geographically incoherent.
The conclusion that the two-state solution, as defined by the Oslo parameters, is no longer viable does not lead automatically to any single alternative. One-state frameworks (binational, democratic, federal) face their own serious obstacles. Confederation proposals that maintain separate Israeli and Palestinian governance in interconnected territories have not been seriously tested. Phased approaches that address immediate humanitarian and security concerns while deferring the most contested political questions have a poor track record of deferral becoming permanent.
What any effective framework requires, as a precondition for its workability, is a different relationship between proclaimed principles and operative conduct. The current international framework proclaims commitment to Palestinian rights, a two-state solution, international humanitarian law compliance, and accountability for violations — while operatively permitting settlement expansion, providing security assistance to a state conducting operations that independent legal authorities have characterized as violations of international humanitarian law, and blocking accountability mechanisms through Security Council veto.
The gap between proclaimed principles and operative conduct is not merely a hypocrisy problem. It is a functionality problem: parties to a conflict who observe that international actors proclaim neutrality while acting non-neutrally have no incentive to accept constraints from those international actors. Palestinian political parties across the spectrum have concluded, with substantial empirical basis, that the existing international framework is not a neutral mediator but a system of managed containment. This conclusion makes them rationally resistant to diplomatic processes that have the form of resolution without the content.
Effective diplomacy for the current conditions requires acknowledgment of what the last thirty years have demonstrated: that incremental process without enforcement is not a path to resolution. Any framework that takes the structural conditions seriously must address the settlement enterprise as an active obstacle rather than a background variable; must include Palestinian security as an interest of equal standing to Israeli security rather than as a residual concern addressed after Israeli security requirements are satisfied; and must include enforcement mechanisms that operate regardless of Security Council veto.
These requirements are politically difficult in proportion to their analytical necessity. The observation that effective resolution requires things that are politically difficult is not a counsel of despair; it is a clarification of what the gap between the current diplomatic framework and the conditions for resolution actually consists of.
One dimension of the changing diplomatic landscape that the recognition waves of 2024 have accelerated is the redistribution of diplomatic initiative from Western powers to the Global South institutional architecture — the African Union, ASEAN, the Arab League, CARICOM, and the broader network of non-Western states that have maintained consistent positions on Palestinian rights while Western governments have been constrained by domestic political considerations.
Global South institutional leadership has genuine comparative advantages in this context: freedom from the specific domestic political constraints that have made consistent Western positions on Palestinian rights politically difficult; legitimacy among Palestinian populations that has not been compromised by decades of instrumentalized “honest broker” relationships; and, in some cases, direct experience with the decolonization processes whose principles are most directly applicable to the Palestinian case.
The limitations of Global South institutional leadership are real: enforcement capacity that cannot substitute for Security Council authorization, internal coordination challenges that create vulnerabilities to divide-and-rule approaches, and bilateral relationships with Israel and the United States that create cross-cutting pressures on institutional solidarity. These limitations are not arguments against building this institutional capacity; they are arguments for understanding its realistic scope and designing frameworks that work within it.
The shift in diplomatic initiative toward Global South institutions does not resolve the Palestinian question. It changes the conditions under which resolution might become possible by diversifying the set of actors whose participation in a resolution framework is required and whose interests must be incorporated into any durable agreement. That change is not sufficient for resolution, but the absence of that change — the continuation of diplomatic processes in which the parties with the most consistent commitment to principles of self-determination and international law are systematically marginalized — has demonstrably been insufficient for resolution for seventy-five years.
Dr. Leila Mansour-Fitzgerald is Senior Fellow in the Program on Conflict Resolution and Transitional Justice at The Uncertainty Department. Her research addresses the structural conditions of durable conflict resolution in cases involving asymmetric power relationships.