RIP UN two-State solution, hello Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine

The United Nations two-State solution, first proposed on 29 November 1947, needs to be finally buried and replaced with the Saudi peace solution proposed on 8 June 2022.

The 1947 UN solution creating one Jewish State and one Arab state between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea (UN two-State solution) was aimed at ending the Arab-Jewish conflict in Western Palestine which had then been raging for the previous 50 years.

This proposal was accepted by the Jews but rejected by the Arabs becoming the catalyst for the War that broke out in May 1948.

The Arabs ended up controlling some 22% of the territory between the River and the Sea. The major part was unified with Eastern Palestine located east of the Jordan River, granted independence in 1946 as The Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, and renamed the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1950.

The balance, the Gaza Strip, was occupied and administered by Egypt.

The founding document of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1964 (PLO) expressly disavowed any claim to sovereignty "over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan" and "the Gaza Strip". It was only in 1968, after Jordan and Egypt had lost these lands to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, that the PLO began to agitate for an independent Arab state west of the Jordan River, employing terrorism to try and achieve it.

The PLO strategy failed.

However the long-dormant UN two-State solution was resurrected by the international community in:

• 1980:Venice Declaration
• 1993: Oslo Accords
• 2002: Arab Peace Initiative.
• 2003: President Bush Roadmap
• 2011: President Obama
• 2020: President Trump

Powerful backers indeed, but no such two-State solution has appeared a remote possibility for the last forty years

A radically-different proposal however surfaced in Saudi Arabia on 8 June 2022 that was both revolutionary and ground-breaking: Merge Jordan, the Gaza Strip, and part of the West Bank into one territorial entity to be called the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine – no new Arab State between the River and the Sea.