This unprecedented step will have a detrimental effect on the future of the Arab-Israeli conflict and, more immediately, on the anticipated agreement ending Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. The resolution openly defies world opinion and the overwhelming international consensus. It also reverses what has long been Israel’s official position. For decades, successive Israeli governments have at least feigned going along with the international desire for a just settlement based on two states peacefully coexisting side-by-side, even as those governments persisted in illegal land acquisition and settlement construction in territories designated for the Palestinian state.

Benjamin Netanyahu is the first Israeli prime minister to openly reject the two-state solution. He and his far-right ministers had never taken pains to conceal their views. However, prime ministers and governments come and go. The Knesset vote, on the other hand, showed for the first time how deep the opposition to a Palestinian state is in Israeli society. The resolution passed by an overwhelming 68 to nine votes. Its wording, which opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state “in the heart of the land of Israel”, is an explicit admission of territorial ambitions. It is little wonder that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has denounced the resolution as “unacceptable.”

This brings us to Israel’s main sponsor, the US, which is forever paying lip service to the two-state solution. How will Washington react to the Israeli slap in the face of its long-held policy? Will the Biden administration, focused on the forthcoming elections, simply turn the other cheek and continue to repeat the two-state mantra like a parrot? I would wager that it will, just as it will continue to politically and materially support Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, which aims to eliminate the Palestinian population of that territory in preparation for annexing it to Israel.

That Israel would flagrantly violate international law in this manner and thumb its nose at the international community by creating a new de facto reality should come as no surprise. But even supposing that Israel succeeds in imposing a single state “from the river to the sea”, would that state remain Jewish? The demographics suggest not. The Palestinian majority would impose the new reality.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 25 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly