Knowledge Bank

The "two state solution", a plan for a "Jewish State" and "Arab State" in the United Nations General Assembly recommendation (1948), has failed egregiously since its inception. For a conflict that has numerous times been described as intractable, it is a wonder why the international community and the parties to the conflict themselves would continue to advocate for a plan that has never worked to accomplish its raison d'etre. By analyzing the state status of Palestine and Israel based on Charles Tilly's framework of the state as organized crime, this thesis seeks to show that in effect Israel has allowed political autonomy within spaces of densely populated and comparatively (to Israel) under-developed Palestinian areas, while coopting the taxable economy that would theoretically further a Palestinian state. This bifurcated "protection racket" organizes a state around the goal of dispossessing a racialized group of its land and extracting economic resources from them as well, while restricting their rights to mobility and their access to well-being. This simultaneous process of territorial integration and societal exclusion/separation is not a process of two separate geo-political entities, but a dominant group seeking to integrate land while excluding the indigenous people and replacing them with settlers through various methods of exploitation.