Michael Lynk is Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Law, Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. Between 2016 and 2022, he served as the 7th United Nations Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967. Since 2022, he has been a DAWN Fellow.
In 1982, Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, spoke to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C., about research that he and other social scientists in Israel were conducting into the political implications of the rapidly expanding Israeli settler population in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). That year, there were 22,000 settlers living in the occupied West Bank, with another 76,000 settlers in East Jerusalem and 6,500 in the Gaza Strip. According to an Anthony Lewis article in the New York Times, Benvenisti — an opponent of the settlement movement — said that, given the stated goal of then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to have 100,000 settlers living in the West Bank by 1987, the momentum of the Israeli settler movement was at a "critical mass." The point-of-no-return, he argued, to forestall Israel's effective annexation of the West Bank was now at "five minutes to midnight."
Two years later, AEI published Benvenisti's "The West Bank Data Base Project," a comprehensive survey of the West Bank's rapidly changing demography and landscape. By 1984, there were 37,000 Israelis living in West Bank settlements, a two-year increase of 68%. In the publication, he wrote that the "political, military, socio-economic and psychological processes working towards total annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip outweigh those who are working against it." In Benvenisti's view, the maximum territorial objectives of the Zionist movement — full and irreversible control over the entire area of Mandatory Palestine — had been achieved. Ironically, his Data Base Project would be criticized by his fellow liberal Zionists for its pessimism that these demographic trends could be reversed, while celebrated by Israel's Likudniks for confirming the success of their annexationist aspirations.
That prognosis was issued over 40 years ago. In the decades since, Western political leaders and media influencers have repeatedly asserted the necessity of achieving a two-state solution as the only realistic path forward for Israel and Palestine, while regularly warning that the diplomatic clock for its achievement sat perilously at "five minutes to midnight." Since Benvenisti's warnings, the Israeli settler population has exploded. By 2023 (the latest year for official figures), the estimated size of the Israeli settler population in the West Bank alone stood at 503,000 — a net increase of 12,000 to 20,000 settlers annually. Many more are on their way: The far-right Israeli government approved a record number of housing starts (over 47,000 units) in 2025. Another 233,000 Israeli settlers live in East Jerusalem.
Since the early 1970s, the international community has made clear that Israeli settlements are illegal under international law and that they must stop.
- Michael Lynk
Yet, following the familiar script, the proverbial door to a Palestinian state is not yet shut. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, speaking to the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) in April 2025, pleaded with the international community to recognize the urgency of reviving the two-state solution: "We are past the stage of ticking boxes — the clock is ticking. The two-state solution is near the point of no return."
The purpose, reality and illegality of Israeli settlements are no secret. While Israel attempted to disguise its first civilian settlements in the occupied territory as military bases shortly after it conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza (along with the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai) in the June 1967 war, it quickly revealed its objectives. By 1969, Yigal Allon, a Labour Party cabinet minister in the Israeli government and a leading architect of the settlement enterprise, publicly proclaimed: "Here, we create a Greater Eretz Yisrael from a strategic point of view, and establish a Jewish state from a demographic point of view."
Ten years later, Matityahu Drobles, a senior official with the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization, wrote that the goal of Israeli settlements was to retain the conquered territory in perpetuity and, by doing so, forestall any possibility of a Palestinian state. The purpose of the settlements, he argued, was to settle:
The areas between and around the centres occupied by the minorities [the Palestinians] so as to reduce to the minimum the danger of an additional Arab state being established in these territories. Being cut off by Jewish settlements, the minority population will find it difficult to form a territorial and political continuity. There mustn't be even the shadow of a doubt about our intention to keep the territories of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] for good.
Since then, Israeli leaders have spoken regularly about the settlements as the state's primary means of planting an irrevocable flag of sovereignty over the OPT. Recently, Israeli Finance Minister and concurrently Minister of Settlements Bezalel Smotrich said in August 2025, when announcing the approval of 3,400 new housing units for the large E1 settlement project in the heart of the West Bank, that this would "bury the idea of a Palestinian state … because there is nothing to recognize and no one to recognize." A month later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at a ceremony marking the signing of the funding agreement for E1, pontificated: "We said there will be no Palestinian state, and indeed there will be no Palestinian state. This place is ours."
Since the early 1970s, the international community has made clear that Israeli settlements are illegal under international law and that they must stop. In 1971, the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) adopted Resolution 2851, its first condemnation of the settlements, stating, "All measures taken by Israel to settle the occupied territories, including occupied Jerusalem, are completely null and void." The General Assembly has since passed more than 50 resolutions denouncing the settlements as violations of international law, most recently in December 2025, when it said, "Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan are illegal."
Similarly, the UNSC passed Resolution 446 in 1979, determining "that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity." The Security Council's latest legal censure on the settlements was Resolution 2334 in December 2016, which declared that the Israeli settlements constitute "a flagrant violation under international law," and demanded that Israel "immediately and completely cease all settlement activities." All U.N. members — including Israel — are required by Article 25 of the U.N. Charter "to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council."
In July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) arrived at a similar conclusion, issuing an advisory opinion that the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem "have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law." It also declared Israel's then-57-year-old occupation as illegal, demanding both it and the settlements end completely and "as rapidly as possible." The UNGA subsequently adopted Resolution ES-10/24 in September 2024 by an overwhelming vote, welcoming the ICJ advisory opinion and demanding that Israel end its occupation and its settlements within 12 months.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk advanced the legal analysis of Israel's settlements in March 2025, determining that they constitute war crimes under the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In his annual report on Israeli settlements to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Turk noted:
The transfer by the occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory, amounts to a war crime.
In parallel, the settlements constitute the heart of Israel's apartheid regime in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Apartheid has been a crime under international law since 1973. In January 2026, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights released a damning report documenting Israel's discriminatory administration of the OPT. It detailed how Israelis and Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are subject to two different and unequal legal and political regimes, with the settlements strictly reserved for Israeli and foreign Jews:
This separation, segregation and subordination is intended to … maintain oppression and domination of Palestinians [and] amount[s] to a violation of Article 3 of ICERD [the International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination], which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid.
Yet none of these authoritative statements of law or repeated condemnations by the international community have deterred Israel from maintaining and accelerating its settlement program. In 2018, the Israeli Knesset stated that "Jewish settlement" was a national value of the State of Israel under the newly enacted Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, which forms part of its constitution. In December 2022, the agreed-upon basis of unity for Netanyahu's new far-right coalition government included the provision that:
The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria.
In January 2009, Thomas Friedman — an influential foreign affairs columnist with the New York Times — wrote about the accelerating Israeli occupation as former U.S. President Barack Obama entered the White House. In his column, he observed that "we're getting perilously close to closing the window on a two-state solution," citing both Hamas's rockets and "fanatical Jewish settlers" as the primary spoilers. "It is now five minutes to midnight," he wrote, and "if we don't get diplomacy back on track soon, it will be the end of the two-state solution." At the time, there were 281,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and another 195,000 settlers living in East Jerusalem.
Four years later, John Kerry — the new Secretary of State under Obama — announced efforts to revive the moribund peace process between Israel and Palestine. The goal was a comprehensive settlement that would birth a Palestinian state. Speaking to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in April 2013, and pointing to the growing Israeli settler population, Kerry said, "The window for a two-state solution is shutting. I think we have some period of time — a year, a year and a half, to two years, or it's over." By then, there were 356,000 settlers in the West Bank and 200,000 settlers living in East Jerusalem.
Kerry's efforts collapsed in April 2014. A subsequent analysis by Chatham House argued that a leading reason for the Kerry initiative's failure was Washington's unwillingness to put any meaningful pressure on Israel as the stronger party to force a deal. Tzipi Livni, who as Israeli Justice Minister represented her government during the negotiations, admitted afterwards that settlements prevented Israel from reaching a resolution with the Palestinians and that "settlement construction makes it impossible to defend Israel around the world."
When the UNSC adopted Resolution 2334 in December 2016, at the end of the second Obama administration, it expressed "grave concern that continuing Israeli settlement activities are dangerously imperiling the viability of the two-state solution based on the 1967 lines." Later that month, Kerry explained the U.S. rationale for abstaining in the vote for the resolution amid fierce Israeli pushback while admitting the vanishing prospects for a two-state solution:
[The] policies of [the current Israeli] government, which the prime minister [Netanyahu] himself just described as 'more committed to settlements than any in Israel's history' are leading in the opposite direction. They're leading towards one state. In fact, Israel has increasingly consolidated control over much of the West Bank for its own purposes, effectively reversing the transitions to greater Palestinian civil authority that were called for by the Oslo Accords.
By the end of the Obama administration in January 2017, the Israeli settler population had reached 400,000 in the West Bank and 210,000 in East Jerusalem.
If the ticking clock for a two-state solution stood at five minutes to midnight in 1982, and the Israeli settlement population in the OPT has since grown 700%, what time is it now?
- Michael Lynk
In July 2025, the United Nations hosted an international summit in New York, chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, to advance the two-state solution. Shortly before the summit, French President Emmanuel Macron wrote to Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, to express his concern that "the two-state solution is more threatened than ever before." Two months later, France recognized the State of Palestine, followed by ten other countries — including the United Kingdom. In announcing its decision, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said, "In the face of the growing horror in the Middle East, we are acting to keep alive the possibility of peace and of a two-state solution."
Following the summit, the UNGA endorsed the New York Declaration, committing the international community to take "concrete, time-bound and irreversible steps" toward a two-state solution. However, the Declaration's 42 paragraphs contained only a handful of meek references to sanctioning Israeli settlements, such as: "We committed to adopting restrictive measures, against violent extremist settlers and entities and individuals supporting illegal settlements, in accordance with international law." There is no mention of sanctioning Israel or its political leadership, yet Israel and the United States opposed the Declaration anyway.
If the ticking clock for a two-state solution stood at five minutes to midnight in 1982, and the Israeli settlement population in the OPT has since grown 700%, what time is it now?
In their recent book, "Tomorrow is Yesterday," Robert Malley and Hussein Agha — two advisors to the various American-led Israeli-Palestinian peace process negotiations over the past 30 years — argue that the current defenders of it have obsessively clung to this illusion long after its possibilities have died. As a telling example, they cite an interview with then-U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in July 2024. When asked if the two-state solution was dead, Blinken replied: "Not only is it not dead — it cannot be dead." Malley and Agha remark that, for these true believers, "It is the sole possible enduring outcome because there is no other," regardless of the accumulating facts on the ground.
Israeli leaders long abandoned the pretense of allowing even a Potemkin state for the Palestinians. Yet repeated calls by political leaders in the Global North for a two-state solution, with no diplomatic strategy or muscle backing it up, serves as Israel's sweet spot for thickening its annexation. As recent decades prove, Israel can add thousands of new settlers annually in East Jerusalem and the West Bank while building or formalizing tens of new settlements each year without triggering meaningful pushback from Europe or North America. Ultimately, for the Global North, the clock's hands never move. The possibility of a Palestinian state remains eternally alive, even as the ground beneath it has collapsed.
In the end, it was always the Global North's utter unwillingness — or, in the words of Malley and Agha, its "moral cowardice" — to use its considerable economic, military and political influence to sanction Israel until it fully ends its settlement enterprise and allows for genuine Palestinian self-determination that has enabled this subjugation to flourish. Israel is a small country dependent on its trade and diplomatic relationships with Europe and North America to sustain its illegal occupation. A third of Israel's international trade is with the European Union. It has received more than $21 billion in military aid from the United States since October 2023. Yet, beyond the occasional finger wagging from foreign ministries in the Global North, no meaningful accountability has been imposed.
The United States bears extraordinary responsibility for allowing Israeli settlements to flourish and for apartheid to grow such deep roots. Its diplomatic shield for Israel at the United Nations and its sanctioning of the ICC for, among other things, investigating potential Israeli war crimes in the OPT, has licensed Israel's impunity.
Yet challenging Israel's political leadership regarding its settlement ambitions has been verboten for all recent U.S. presidents — Democrat and Republican alike. As Aaron David Miller, a former senior American foreign policy advisor on the Middle East, observed in 2009: "In 25 years of working on the issue for six Secretaries of State, I can't recall one meeting where we had a serious discussion with an Israeli Prime Minister about the damage that settlement activity — including land confiscation, bypass roads and housing demolitions — does to the peacemaking process."
In February 2026, the Israeli security cabinet announced new measures to remove restrictions on Jewish Israelis to buy West Bank land directly, simultaneously extending greater Israeli enforcement powers over those remaining parts of the West Bank where the Palestinian Authority exercises some limited control. Even liberal Zionists concede that this converts the de facto annexation of the West Bank into formal, de jure annexation. Israeli Minister of Energy Eli Cohen said that these measures would "actually establish a fact on the ground that there will not be a Palestinian state."
The reaction from the Global North's political leadership was critical but muted. The Trump administration signaled its opposition to Israel's plans without mentioning efforts to force it to undo its settlement enterprise, even as Netanyahu met with Trump at the White House just three days after the announcement. The European Union called the announcement "another step in the wrong direction," noting that "annexation is illegal under international law." However, it only committed to working with other international partners on the issue, with no threat of sanctions. The United Kingdom said that any unilateral attempt to "alter the geographic or demographic make-up of Palestine is wholly unacceptable and would be inconsistent with international law," while merely calling upon Israel to reverse these decisions immediately.
This diplomatic pantomime has long worn thin. With the eyes of the Global North wide open, the 58-year-old Israeli occupation has metastasized into the permanent alien rule and domination of one people over another, encased in a two-tier apartheid system of unequal laws and political rights. The cost of the failure by Europe, North America and the rest of the Global North over five decades to insist upon a rights-based framework and to enforce the many U.N. resolutions critical of Israel's occupation has been the evaporation of any lingering prospects for a genuine two-state solution. Even the European Union, in a fleeting moment of political clarity in 2017, acknowledged that the situation in Israel-Palestine was now a one-state reality of unequal rights. The avowals by these major international actors that they remain committed to a two-state solution has become a hollow ritual, a cover for paralysis rather than a declaration of resolve amid an avaricious occupation that long ago slipped the restraining bounds of legitimacy.
The views and positions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DAWN.
