On July 7, Narendra Modi stood beside Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in Jakarta and declared that India supports “a two-state solution and the pursuit of lasting peace” in Palestine. Modi was repeating a line that Indian prime ministers have recited for decades. It is a comfortable formulation that costs New Delhi nothing and offends no one.

A week later, Indian officials at the Palestine Donor Group meetings in Brussels reiterated the commitment, welcoming diplomatic avenues towards Palestinian statehood and UN membership.

But this language now describes a country that no longer exists in any coherent, contiguous form, and every week that passes widens the gap between rhetoric and reality.

On July 14, just a week after Modi’s Jakarta remarks, Israel’s security cabinet approved a budget of $434 million to establish 34 new settlements in the occupied West Bank. This is the latest move in a wider settlement project, the scale of which makes the two-state framework difficult to sustain in its classical sense.

Israel’s settler expansion has drawn criticism abroad, but the same chasm between word and deed is visible closer to home. India has kept up its rhetorical support for Palestinian statehood even as it deepens its own ties with Israel.

New Delhi voted in favour of last September’s UN General Assembly resolution endorsing a two-state solution. Yet, in the preceding two years, it abstained repeatedly on resolutions calling for a Gaza ceasefire, a halt on arms’ sales to Israel and an end to the occupation within a fixed timeframe, citing its long-standing preference for dialogue over condemnation.

At the same time, India’s defence relationship with Israel has only strengthened.

Israel’s settler project

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who oversaw the decision to establish 34 new settlements in the West Bank, said the move was “killing the idea of establishing a terrorist state in the heart of the country” while strengthening Israel’s hold on “the homeland in Judea and Samaria”, his preferred biblical name for the West Bank. Under Smotrich’s four-year tenure as finance minister, the tally of new settlements now stands at 103.

Around 700,000 Israeli settlers now live among 2.7 million Palestinians across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the settlements form a dense grid of towns, military zones and connecting highways that has carved Palestinian population centres into disconnected islands.

Under the 1995 Oslo II Accord, the West Bank was divided into Areas A and B, with a Palestinian population, and Area C, under Israel.

Area C, over which Israel retains full civil and military control, makes up roughly 60% of the West Bank and contains the agricultural land, water resources and transport corridors that any functioning Palestinian state would need.

The long-frozen E1 corridor near the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, which successive Israeli governments have moved to advance in recent years, shows what this control means. Building the corridor would sever East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, splitting Palestinian territory into two disconnected halves rather than one contiguous whole.

The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of July 2024 found Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory unlawful and called for it to end as rapidly as possible, a finding the UN General Assembly subsequently endorsed. But the legal argument matters less with each passing year against the physical fact of concrete on the ground.

Domestic politics

Israeli politics has shifted in ways that make a negotiated withdrawal increasingly implausible too. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition depends on parties that reject Palestinian sovereignty as a matter of ideology rather than tactics, and settler violence against Palestinians and their property has risen in recent months, often with limited consequence for the perpetrators.

Smotrich leads the Religious Zionism party, whose base is concentrated in the settler movement. He faces a legislative election in October in which his political survival may depend on demonstrating territorial entrenchment.

Polling on both sides shows collapsing faith in the two-state idea itself. Palestinians have watched 30 years of negotiations produce more settlements. Israelis, after the trauma of recent years, have moved towards viewing any Palestinian polity as an unacceptable security risk. Neither public wants the compromise their leaders once signed up to under the Oslo Accords.

That rejection has found its most extreme expression in Gaza, where Israel’s campaign has produced devastation, civilian deaths, and the destruction of housing, hospitals and infrastructure at a scale that amounts to genocide, as documented by UN experts and leading human rights organisations.

A two-state solution requires two things above all: a Palestinian population with the security and institutional capacity to govern itself, and a level of trust sufficient to sustain a negotiated peace. Genocide destroys both, and it removes the conditions under which Palestinian statehood could plausibly be built.

What has emerged instead is a single territorial reality stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, governed by one state that exercises full rights over one population and military or administrative control over another. Describing this arrangement honestly means calling it apartheid.

Alive only in rhetoric

In September 2025, as the war on Gaza continued, the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Australia, four of Israel’s closest Western partners, formally recognised Palestinian statehood. They broke with decades of policy specifically to preserve the two-state option.

That even allies unwilling to abandon Israel outright would take this step, rather than simply repeat the formula as Modi did, reflects how directly settlement expansion now contradicts the two-state outcome the international community continues to invoke.

When Modi and other world leaders repeat their support for this outcome, without acknowledging that its territorial basis has been dismantled, they offer a comforting fiction in place of a difficult truth, a fiction that lets governments avoid harder questions: accountability for war crimes, compensation for destroyed land and livelihoods, the withdrawal of settlement infrastructure, and a serious reckoning with what equal rights would look like for everyone living in this single territory.

It is possible that many, including India, genuinely believe restating the two-state principle keeps it alive as a diplomatic anchor. It can even be argued that abandoning the two-state language altogether would remove even the modest international pressure that still exists on Israel to limit settlement expansion. But an anchor only works if there is still a ship attached to it.

India and other governments that value their moral standing on this question would serve Palestinians better by shifting the conversation towards the one territorial reality that now exists, and what justice, security and self-determination for both peoples could mean within it, rather than continuing to defend a geography that no longer holds together on the map.

Vishal R Choradiya is an assistant professor with the Department of Professional Studies, Christ University, Bengaluru.

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