5 minutes to midnight – again…
JVL Introduction
Michael Lynk a former United Nations Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.
He writes here about the irony of the two-state solution:
“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.”
Lynk follows the formulation from Meron Benvenisti writing in 1982 to Antonnio Guterres at the UN last April”: “The two-state solution is near the point of no return.”
The settler project has always been intended to make a two-state solution impossible by creating facts on the ground. Many believe that they had achieved their goal decades ago.
Does the West seriously believe there are still 5- minutes to go?
Or did that train pull out of the station when the Oslo Accords collapsed/were killed off? with the building of the Separation Wall? With the blockade of Gaza? With the subsequent six wars? With the acceleration of terror against Palestinians on the West Bank? With the Nations State law? With the genocide in Gaza?
Or are there still 5 minutes left to pull the chestnuts from the fire?
If so, the West had better hurry up. One of those precious minutes has already been used up writing the introduction to this article…
RK
This article was originally published by Dawn on Wed 25 Feb 2026. Read the original here.
The broken clock: Why, for the West, it will always be "five minutes to midnight" for the two-state solution
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This is a remarkable article, cataloguing close to six decades of utter cynicism on the part of Israel’s Western allies, mouthing the “two-state” mantra over and over despite irrefutible evidence of Israel’s determination never to allow a Palestinian state to come into being. As Lynk writes: “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?”