Two State Solution Map

Building a Two State Solution Map: What It Takes

Most people who find themselves looking at a Two State Solution Map have done so after seeing some version of it on social media, often an interactive one shared without context about what data actually went into it. The common versions floating around—interactive maps from research orgs, news outlets, and advocacy groups—are useful starting points, but they also come with enough caveats that you should know what you are looking at before sharing one as if it settles anything. I spent a few weeks last year digging into this for a project, and the process was less complicated than expected and more frustrating than I anticipated. A Two State Solution Map is a geographic visualization that attempts to draw territorial boundaries separating an Israeli state and a Palestinian state, usually based on the 1967 lines with some degree of land swap. That sounds straightforward, but the reality is that there is no single agreed-upon configuration. Different organizations publish different maps, and the differences between them are significant—sometimes in ways that casual viewers don't catch. The basic ingredients are: the 1967 armistice line as a starting point, proposed land swaps along the green line, settlement blocs that would be transferred, Palestinian population centers that need to remain contiguous, and various border corridors or tunnels that some proposals include. Most maps also show East Jerusalem's status one way or another, even though that is arguably the most contested element of any drawing.

Picking Your Source or Building From Scratch

If you just need a map for a presentation or an article, there are a handful of reputable sources. The Shimon Peres Center for Peace maintains one of the more widely cited interactive versions. The Carter Center has published maps related to their negotiations. Various academic papers from places like Columbia and Oxford have their own spatial proposals. These are fine for general reference. I'd avoid using maps from organizations with a hard political stance without noting whose proposal it is, because the differences are not subtle. If you are building your own, the technical stack is not particularly hard. You will need GeoJSON or Shapefile boundary data for the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Israel proper. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs both publish boundary files, and open-source datasets on GitHub have cleaned-up versions that combine them. QGIS handles the rendering without requiring any coding. If you want interactivity, Mapbox GL JS or Leaflet with GeoJSON layers is the standard path.

The Practical Problems Nobody Talks About

Here is where it gets annoying. I hit a specific issue that took me about six hours to resolve and that probably deserves to be better documented. The 1967 line boundary files use different coordinate reference systems across the various data sources I was combining. Israel's survey data tends to use a local datum, Palestinian Authority mapping materials often use WGS84, and the UNOCHA boundary datasets use yet another transformation. When I overlaid them without checking, the borders appeared to diverge by roughly 200 to 400 meters in places, which sounds small until you are trying to show a border that runs through a valley where a single village sits on one side and a settlement on the other. The workaround was to reproject everything into a single CRS—EPSG:4326 for WGS84—using GDAL's cs2bin transformation pipeline rather than letting QGIS do an auto-reprojection, which quietly applied approximations that shifted things enough to matter at this scale. I also cross-referenced the final output against the UN Cartographic Unit's official Palestinian territory shapefiles, which are the closest thing to a neutral baseline that exists. Once I did that, the discrepancies dropped to a manageable level. It is tedious work, and most people skip it.

What a Good Map Shows—and What It Hides

A responsible Two State Solution Map should make its assumptions visible. That means labeling which proposal it follows, showing the land-swap areas distinctly, and indicating which settlements are included or excluded. Many popular versions gloss over this by presenting a single colored boundary as if it is the only possible line. That is misleading, and it is the main reason these maps often get weaponized in arguments rather than used to clarify them. There is also the question of area calculation, which most map creators ignore. The total land area available for a Palestinian state under various proposals ranges from roughly 55 percent to 78 percent of historic Mandatory Palestine, depending on which land swaps you accept and whether you include Gaza. A map that does not show at least an approximate area figure is leaving out information that matters. I always add a small text box with the calculated percentages for each proposed state, even if it makes the layout slightly uglier.

Common Pitfalls for Beginners

The biggest mistake I see is treating this as purely a geographic problem when it is fundamentally a political one. The borders on any Two State Solution Map are opinions, not facts. They reflect negotiating positions, security calculations, demographic engineering, and ideological commitments. A map that looks clean and definitive is usually a map that has been sanitized of the things that actually made the proposal hard to implement in practice. Another frequent error is forgetting about the enclaves and the separation wall. Many proposed maps show a neat contiguous Palestinian state, but the reality on the ground includes areas surrounded by Israeli-controlled territory or cut off by the barrier that Israel built inside the West Bank. Some maps acknowledge this by showing disconnected zones. Many do not. If your map shows a fully contiguous Palestinian state without noting how that differs from current geography, you are presenting a negotiated ideal, not a description of what exists or what any realistic agreement would preserve.

When a Map Is Not the Right Tool

I should be direct about the limitations here. A static or even interactive map cannot convey the depth of what is actually at stake: water rights, holy site access, refugee return provisions, security arrangements, the status of individual neighborhoods in Jerusalem. These are not geographic questions. A map can suggest where a border might run, but it cannot show you why that border would or would not work for the people living on either side. Using a Two State Solution Map as if it resolves the underlying conflict is like using a floor plan to argue about whether a house is livable. It shows walls. It does not show plumbing. If you need to discuss the political dimensions, pair the map with written context from negotiating documents or academic analysis. The Oslo accords' defined Areas A, B, and C are a starting point, though they are now largely obsolete as a descriptive tool. More recent working papers from the Track 2 dialogues in Geneva offer detailed spatial proposals that are worth referencing alongside any map you produce.

Where to Get the Data

For raw boundary data, the best sources are the UNOCHA OPT dataset, the Palestine GeoPortal maintained by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, and the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics for Israeli municipal boundaries. Settlement boundary data is more contentious. B'Tselem publishes one version. Gisha, the Israeli organization that works on freedom of movement, maintains another. They disagree, sometimes significantly, on which outposts are official and which are unauthorized. You will need to pick a source and note which one you used. For rendering, QGIS is the simplest path if you are not writing code. It has built-in support for the coordinate systems involved and can export to SVG or PNG with clean borders. If you want something interactive, Mapshaper is faster than anything I have seen for cleaning up messy GeoJSON and converting it to TopoJSON for web use. For a proper web implementation, Leaflet with the leaflet-draw plugin lets users toggle between different proposed border sets, which is worth the extra effort if the audience will actually engage with it. The work is not hard in the technical sense, but it does require you to be honest about what the map is and is not doing. The people who produce the most useful versions of a Two State Solution Map are the ones who make their uncertainties visible rather than hiding them behind a polished rendering.