The European Union and the killing of the two-state solution

Whether viewed as normative asymmetry, the consequence of futile decolonisation or the outcome of a settler colonial process, Palestinian statehood has endured a gradual ‘unmaking’ engineered by the illegal Israeli occupation. Western policies charged with racialised logics, postcolonial rationales and the politics of delay attempt to dismantle that fragile statehood, protecting the white-induced subjugation and subordination of Palestinians. The EU, more than any other actor, has insisted on the preservation of the so-called two-state solution, although its policymaking contradicts its own discursive commitments. The paper analyses how Palestinian statehood is discursively upheld but materially dismantled. Through analysis of legal neutralisation, economic dependency and racialised politics, we unpack how the EU's policymaking adopts colonial prejudice to regulate life through invisibility, temporality and erasure. A contrapuntal reading of official EU documents, speeches and institutional texts helps us centre the influence of European coloniality while also listening to marginalized, silenced and ignored voices shaped by colonial histories.