On October 6, 2023, an edition of Newsweek hit newsstands proclaiming, “The Palestinian Dream Is Dying—And It’s A Nightmare for Israel.”
The following day would be the deadliest in Israel’s history, sparking a war in which more Palestinians are estimated to have been killed than in all previous conflicts combined.
But the dream of an independent Palestinian state had already begun to fade long before Hamas militants launched their surprise incursion into Israel, killing, maiming and kidnapping men, women and children. A combination of Israel’s territorial expansion, the decline of the Palestinian National Authority (PA) and the growing influence of Hamas has eroded the feasibility of a two-state resolution, creating an untenable status quo that shattered into pieces in the early morning hours of October 7, 2023.
Now, residents of Gaza and the West Bank are at the mercy of Israeli military operations in which fighters and civilians are being slain at staggering rates. And with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s far-right government considering territorial annexation and mass expulsions while two rival Palestinian governments teeter on the verge of collapse, not the only hopes for a Palestinian state—but the existence of its very people—is at risk.
But there is an alternative, albeit one that elicits significant controversy on both sides of the decades-long struggle: one-state for two peoples.
The prospect of uniting two populations divided by history, culture, religion and deep-seated animosity is fraught with challenges. Yet, as other solutions lose viability, the conversation is gaining momentum.
“Now, the real discourse is—de facto—not between the one state or two states but rather what kind of one state will it be,” former Israeli interim President and Knesset speaker Avraham Burg told Newsweek. “One state with two regimes, one full of privileges to the Jews and one of total discrimination to the Palestinians, or one state with equal rights to all?”
‘Zombie Language’
Burg envisions an inclusive system in which “every individual, between the river and the sea, must have the same rights and liberties.” He is among a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians who have abandoned the notion that the nascent United Nation’s 1947 partition plan of the former British Mandate of Palestine will ever be fulfilled. Since Israel’s first victory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the world’s only Jewish state has steadily expanded control over Palestinian territories, obscuring the definition of what an independent Palestinian state would look like.
Palestinian-American author Ahmed Moor dismissed the two-state solution as “zombie language.” He told Newsweek “it is as intractable as it’s ever been, and so risk aversion and inertia leads us to a place where everybody knows there’s never going to be a Palestinian state, it’s been colonized out of existence, and yet world leaders still talk about two states.”
Since 2012, Moor has campaigned for a different approach: one in which Palestinians would fight to secure their rights from within a single state. One model he’s suggested is that of a federal configuration divided into provincial units that could be tasked with local decision-making on issues such as education while still answering to a common central government.
Rather than framing the conflict on the basis of India and Pakistan, two feuding nations to also emerge from the ashes of the British Empire in 1948, Moor advocates for a civil rights struggle more akin to the movement that took hold Black communities in the Jim Crow-era U.S., or under apartheid in South Africa.
As long-jailed dissident Nelson Mandela emerged to become South Africa’s first black leader in 1994, the man viewed by many at the time as the Palestinian equivalent, Yasser Arafat, led the Palestine Liberation Organization into the Oslo Accords, which briefly held promise for Palestinian self-rule. What followed, however, were broken promises and an uptick in extremist violence.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin paid with his life, assassinated by a far-right Israeli gunman in 1995. Arafat, having lived to witness the first premiership of Netanyahu along with the rise of Hamas and its own one-state vision—that of an Islamic Palestinian state—died of a sudden illness in 2004. Arafat’s death came amid a new wave of violence that marked the Second Intifada uprising.
Today, Moor is far less optimistic than he once was about the possibility of Palestinians gaining full rights within Israel. Netanyahu’s coalition includes ultranationalists who openly discuss the removal of Palestinians rather than their integration. Meanwhile, Israel faces a demographic challenge: with more than five million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and another two million Arab citizens of Israel, a single state would threaten Jewish numerical dominance.
‘How Much Worse Should It Get?’
To address this and other issues, Hiba Husseini, head of the Husseini & Husseini law firm and former legal adviser to Palestinian negotiations, proposed a “Holy Land Confederation” with former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin in 2022. Their plan envisioned a system in which both sides share land, infrastructure and resources, with Jerusalem functioning as an “open city” under joint administration and population swaps that would see the majority of the estimated 700,000 Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank leave, while the remainder would be given the choice to transfer or stay.
“We cannot stress enough how important it is to consider alternatives,” Husseini told Newsweek. “Conflict management and the shrinking of the conflict have backfired, costing tremendous loss of human life.” She added the ongoing war has also exacerbated regional instability in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, underscoring the urgency of finding new answers. “How much worse should it get before we realize that it is essential to have a resolution of this conflict?”
Leila Farsakh, a University of Massachusetts-Boston professor, said such a solution may prove attractive for those seeking a “realistic approach.” An Israeli-Palestinian confederation could channel the broad international recognition both national movements have received: approximately 163 nations for the State of Israel and 148 for the State of Palestine.
Under the proposal, each group would maintain its language, culture and education system while electing representatives to a common national council. Israelis and Palestinians would be guaranteed equal political rights while sharing a common foreign and defense policy.
“If you ask me where we are, we have definitely now reached a new reality in so far as it’s clear that there can never be a viable Palestinian state, because of the deepening of Israeli occupation and expansion of settlements during the Oslo years,” Farsakh said.
“And what we have right now is one state, which is Israel, from the river to the sea and in which Israelis have rights and Palestinians don’t have rights, and this is not sustainable.”
She argued that a successful confederation could transform the area into “an example for the whole region,” even “a promise of what the future Middle East can look like.”
‘Sounds Good on Paper’
Despite these alternative visions, skepticism remains. The confederation approach was one of four one-state scenarios — alongside a unity state, a state with Palestinian autonomy and a federal state — that Pnina Sharvit Baruch, former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ International Law Department of the Military Advocate General, explored in a 2021 study. Sharvit Baruch is also a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).
While a confederation “is a solution that sounds good on paper,” she told Newsweek, it fails to account for “deep feelings of hostility, mistrust, and, in some cases, even hatred” that would complicate shared governance, let alone open borders.
Her INSS colleague, Udi Dekel, a former Israeli negotiator, proposes a different approach: a “Palestinian Entity with Limited Sovereignty.” Under this model, the PA would gain expanded self-governance over designated areas of the West Bank while Israel would retain overarching security control. Israeli settlements would remain, but would cease expanding into PA-administered zones. Gaza would come under the separate authority of a committee of technocrats with the possibility of eventually becoming part of the Palestinian quasi-state. Parts of East Jerusalem may be included as well.
For Palestinians, Sharvit Baruch says this plan entails “a kind of drawing the lines in a new way that will enable them to control themselves as much as possible, without [Israeli] interference and with encouraging economic growth.” At the same time, Palestinians “will have to give up on the idea that they will get back all of the West Bank, and, of course, the idea that they will get back all of the State of Israel,” she said.
Despite the continued dominance of the two-state solution in mainstream discourse, alternatives have emerged for decades. Late Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi proposed a binational state known as “Isratine” be formed, while Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei continues to advocate for a democratic referendum among Israelis and Palestinians to determine their common fate.
Thus far, no one-state approach has gathered substantial support abroad, particularly in the Arab world. In an emergency effort to resurrect a path to Palestinian statehood, Egypt unveiled a proposal last month that would see war-torn Gaza come under the temporary administration of an independent Palestinian committee until it could be handed over to a reformed PA, echoing the plan promoted by Dekel and Sharvit Baruch.
The Egyptian proposal was endorsed by the Arab League and won support from Hamas, but it was shot down by both the U.S. and Israel, whose officials said it failed to address the realities of the situation in Gaza today.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a native of the Palestinian territory who serves as a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Newsweek at the time that the plan “may be the last attempt to stabilize what remains of the Palestinian people on their land, what remains of the Palestinians territories, what remains of the Palestinian Authority, such that we could even keep talk of the two-state solution alive.”
Still, Tsach Saar, Israel’s deputy consul general in New York, recently told Newsweek that Israel had no long-term plan to once again occupy Gaza in the long-term as it did from 1967 until withdrawing in 2005. At that point, Hamas had emerged victorious in elections and seized power amid a violent rift with the PA’s leading Fatah faction, still led by Arafat’s successor, President Mahmoud Abbas.
Netanyahu has dismissed out of hand the PA in its current form as a candidate for administering post-war Gaza, instead endorsing President Donald Trump‘s plan that would see the U.S. take direct control of the territory.
The ‘One-State Reality’
The current U.S. and Israeli stance complicates any standing proposals, one-state or two. Trump and Netanyahu have aligned in backing the resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza to other countries, despite receiving no takers, and Trump has additionally teased an upcoming announcement related to Israeli plans for the annexation of the West Bank, after having remarked how “small” Israel is in terms of land mass. Both men have demonstrated something of an immunity to international pressure.
Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland and former adviser to several U.S. administrations, sees the U.S. on track to continue emboldening Israeli designs for expansion. “The Israeli far right cannot achieve and maintain its objectives without substantial American backing, which has come their way from both Democratic and Republican administrations,” Telhami told Newsweek. “In the short term, it’s hard to see this changing.”
He described coming to the conclusion — long before the October 7 attacks —that talk of a two-state solution was “little more than a smokescreen to deal with the unjust reality” as a difficult one, given his years of advocacy toward that exact outcome. But today, with Israelis, Palestinians and the entire region hurtling toward even greater uncertainty under the emerging “one-state reality,” he argued that “it’s the reality on the ground and regionally that will continue to dictate the immediate choices.”
“Saying that it’s a one-state reality now does not preclude the possibility of two states, if the regional and international environments shifts—and if Israel runs into increasing obstacles implementing displacement of Palestinians or bringing peace to its own citizens,” Telhami said.
“Nor does it imply that one state with equality for all is any more likely.”
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