Last December, I wrote about the underlying causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in light of the recent violence in Gaza. Since then, the death toll has risen to nearly 30,000 people, including over 10,000 children [1]. Seventy percent of all homes in Gaza have been destroyed [2]. Millions of Gazans have been displaced, most crowding in the southern city of Rafah, squeezed against the Egyptian border, unable to escape [3]. Israel has promised to launch a ground invasion of Rafah if Hamas does not free all hostages by March 10 [4]. Calls for a ceasefire in the UN have been vetoed by the United States [5]. Israel has been accused of genocide in the International Court of Justice [6]. Experts have called Israel’s bombing of Gaza the most destructive bombing campaign in recent history [7].
The present-day, short-term reality of death and destruction in Gaza makes talking about the long-term future of Israel and Palestine feel at best untimely, and at worst, callous. And yet, it is important to consider how long-term peace can be achieved. In my article last December, I argued that long-term peace and stability in Palestine could only be achieved by discarding the fundamental geopolitical concept of nationalism and creating a multiethnic republic with a secular constitution.
While I did not say it then, I believe that this situation could only be achieved through a one-state solution. This is not a popular opinion, especially among moderates. Advocating for a “one state solution” usually means advocating for an entirely Israeli state, or an entirely Palestinian state, at the expense of the other nation. I am certainly not advocating for either. I am advocating a third type of one-state solution, a multiethnic republic in which both nationalities exist together, united by a secular constitution, occupying all the land Israel currently occupies, including Gaza and the West Bank. While this prospect looks bleaker than ever in February 2024, I argue that it is both more practical than, and morally preferable to, a two-state solution.
Let me begin with practicality. No proposed solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is easy, but the one-state solution I propose is clearly more practical than creating two separate states. For one, any two-state solution would have to accomplish the impossible task of determining what land, and how much land, to carve out of Israel and give to the new Palestinian state. Remember, this decades-long feud is fundamentally a land conflict—Israelis and Palestinians each claim the same land, and it is impossible to divide the land in a way that satisfies both parties, especially when it comes to the city of Jerusalem. One such proposed solution was given in 1947 by the United Nations, who proposed giving 56% of the land to Israel, 43% to the Arabs, and leaving the remaining 1% (mostly Jerusalem and the surrounding areas) to be a UN-administered neutral zone [8]. This plan was rejected by the Arab delegation because Arabs were given just 43% of the land despite constituting some 70% of the population [9]. The division would be more fair today, but only because 750,000 Arabs were chased out of the land of Palestine during the 1947 Nakba.
This plan, as well as most proposed modern borders of Palestinian state, runs into another enormous problem—it makes Palestine a non-contiguous state divided between the land around Gaza and the land around the West Bank. Such a division would make Palestine significantly more vulnerable to exploitation, because any travel or trade between Gaza and the West Bank would be forced to go through Israel, and political instability, setting the stage for a repeat of 2006, when a dispute between two political parties in the Palestinian Authority led to one party violently seizing control of Gaza and the other being relegated to the West Bank.
This task is made even more complicated by the 500,000 Israeli settlers who have moved into, and built cities on, Palestinian land in the West Bank since 1967 [10]. While Israel did dismantle and evacuate 18 settlements in the Gaza Strip as part of peace talks in 2005, there are nearly 250 settlements in the West Bank, making forced evacuation a much greater challenge [11]. To be clear, those people should not be there—setting up settlements on occupied territory is considered a war crime under international law [12]. But nevertheless, they are there, and it does not seem practically possible to relocate 500,000 people, many of whom were born in the settlements, in order to give the land over to an Arab-run regime.
These are just some of the practical problems posed by a two-state solution. A one-state solution would avoid them—no need to forcibly remove hundreds of thousands of people, no need to carve up borders through neighborhoods, and no need to administer a Palestinian state that is isolated between two non-contiguous islands.
Additionally, there are strong moral reasons why a one-state solution is preferable to two states. First, dividing Israel and Palestine incentivizes extremism and takes away whatever little incentive Israel has to treat Palestinians with anything approaching fairness. Removing Palestinians from Israeli society simply empowers the furthest-right radicals in Israeli politics and removes a consistent voice for peace and tolerance. Fully incorporating Palestinians as citizens of the state of Israel at least gives them a voice in government, both directly and indirectly incentivizing the government to maintain peace and economic stability, and reduce violence.
Second, any independent Palestinian state drawn along lines resembling the 1947 Partition Plan would be hopelessly underdeveloped compared to Israel, and would doubtless constitute a humanitarian disaster. Despite the many abuses Palestinians currently endure at the hands of the Israeli government, full independence from Israel would be even worse, cutting Palestinians off from the basic utilities they do get from Israeli forces—access to water, electricity, and food. Even in the best of times, Gaza had insufficient infrastructure to support its population. Today, whatever Gazans had is almost utterly destroyed.
Finally, and in a more abstract sense, international conflicts should not and cannot be truly solved through mere segregation. “Solving” the conflict by setting up a Jewish ethno-state and an Arab ethno-state plays into the racist ideology that every ethnicity needs a distinct state to avoid mixing fundamentally incompatible peoples. This is the kind of idea that motivated the Confederate States of America to secede in 1861. Would things really have been better if the North had let them? If the nation was not able to solve the issue of slavery peacefully, would it have been better to just let the South break away and continue to practice it, while the United States of America was limited to just the northern states? Should we have tolerated the slave-holding Confederacy to our southern border, simply because “we’re just so different,” and “it would be too hard to stay together?” I hope the answer is obvious. Conflicts should not be solved by simply building a wall between the two feuding groups—in fact, to do so is to not solve the conflict at all.
To be clear, there are enormous obstacles to be overcome before a one-state solution is even feasible. Most immediately, the bombing must stop. After that, the ideology of Zionism, which asserts that the Jewish people have a divine right to rule the land of Palestine, must not be the governing ideology of the new integrated state. It will not be easy to integrate a population so deeply traumatized by generations of violence. Extremists will still periodically try to tear apart the new state through terrorism. I won’t pretend to have all the answers. But I know that the situation must dramatically change, and I believe that a two-state solution will not lead to long-term peace or stability in the region.
