When the guns eventually fall silent in Gaza, Israelis and Palestinians will confront a decades-old reality that cannot be overcome by violence and political half-measures. Both Jews and Palestinians will continue to assert privileged ownership of Palestine, citing centuries of history, the merits of which will never be settled conclusively by historians, let alone by the two principals. The question, therefore, is not whether Jews and Palestinians will continue living cheek by jowl, but how. Will they do so amid endless spasms of bloodletting or a coexistence created by a negotiated settlement that reconciles Israel’s need for security with Palestinians’ desire for statehood?
Israeli leaders have long claimed that they cannot negotiate with Hamas, which regards the Jewish state as the culmination of a colonial-settler project produced by Zionism. Yet this insurmountable barrier to a political settlement does not exist in the West Bank — or, more precisely, has not since the Palestinian Liberation Organisation forsook terrorism in 1988, recognised Israel’s right to live in peace, and agreed to negotiate with Israel to create a Palestinian state encompassing the West Bank and Gaza. The PLO’s historic decision paved the way for its leadership’s return, first to Gaza and later to the West Bank, the formation of a governing body, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the quest for a political settlement that would yield a Palestinian state.
Negotiations that started in 1991 led to two agreements, Oslo I (1993) and Oslo II (1995), with the United States acting as a mediator. The latter accord provided for a tripartite division of the West Bank that gave the PA (qualified) governing rights in Areas A and B and Israel exclusive control over Area C, which made up 61% of the territory. Even now, the PA exercises unshared civil and military authority solely in Area A (18 % of the West Bank). Plus, in both of its zones, the PA’s rights are defined narrowly: Israel controls the West Bank’s airspace, border crossings, telecommunications, water resources and other natural resources.
Moreover, in Areas A and B, the Palestinian population is scattered across “165 disconnected islands”, in contrast to Area C, a sprawling continuous expanse that contains all the Jewish settlements, as well as 200,000 or more Palestinians. Hagai El-Ad, an Israeli and former executive director of the human rights organisation B’Tselem, aptly likens the West Bank’s political geography to Swiss cheese. Israel has never been willing to make the hard choices required to change this patchwork into a territorially continuous sovereign Palestinian state — not even in 2000 at Camp David, despite the mythology that Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat, the PA’s leader at the time, a state covering almost all of the West Bank, only to be spurned. In reality, Israel did not present documents or maps, let alone agree to a fully sovereign Palestinian state with a unified territory.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plan, proposed in September 2008 following a series of meetings with PA president Mahmoud Abbas, went much further; but by then, Olmert was on his last legs politically, and Abbas refused to accept in haste a plan whose future was uncertain. Since then, the two-state concept has withered on the vine, and that has revived the idea of a single state that would provide equal rights to Jews and Palestinians alike.
The resulting frustration revived the idea of a single state that would guarantee equal rights to Jews and Palestinians alike, proposed in Zionism’s early decades by Jewish intellectuals, including Gershom Scholem, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber. Its more recent Israeli proponents have included Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem’s former deputy mayor, and Oxford historian Avi Shlaim. Among Palestinians, this formula has been advocated by the late Columbia University literary scholar Edward Said, Sari Nusseibeh, a philosophy professor and former president of Al-Quds University (1995-2014) in Jerusalem, and Columbia University historian Rashid Khalidi. Their conceptions of a single and inclusive state’s architecture, while not necessarily identical, rested on the premise that the proliferation of Jewish settlements had made the creation of two separate national states infeasible.
By definition, this solution contradicted the animating principle of the Zionist movement articulated by Theodor Herzl, and later picked up by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben Gurion: the essentiality of a nation in which Jews have special rights. The vision of one state in which Jews and Palestinians have equal rights appeals, particularly to people on the political Left but is fated to remain on the drawing board. It will never be accepted by the religious parties of the far-Right, represented in the current Israeli coalition government by Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the Otzma Yehudit party and Minister of National Security since 2022, and Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionist Party and Finance Minister, also since 2022; or the secular Right-wing parties, such as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud or Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu.
Nor does the one-state model have much public support. A December 2022 poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and Tel Aviv University’s International Program for Conflict Resolution and Mediation found that only 20% of the wider Israeli population approved of a single democratic state. It didn’t fare much better among Palestinians: 23% favoured it. The Rightward trajectory of Israel’s politics during the past several years and the deep mistrust produced by Hamas’s October 7 attacks will, if anything, reduce its appeal in both communities.