Begin forwarded message:
From: MJ Rosenberg <rosenbergm@substack.com>
Date: July 5, 2026 at 12:05:55 PM MDT
To: dan.nelson@nelsoninsight.com
Subject: How One Democratic State Is The Only Solution
Reply-To: MJ Rosenberg <reply+3e7zw4&2jzkx&&fce7131fc5821ed59e5dc843db6df011c66951acea6a2731ffc83106d9943d60@mg1.substack.com>
One state is the only way to end Israel-Palestine conflict.
For decades, I supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I believed that the two peoples could, with enough courage and international support, divide the land between them and finally live in peace. It was never going to be easy, but it seemed both morally defensible and politically achievable.
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I no longer believe that.
The tragedy is not that the two-state solution was a bad idea. The tragedy is that it was systematically destroyed while the rest of the world continued pretending it remained alive. Every American administration, every European government, and every Israeli prime minister dutifully repeated their support for two states while Israeli settlements expanded year after year, fragmenting the West Bank into disconnected islands surrounded by Israeli roads, military installations, and expanding Jewish communities.
Meanwhile, the United States ran a “peace process” that seemed to exist only to serve Israel’s interests.
There comes a point when reality overwhelms diplomacy. We passed that point years ago, perhaps on the day an Israeli rightist assassinated Yitzhak Rabin.
Today there are essentially four possible futures.
The first is permanent occupation. Israel continues to control millions of Palestinians who lack equal political and civil rights while destroying Gaza and carrying out a campaign of violent subjugation in the West Bank. That is the present system. It has radicalized both societies, strengthened extremists, almost completely isolated Israel internationally, deepened Palestinian despair, and made anything even resembling peace more remote than ever. Under this scenario, Israel continues evolving into Netanyahuland—a state dominated by crazed nationalists and religious fanatics. And both Hamas, Hezbollah, and various spinoffs continue to threaten Israel and the Palestinians.
The second possibility is expulsion. The Israeli far right openly advocates removing Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. Others speak euphemistically about “voluntary emigration,” although everyone understands that people don’t volunteer to abandon the land where their families have lived for generations. Ethnic cleansing is not a solution. It is a crime, just like its natural successor: genocide.
The third possibility is Israel’s destruction. It is equally unrealistic and equally immoral. Seven million Israeli Jews are not going anywhere. They have built families, cities, universities, industries, and institutions over nearly eight decades.
Whatever one thinks about Zionism or Israel’s history, those human realities cannot simply be wished away. Nor can the genuine Israeli culture, which like modern Hebrew, is unique to Israel and not some subset of Judaism that will relocate. Like the Palestinians, the Israelis have no other place to go, nor would either people ever agree to go.
If those three possibilities are unacceptable, and I believe they are, only one remains.
A single democratic state in all of historic Palestine, stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, with equal rights for every citizen regardless of religion or ethnicity.
For years, that idea was dismissed as hopelessly idealistic. It is not.
I am not suggesting that Israelis and Palestinians suddenly discover they love one another. Nations are not built on affection. They are built on institutions, laws, constitutions, and shared civic obligations.
Shared citizenship does not eliminate conflict. It creates rules for managing it without perpetual war. Belgium contains multiple linguistic communities. Switzerland contains several languages and religious traditions. Northern Ireland emerged from generations of violence that many believed would never end. None of these societies became perfect, but each demonstrates that bitter historical enemies can eventually share political institutions if those institutions are perceived as fundamentally fair.
The first principle of a new state would therefore be very simple: every citizen is equal before the law.
That sounds obvious, but it would represent a revolutionary change.
The state would not define itself as belonging primarily to Jews or primarily to Palestinians. It would belong equally to everyone who lives there. Jewish civil rights would be fully protected. Palestinian civil rights would be fully protected. The government would derive its legitimacy from citizenship rather than ethnicity.
That is not a rejection of Jewish identity or Palestinian identity. It is an acknowledgment that modern democratic states cannot permanently privilege one national community over another when both populations occupy the same territory.
One objection immediately arises. What happens to the settlers?
My answer is that they stay. (Although I think the fanatics would leave, given that their raison d’etre (domination of Arabs) would no longer be protected by law.
Those Jewish settlers who are willing to live under the laws of a democratic state and accept that their Palestinian neighbors possess exactly the same legal rights they do would have no reason to leave. Their communities would simply become ordinary towns within a democratic country.
Likewise, Palestinians would remain where they live today. Families in Gaza, Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Nazareth, and every other city or village would become citizens of the same state. Alternatively, they could live in Tel Aviv as Jews could live in Nablus.
Nobody would be uprooted because of their religion.
The new government would almost certainly build upon existing Israeli institutions (and Palestinian institutions where they have been allowed to exist). That is not because Israel has always governed justly; it plainly has not.
But because the institutional infrastructure already exists. Israel possesses courts, ministries, hospitals, universities, tax authorities, transportation systems, regulatory agencies, and a sophisticated civil service. Those institutions evolved over decades, themselves drawing upon Ottoman law, Palestinian tradition, and the legal framework established during the British Mandate before being reshaped by successive Israeli governments. They would be reshaped, and where necessary, overhauled or dismantled again.
Their mission would change from serving a Jewish state primarily to serving a democratic one.
That would require a constitution explicitly guaranteeing equality before the law, prohibiting discrimination based on religion or ethnicity, protecting freedom of speech and assembly, guaranteeing an independent judiciary, and ensuring that elections are genuinely democratic.
Religion would enjoy complete equality.
Judaism, Islam, Christianity, the Druze faith, the Baháʼí faith, and every other religion would possess equal legal status. Holy places would be protected by constitutional guarantees and administered through arrangements negotiated with the relevant religious communities. Jerusalem would cease being the exclusive capital of one people and become the shared capital of all the country’s citizens.
Language presents another challenge, but hardly an insurmountable one. Hebrew and Arabic would become coequal official languages. Government documents, courts, schools, and public services would operate in both. Millions of people are already bilingual. Millions more would become so within a generation.
Education may be the hardest challenge of all.
Children cannot be expected to build a shared future if they are taught entirely separate histories that deny the humanity of the other side. Schools would have to teach the Holocaust honestly and completely. They would have to teach the Nakba honestly and completely. Neither tragedy disappears because acknowledging it makes one community uncomfortable. Mature societies confront history rather than censor it. And they acknowledge and accept responsibility for past crimes.
The present system cannot simply continue. Israel’s Law of Return gives every Jew in the world an automatic right to citizenship while denying that same right to Palestinians displaced during the wars of 1948 and 1967 and to many of their descendants. It is the codification in law of the Nakba. But many Israelis view changing it as an existential threat.
The solution is neither to preserve one exclusive system nor to replace it with another.
Instead, immigration should be governed by ordinary democratic law.
The Palestinians already living in Israel, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank would automatically become citizens because they already live in the country.
Future immigration, whether by Jews, Palestinians, or anyone else, would be administered through a single immigration authority applying laws enacted by the democratic legislature. Family reunification, humanitarian admissions, refugee policy, labor migration, and naturalization would all be governed by one legal code applying equally to everyone. Like other democratic countries, immigration policy would be subject to democratic debate and legislative revision rather than ethnic preference.
That would displease ideological purists on both sides. Democracy often does.
Security remains the issue that generates the greatest skepticism.
Israeli Jews understandably fear becoming a vulnerable minority in a region that has witnessed repeated wars and terrorism. Palestinians understandably fear that Israeli security institutions would continue treating them as enemies rather than citizens.
Those fears are real.
For that reason, I do not believe a transition could succeed without substantial international involvement.
The United States, the European Union, the United Nations, NATO, and major regional powers would almost certainly have to supervise implementation, guarantee constitutional protections, monitor elections, oversee security reforms, and provide peacekeeping forces during the transition. The objective would not be permanent foreign occupation, but temporary guarantees until confidence in democratic institutions became firmly established.
Some readers will dismiss this as impossible.
But history repeatedly surprises those who mistake today’s political reality for tomorrow’s.
Apartheid in South Africa once appeared permanent.
The conflict in Northern Ireland seemed endless.
The Berlin Wall looked immovable until the day it vanished.
None of those transformations occurred because hatred disappeared. They occurred because political systems built on permanent inequality eventually exhausted themselves.
That is precisely what I believe is happening in Israel and Palestine.
The present system cannot continue indefinitely without producing ever larger explosions of violence. The Gaza genocide has already spread instability throughout the region, contributing to direct confrontation between Israel and Iran, disrupting global shipping, threatening energy markets, drawing the United States deeper into regional conflict, and increasing tensions far beyond the Middle East. What began as a conflict over one small piece of land now repeatedly threatens international peace and the world economy.
The international community, therefore, has interests that extend well beyond humanitarian concern, which impel them toward the one-state formula.
I have no illusions about the difficulty of creating such a country. It would require extraordinary political leadership, unprecedented international involvement, enormous economic investment, constitutional creativity, and, above all, courage from two peoples who have learned to fear one another more than they trust themselves.
But difficult is not the same as impossible.
The real question is whether any other future offers a better chance of allowing both peoples to live with dignity, freedom, security, and equal rights.
After decades of watching every other proposal fail, I have come to believe the answer is no.
One democratic state is not merely the most just solution that remains.
It is the only one that still makes political, moral, and historical sense.
It is also a solution many, if not most, Palestinians already favor.
Most Israelis do not, but that will change once they recognize that the United States is no longer Israel’s lifeline. Especially with AIPAC so discredited that identification with the lobby is the kiss of death for candidates.
Bottom line: the planets are in alignment for the one-state reality. There really is no alternative…except a single entity that looks the way Gaza looks now.
What JFK called “the peace of the grave.”
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