The Case for a Single-State Solution
How innovative governance could build trust within Israel-Palestine and stabilize the wider region
I don’t profess to any particular knowledge or expertise about the Middle East. Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th this year, I studiously avoided commenting on it, for lack of anything constructive to say. Like so many others, I threw my hands up in resignation about a problem that has remained intractable for as long as I can remember, and for a long time before that. Instead, I wrote about Congressional dysfunction and gerontocracy, and the situation in Ukraine.
But things changed when I started reading an apparently unrelated book on indigenous economics and two pieces on the Israel-Palestine conflict in yesterday’s Washington Post. They got me thinking about conflict resolution and political representation—the latter of which I discussed last year in relation to US elections—in ways that might offer a new perspective on this gnarly old problem.
So, in the unlikely event that it might spur those better versed than me in Middle-Eastern affairs to exclaim, “hey, there’s something here worth pursuing,” I offer a case for a single-state ‘solution’ to the Israel-Palestine problem—acknowledging that it’s not really a ‘solution’ as such (hence the quotes) but more of a step, hopefully, in the right direction. We should also acknowledge that a single state is actually what Palestine was a hundred years ago, around the time the British took over. As a Briton by birth, I can happily state that, if in doubt, blame the British!
The region known as ‘Palestine’ was part of the Ottoman Empire for about four hundred years prior to the First World War. Before that, it was under Egyptian control, their having wrested it from the Mongols 200 years before, who had, in turn, taken it from an Arab sultanate that had dispatched the European crusaders in the late 12th century. It hardly needs mentioning that, for whatever reason, people have been fighting over the region for centuries—millennia, actually. Even the Asterix comic books—a surprisingly great source of ancient history for the young reader—allude to these conflicts. In the episode Asterix and the Black Gold, Asterix and Obelix, in a quest for a key ingredient for their tribe’s magic potion, encounter Sumerians, Akkadians, Hittites, Assyrians and Medes, all in battle with one another in the deserts of modern-day Jordan and Iraq.
The First World War pitted the Ottoman Empire, alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary, against Britain, France and Russia. In 1917, as hostilities ground toward a stalemate, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, issued a declaration supporting the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Not long after, the British captured Palestine from the Ottomans. In 1920, the League of Nations gave Britain mandatory power over Palestine—the so-called British Mandate—which amounted to colonial rule for the next 28 years. During that time, the historically small Jewish population, encouraged by the Balfour Declaration, swelled through immigration, most of all during the years leading up to the Second World War as the Jewish diaspora escaped the Nazis.
Palestinian Arabs, fearing displacement, rebelled against this influx. Their worst fears were later realized when Britain, stretched thin after the Second World War, signaled an end to its mandate. The then-newly formed United Nations recommended a two-state solution: one for Arabs, one for Jews. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jewish people seized control of most of Palestine by military force, establishing the state of Israel and displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in what became known as the ‘nabka’ or catastrophe. In this way, the outlines of modern-day Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were established.
For ignorami like myself, yesterday’s explainer in the Washington Post, showing how the map of the region changed over the years since the British Mandate, provides valuable context to the current conflict. After declaring its independence in 1948 and establishing its borders in 1949, Israel fought two additional wars in 1967 and 1973 in which it captured more territory, subsequently ceding some of it. Following the Oslo accords of the early 1990s, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank gained a degree of self-governance, yet this was undermined in the West Bank by waves of Jewish settlement and years of Israeli military control, and in Gaza by Israel’s blockade of the strip following Hamas’ rise to power there in 2007.
Superficially, it might seem tempting to draw a parallel between the persecution of the Jewish diaspora during the first half of the 20th century and Jewish maltreatment of the Palestinians, initially enabled by the British Mandate and later sanctioned by the state of Israel. But Jewish immigrants to Palestine were not going after Palestinians the way Nazis were going after the Jews. Jewish immigrants were escaping Nazism and were desperate to establish a safe haven. Native Palestinians suffered the consequences of Jewish settler-colonial zeal. One wrong led to another.
Underlying the struggle over land is the tripartite status of Jerusalem as a religious hub. The ancient city is claimed by all three major monotheistic religions as a sacred site, which means that claims of control over all or part of it are backed by religious fervor, with which there is little or no negotiation. It is for this reason that the United Nations recommended in 1947 that it alone would administer Jerusalem as part of its two-state solution. That idea went nowhere. Today, religious fervor drives Jewish settlers to occupy parts of the West Bank that were placed under Palestinian control by the Oslo accords. Successive Israeli governments have either done nothing to deter this settler-colonialism or they have tacitly encouraged it. The settlers believe they have a biblical right to the land.
It is within this context that the Biden administration sought to normalize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors in exchange for the long-sought ‘two-state’ solution, and the attack by Hamas sought to derail it. A glance at the last map in the Washington Post’s explainer leaves one in no doubt about the difficulty of executing such a solution, what with the entrapment of two million Palestinians into a tiny rump of their former homeland in Gaza, and the impossibly complex patchwork of control in the West Bank, a distinct territory separated from Gaza by at least thirty miles of Israel.
…Which brings us to the second of yesterday’s pieces in the Washington Post, Biden’s op-ed, in which he seeks to establish an equivalence between Hamas in Israel and Putin in Russia as a justification for his actions (or inaction) in response to the events of October 7th. “A two-state solution,” he writes, “is the only way to ensure the long-term security of both the Israeli and Palestinian people. A two-state solution—two peoples living side by side with equal measures of freedom, opportunity and dignity—is where the road to peace must lead.”
I am not alone in concluding that Biden misread the situation and that he missed an opportunity to impress upon the Netanyahu government the contingency of American support on humane treatment of the Palestinians.[1] For a hundred years, they have had one raw deal after another. It’s little wonder that, under such circumstances, extremist groups such as Hamas would rise to power. Biden’s op-ed is tone-deaf to the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. And while Hamas and the Putin régime may share destructive tendencies, in all other respects they are as alike as chalk and cheese. One is a thorn in Israel’s side: a terrorist group that has surely signed its own death warrant with its violent excursion into Israel. The other is an autocratic government of a giant nuclear power that seeks to recapture a lost empire at the expense of its neighbors and the West.
Biden’s handling of the situation may cost him at the polls next year, unless he sees it for what it is and recalibrates. Given his fixation on the two-state solution, that seems unlikely. Biden clearly has not thought this one through. That said, I may not have thought it through any better. For what it’s worth, though, my thought process arrived at a single state, rather than two, uncomfortably juxtaposed ones. Here’s how.
A two-state arrangement (I won’t call it a solution any more) would codify and perpetuate the de facto apartheid that has taken root in the region. Two mutually antagonistic states would have to share borders, with all the risk and expense their patrol would entail. Palestinians in Gaza would remain kettled in their strip of land, without any easy way to travel to the other part of Palestine in the West Bank. Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank would be uprooted to new locations in an attempt to consolidate the patchwork of settlements into two definable polities. This process would reward years of Israeli settlement that violated the Oslo accords, resulting in additional loss of land for the Palestinians. More violence would ensue.
When a geopolitical entity is partitioned, the process often is fraught, leaving simmering animosity or igniting outright conflict. The partition of British India into India, Pakistan and East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) after its independence in 1947 is a classic example. Another is the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh within Azerbaijan, which was seized by neighboring Armenia thirty years ago, displacing tens of thousands of Azeris, leading to years of armed conflict. Then, in September this year, Azeri forces staged a lightning offensive, taking it back and forcing thousands of resident Armenians to flee. Since both sides claim the region, one cannot expect this to be the end of the matter.
Counterexamples in which a single polity was established serve to illustrate how governance structures for coexistence can help communities to move on, even if they do not immediately resolve underlying differences.
The country that practiced actual apartheid, South Africa, was divided rather like the West Bank into a patchwork of communities, ethnically white or black. Whites rarely visited black townships, while blacks often migrated into white areas for work but did not live there. Under successive white-controlled governments, most native African people were not free to move around their country the way whites were, a plight analogous to that of Palestinians in the West Bank or, for that matter, black Americans under segregation.
After Nelson Mandela was released from prison and apartheid abolished, there was no way South Africa would be partitioned, even if South Africans wanted it. Instead, the new Mandela government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to document the wrongs of apartheid, so that they would never be repeated. Thirty years on, South Africa still deals with crushing economic inequality between minority whites and majority blacks, along with its attendant high crime rates, but the racist system of government itself has long been demolished and all South Africans are free to move around as they please.
Another example of a working single-state arrangement is Northern Ireland. Irish independence from Britain in 1922 resulted in six counties in the northeast of the island, which were majority Unionist, remaining with the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland, or Ulster. This arrangement ignited sectarian tensions between the Protestants, most of whom supported union with Britain, and Catholics, who largely supported Irish union. In the 1960s, the tensions boiled over into armed conflict and terrorism—the so-called ‘troubles’—which were exacerbated at times by heavy-handed British policing.
Finally, in 1998, the British and Irish governments successfully negotiated an accord with most of Ulster’s political parties to restore self-government to Northern Ireland. Known as the Good Friday Agreement, it gave Ulster political control—and responsibility—over its home affairs, with the establishment of a parliament at Stormont. The UK retained control over national affairs, such as economic policy and defence. The agreement was ratified by two separate referenda north and south of the border.
Aside from a few blips over the ensuing 25 years, it has been largely a success. Britain’s exit from the European Union in 2020 created a stress test for the agreement, reimposing border controls, not between north and south, but between Ulster and the British mainland, leaving Northern Ireland economically more closely tied to the Republic of Ireland than to Britain. Public sentiment for Irish union has been growing since then, but so far no concrete steps have been taken. Meanwhile, Ulster remains mostly peaceful, even though parts of its cities remain divided along sectarian lines.
Negotiating a single-state arrangement is an exercise in power-sharing. White South African politicians saw the writing on the wall in the late 1980s and agreed to open political representation to everybody, knowing that, in so doing, they were effectively de-electing themselves. Their racist system had become an anachronism: South Africa had to move into the modern world.[2] Northern Irish politicians instructed their militants to put away their guns and explosives so that they all could have a say in the running of the province.
Power-sharing is successful not only for national or regional politics but also for land and resources. This is where indigenous economics comes in. Ronald Trosper’s book of the same name describes a variety of cases around the world where indigenous groups, having claims to land and resources that competed with those of national or regional governments, successfully negotiated agreements to manage those resources to the benefit of all.
In one such case, a Māori group known as the Tūhoe held a legitimate ownership claim to the Te Urewera National Park and the Whanganui River under the Treaty of Waitangi with the New Zealand Government. The Waitangi tribunal ruled that the government would have to transfer ownership of land to Māori entities. The government refused, on the grounds that it is the legal owner of the national park and that it asserts rights over inland waterways.
A solution to the impasse assigned legal personhood to the river. This would place both parties in an equal position of responsibility for its management. “The Māori could say that the national government no longer owned the river,” writes Trosper, because it now owned itself. The Māori would exercise guardianship over it. Similarly, “the government could also maintain that the Māori had not obtained ownership of the river or the park.” This solution set aside the question of who owns the watershed in favor of a practical solution in the sharing of power and responsibility over the resource in question.[3]
In a related but somewhat different case, the Haida people of Haida Gwaii, a group of islands off the coast of British Columbia, sought the establishment of a park to protect old-growth forest from logging. As in New Zealand, competing claims for ownership of the land existed, in this case between the Haida and the governments of BC and Canada. Over several years, the Haida and the Canadian government negotiated a comanagement agreement in which the provincial government would allocate C$38 million to Haida Gwaii for forest management. Rather than take a top-down, government-managed expenditure approach, parties agreed to establish a trust to hold the principal amount, with interest on the principal providing for community development projects into perpetuity.
This idea got the non-Haida residents of the islands on board. They were initially resistant because they feared the loss of livelihood from logging. The result was the establishment of the Gwaii Trust and Gwaii Haanas National Park. The agreement recognized that both the Haida and the government had claims to the land, but that these would be set aside, unresolved, in favor of comanagement. Today, the park is home to a small selective logging operation under the stewardship of the Haida, and many of those who formerly relied on logging for income are now employed by the park. As one of the lead negotiators remarked, “Without ‘small-t’ trust, no ‘large-t’ Trust!”[4]
A similar arrangement was established between the downstream users of the Ambato River in the Ecuadorian Andes, which was becoming polluted by livestock upstream, and an indigenous group who live on the páramo, the high-altitude moorland that is the source of the water and the home of the livestock. The downstream users included city-dwellers, irrigators and a hydroelectric facility. The initial proposal was for downstream users to compensate individual land users on the páramo to increase the flow and quality of water. This idea was rejected in favor of a trust that would be funded by downstream users to provide services and support to whole communities in the upstream area, consisting of both indigenous people and livestock owners. In this way, the water would not become commodified in a conventional sense, and upstream communities would work together to implement solutions. Not only was the environmental damage addressed by replacing the livestock with native animals that did not damage the ecosystem but also the communities who made these changes were financially supported in the transition.[5]
Indigenous experiences are instructive for the Israel-Palestine situation for three reasons. First, the question of who ‘owns’ the land can be set aside for the purpose of forging an agreement about how to live on it. Indeed, the indigenous concept of ‘ownership’ is quite different from the modern, legal concept of title. It is a belonging to the land rather than the land belonging to a person or institution. For this reason, assigning legal personhood to a natural resource, such as the Whanganui River, is entirely in keeping with the indigenous worldview, whereas some raised under Western law may have trouble wrapping their heads around it.
Second, the indigenous approach is what Trosper calls a relational one. His theory of indigenous economics is antithetical to the neoclassical paradigm of atomized individualism. Instead, an economy in harmony with nature will emerge through the establishment and maintenance of relationships among people. The stronger the network of relationships, the stronger the community bonds, the greater the propensity for consensus. This relational doctrine extends out to nature: in fact, the indigenous mind does not really make a distinction between the two.
Third, and following from the first two, new governance structures can be created enabling both indigenous and non-indigenous people to live and work side-by-side, to understand each other’s similarities and differences, and to maintain mutual trust. In both the Haida and the Ecuadorian examples, two groups share financial resources to support both their livelihoods and the natural systems on which they depend. Although somewhat distinct in their cultures and worldviews, they cooperate with, and depend upon, one another.
The essence of an indigenous concept that roughly translates as ‘harmonious life’ is the maintenance of strong community relationships and, through this, strong relationships with nature. Where community relationships break down, the relationship with nature suffers.
In the lead-up to last year’s midterms, I wrote about proportional representation and multi-member districts as reforms to the US electoral system that could better represent people’s views in Congress, breaking the two-party stranglehold on the electoral system in favor of a multi-party landscape. The essence of a multi-member district is co-representation: not one but several people represent a single district which, by design, is larger than today’s Congressional districts. Co-representation thus more accurately reflects the range of electoral preferences in any given district.
The same concept of co-representation can easily be applied to a single Israeli-Palestine state because elections to the existing Knesset conveniently take place through proportional representation from the whole of Israel as a single district. People vote for parties rather than for specific candidates. Seats are allocated according to the percentage of votes each party obtains. Parties then nominate their own representatives to those seats. Because Israel has many political parties, coalition governments are the norm.
In theory, if the Palestinian territories were absorbed into a single Israeli-Palestinian state then new political parties would emerge to represent the Palestinians, and the composition of the Knesset would change. The body’s name might have to be changed to ‘Assembly’, which is what ‘knesset’ means in Hebrew anyway, or it could be referred to interchangeably as the ‘Knesset’ or ‘Majlis’ by Hebrew or Arabic speakers.
Although the comparison is not perfect, we can think of the current Israeli government as analogous to the settler-colonial governments in South Africa, New Zealand and Haida Gwaii. In those cases, the national and regional governments held most of the power, but they also recognized the rights of the indigenous peoples, who are analogous to the Palestinians in this situation.
White South Africans understandably feared a violent backlash after the abolition of apartheid. One of the purposes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was to deflect anger against white South Africans into a public, structured conversation in which wrongs could be acknowledged and forgiven in safety. To this day, many white South Africans live within heavily fortified compounds, but these are to protect against violent home invasions due to the high incidence of property crime. Crime will fall once South Africa remedies its economic inequality.[6]
What the examples above show is that communities with distinct identities and worldviews, with competing claims to land, can exist side-by-side, provided the right structures are in place. If South Africans, Aotearoans (white New Zealanders and Māoris) and Haida Gwaiians (indigenous and non-indigenous) can do it, then why not also Israelis and Palestinians? There is no reason why not. Here are some of the structures that would have to be established.
Facilitated by international partners, such as the United States and neighboring Arab states, representatives of Israel and the Palestinians would draft a constitutional amendment for the creation of a new state, to be called Israel-Palestine, whose border would encompass the current state of Israel plus the West Bank and Gaza. (This is approximately the original border of Palestine when it transferred from Ottoman to British rule.)
The amendment would state that the land belongs to everyone and no-one in particular. That is, no particular individual or group would have ‘biblical’ rights to the land or any part of it, but all individuals and groups would respect each others’ claims to the land without diminishing their own. The land, by definition, is shared.
Parties would also agree that, if the the amendment is adopted then a Truth and Reconciliation Commission would be formed to address and forgive the decades of harm done by both sides.
The constitutional amendment would be put to a national referendum of both Israelis and Palestinians.
Assuming it passes, all people currently living in Israel and the Palestinian territories would have free movement within the new state. The issue of Israeli settlement in the West Bank all of a sudden would become largely moot.
If the referendum failed then a two-state arrangement of some kind would be implemented.
Israelis, like white South Africans after the fall of apartheid, might worry about their safety from militant extremists fanning out over the country to commit violence. After all, this is exactly what Hamas fighters did on October 7th, so it’s a legitimate worry. However, if by that time the threat of Hamas from within Gaza has been largely neutralized then the role of the Israeli Defence Force in the rest of Israel-Palestine would be mainly to keep a watchful eye. Yes, there probably would be some isolated incidents, but these would be expected in the early days of a significant upheaval of this kind.
The referendum would trigger a national election for the new Israeli-Palestinian Assembly.
Then the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would begin its work. The process might reveal additional conflicts to be addressed, whether territorial, religious or cultural. But now the new nation would have a framework within which to address them. Tools and techniques exist to map areas of agreement and disagreement, so that parties could share the same ontology and focus on resolving differences. Relationship-building and consensus-building would gradually replace conflict and violence.
In parallel, the new government would embark on a program of community repair and rebuilding. This is where ‘small-t’ and ‘big-T’ trust converge. Rather than budgeting only for direct spends on such needs as rehousing displaced Palestinians or rebuilding Gaza, the government also could seed an Israel-Palestine Trust, administered by representatives of both peoples, to manage the Trust’s fund, evaluate community requests for support, and disburse grants, prioritizing the neediest and most deserving. In this way, communities themselves would have a voice in decisions about how, and where, they would be rebuilt and reinvented. No more enclaves, no more apartheid. Over time, the Trust would remedy economic inequality between Palestinians and Israelis, thereby deflecting future resentments and the risk of property crime.
Where would all this leave militant groups and their enablers? On the sidelines, one would hope. If the majority of Israelis and Palestinians chose to live this way—to choose ‘harmonious life’, even if it meant having to confront old animosities and put them to bed—then extremists on both sides would see their influence decline. Iran’s official policy seeking the destruction of Israel probably wouldn’t change until the Iranian régime itself were removed, and it would likely continue to support the various paramilitary groups seeking to destabilize the region. On the other side, extreme Zionists would rail against the integration of Israel-Palestine, but there would be little they could do to stop it, given the current political make-up of the region. The further Israel-Palestine pressed on with its single-state project, the fainter would become the voices of destruction. A normalized Israel-Palestine would find a readiness for normalized relations among its majority-Muslim neighbors.
After the Holocaust, the international community said “never again” and so far it has held to that. We can also say “never again” to the partition of Israelis and Palestinians. In the heat of the moment, many may say, “that’s impossible” but the cases above prove that it’s not. A roadmap to peaceful cohabitation is a roadmap to long-term stability and prosperity for all concerned, both within Israel-Palestine and around it. A two-state arrangement cannot deliver these things; it can only deliver an uneasy, mutually distrustful adjacency. A single-state arrangement at least has a shot.
As an afterthought, indigenous wisdom also informs the world’s wider future about governance. As I wrote in A Planetary Economy, new governance structures not centered around the nation-state will be needed in support of a stable, ‘planetarian’ economy and society for the 22nd century and beyond. The indigenous focus on relationships over individuals can guide our thinking on this. Whereas an opportunity exists today for a single Israeli-Palestinian state, other opportunities will present themselves in decades to come for representative government at all levels of social organization for harmonious relations with the planet and with one another. That is not so much an endpoint in itself but a goal toward which humanity must, and can, strive.
Works Cited
Biden, J. (2023) Joe Biden: The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas. The Washington Post, November 18, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/18/joe-biden-gaza-hamas-putin/
Burke, J. (2023) ‘These are biblical lands promised to us’: Jewish settlers in West Bank hope Gaza conflict will help their cause. The Guardian, 18 Nov 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/18/these-are-biblical-lands-promised-to-us-jewish-settlers-in-west-bank-hope-gaza-conflict-will-help-their-cause
Friedman, T. (2023) The most revealing moment from my trip to Israel. The New York Times, Nov. 14, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/opinion/israel-war-biden.html
Murison Smith, F.D. (2020) A Planetary Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Murison Smith, F.D. (2022) How to ensure the United States never falls prey to the ‘tyranny of the minority’. Dispatches From a Crowded Planet, Oct. 27, 2022. https://fdms.substack.com/p/how-to-ensure-the-united-states-never
Nechepurenko, I and A. Troianovski (2023) Azerbaijan reclaims Armenian enclave, shifting region’s political dynamics. The New York Times, Sep. 20, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/world/europe/azerbaijan-armenia-cease-fire.html
Tierney, L., L. Karklis and D. Wolfe (2023) Six maps explain the boundaries of Israel and Palestinian territories. The Washington Post, November 18, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/israel-palestine-gaza-west-bank-borders/
Stack, M.K. (2023) Is Ireland headed for a merger? The New York Times, Nov. 21, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/opinion/united-ireland.html
Trosper, R.L. (2022) Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands. University of Arizona Press.
Wilkinson, R. and K. Pickett (2009) The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury Press, New York.
[1] See, for example, Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. Tens of thousands of protesters around the world in support of a ceasefire and aid to the Palestinians in Gaza express the same sentiment.
[2] The final straw was not economic sanctions or votes of condemnation at the United Nations but sporting sanctions imposed in the 1980s. South African athletes were barred from the Olympics and its beloved cricket and rugby teams forced into isolation. South Africa’s reward for dismantling apartheid was to host the 1995 Rugby World Cup, which it won, fielding a mixed-race team. Nelson Mandela presented the trophy.
[3] Trosper (2022) pp. 20–22.
[4] Trosper (2022) p. 18.
[5] Trosper (2022) pp. 8–11.
[6] For an excellent analysis of the relationship between economic inequality and crime, see The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
A one state solution is a death sentence for Israel. The Jews in Israel know this, and the Palestinians know this. The Jews will not commit suicide. forget about it.