The One-State Solution: A Democratic State in Israel and Palestine?
Once a fringe idea, the call for a single democratic state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean now features in mainstream debate. Where did it come from, and what are its critics' objections?
For most of the past half-century, international diplomacy on Israel and Palestine has pointed in one direction: two states living side by side. The alternative, a single state in which Israelis and Palestinians share citizenship and equal rights, was long dismissed as utopian or as a cover for eliminating Israel. That has changed. As the two-state framework has stalled, the one-state idea has moved from the margins into newspapers, academic journals and activist campaigns.
An older idea than it looks
The idea of a shared state predates Israel itself. In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of Jewish intellectuals in Palestine, among them the philosopher Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, the first chancellor of the Hebrew University, advocated a binational state in which Jews and Arabs would share power. The Brit Shalom and Ihud groups they led never won mass support, and the war of 1948 swept their proposals aside.
After 1967, the Palestine Liberation Organization adopted the goal of a "democratic secular state" in all of Palestine. It gradually retreated from that position and accepted a two-state outcome by the time of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.
The modern revival began around the turn of the millennium. In 1999 the literary scholar Edward Said published an essay arguing that the two peoples' lives were too intertwined for partition to work. In 2003 the historian Tony Judt caused a storm by describing a binational state as the alternative to indefinite occupation.
The case for one state
Advocates make several arguments:
- Facts on the ground. With hundreds of thousands of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, a contiguous Palestinian state is, they argue, no longer physically possible.
- Rights, not borders. A one-state framework shifts the question from drawing lines on maps to guaranteeing equal civil and political rights to everyone who lives in the territory.
- The status quo is already one state. Israel controls the whole area between the river and the sea, so the real choice is between an unequal single state and an equal one.
Groups such as the One Democratic State Campaign, co-founded by Palestinian and Israeli activists, have tried to turn those arguments into concrete programmes. Their proposals include constitutional protections for both national communities.
The objections
Critics raise equally serious points:
- Self-determination. Most Israeli Jews see a Jewish-majority state as the core of Zionism. Many Palestinians want a state of their own after decades under occupation. Polls on both sides have long shown limited support for a shared state.
- Security and trust. After decades of violence, opponents doubt that the two communities could share institutions such as the army, police and courts without renewed conflict.
- Precedent. Sceptics point to Lebanon, Yugoslavia and other divided societies where power-sharing arrangements broke down.
Where the debate stands
Formally, the international community remains committed to two states. In practice, the language of the debate has shifted. Human-rights organisations now describe the current situation as a single system of control. Some Israeli and Palestinian politicians discuss confederations and hybrid models that borrow from both ideas.
The one-state solution may never become a negotiated blueprint. Its return to the mainstream, though, reflects a growing sense that the old framework no longer describes reality. Any future settlement will have to answer the question it poses: what rights will the people living between the river and the sea actually have?