When I explain my support for a one-state solution in Israel/Palestine, reasonable people often respond that it is an interesting yet entirely infeasible idea. Those same reasonable people, especially when they hold political office, tend to fall back on the officially endorsed two-state solution, despite its demonstrable unfeasibility. Of course, the one-state solution is not my invention. It has been defended by thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Tony Judt in the past, and more recently by Shlomo Sand, Omri Boehm, and many young Palestinians and Israeli Jews.
The Arab-Jewish historian Ilan Pappé argues in Israel on the Brink that the one-state solution is not only feasible but likely to emerge from the collapse of the current Israeli state under Netanyahu and the far-right theocratic forces supporting him. According to Pappé, this collapse will be driven by three forces: the deepening internal divisions within Israeli society, growing international pressure in response to apartheid and genocide, and the ideological estrangement of American Jews from the present incarnation of the Israeli state. New generations—eager to forge a different kind of politics and deeply skeptical of old nation-states—may seize this moment to move beyond the failed “peace orthodoxy” of the two-state solution.
In Pappé’s account, the existing state would be replaced by a decolonized Palestine: a democratic polity in which different ethnicities, languages, and religions coexist, and in which Palestinians expelled in 1948 and afterward can return to their land. Such a decolonized Palestine could also, in theory, emerge not only from collapse but from deep reform of the Israeli state—or from a process somewhere between reform and collapse. The final chapters of Pappé’s book offer an optimistic vision of Palestine in 2048, a century after the Nakba, where peace and coexistence have taken root.
The failure of the peace orthodoxy, combined with Israel’s ongoing internal and moral collapse, is what makes the one-state solution not merely desirable but feasible. An egalitarian state would reconcile the right of return with the right to stay. What Pappé calls “Historical Palestine” would acquire a new name and coexist with its neighbors in a renewed Mashreq for the twenty-first century. The Mashreq—the eastern Mediterranean region of the Ottoman Empire—was, according to Pappé, once a vast space of coexistence and relative tolerance among ethnic and religious communities, before victorious imperial powers imposed rigid nation-states that divided populations along ethnic lines.
Whether Pappé’s optimistic vision can emerge from the current reality of a single apartheid state remains an open question. It is unclear whether the alliance of Netanyahu and Trump represents the final attempt to impose a colonial mindset—or merely the opening phase of an even more dystopian future. The dismal spectacle of Tony Blair serving on an executive committee tasked with “rebuilding” Gaza—alongside Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and without meaningful participation by Palestinian communities or the United Nations—suggests that what was once known as the peace orthodoxy has mutated into something far darker.
The contrast with the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland could not be more striking. There, the international community and all local parties worked together to craft an agreement that relativized the nation-state in order to build something better—not a vast private condominium. What has happened since to the mindset of one of the architects of that agreement remains a mystery to me.
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