The two-state solution may command widespread international consensus as the best way to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But an Israeli academic told the Limmud Festival this week that after 70 years, attempts simply to partition the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan had failed and it was time to adopt another approach.
Professor Oren Yiftachel, a geographer at Ben-Gurion University and advocate for the Land for All movement, instead proposed a "confederation" between Israel and Palestine.
While there would be sovereign Israeli and Palestinian entities based on the 1967 border, the border would be open and the two peoples enjoy free movement across it, co-operating on areas such as trade and the environment.
“It looks utopian but it is actually quite practical,” he said.
Set up eight years ago, he acknowledged the movement had yet to become a major actor on the international stage.
The momentum in the region now, he warned, was towards “creeping apartheid".
He described the peace plan put forward by then President Trump’s administration, which awarded around a third of the West Bank to Israel, as “a cruel caricature of a two-state solution’ and its “last hurray”.
The one-station option favoured by Palestinian intellectuals, however, went against international law because it “eliminates the existence of Israel”, a recognised sovereign state.
A confederation envisaged “two or more sovereign entities, yet the borders between them are open and they share institutions and certain aspects of management".
It would be a way to “manage the space between them in a more just and a more economically, socially and environmentally beneficial way,” he said.
Jerusalem would be a shared capital, Jewish settlements on the West Bank need not be uprooted but could choose to remain under Palestinian control and Palestinian refugees would have the right to return to the Palestinian sovereign area.
Free movement would be gradually introduced along the lines of the Schengen agreement in Europe so for example, Palestinians could cross into Israel “to work, shop or go to the beach” but they would remain citizens of Palestine, rather than Israel.
He cited the precedents of arrangements in Bosnia, East Timor and Chandigarh, which serves as the capital of both the states of Punjab and Haryana in India.
Confederation is “not an easy model to think about but for us, it is the only way forward”.
Under such an arrangement, he still believed that “any Jew in the world under duress” would continue to be welcome in Israel. "This is a historical mission of Israel. I don’t see that at all under danger. The Israelis will always insist on that, and rightly so with the history of the Jews, that Israel will be a safe haven for Jews around the world.”
At the same time, Palestine would be “a safe haven for Palestinians”.
Overlapping homelands; maps on Palestinian logos which lay claim to the area between the river and the sea. And below an Israeli map.
