Two States, Together: An Alternative Vision for Palestinians and Israelis

After Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s maximalist response, it is clearer than ever that in conflict and geopolitics, the unimaginable can rapidly become reality, in the Middle East and all over the world. No violent conflict can again be considered “manageable.” But transformation isn’t always for the worse. In Syria, the entrenched dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad spectacularly collapsed in December, opening up paths toward better governance and a rebalanced regional order.

Although Israelis and Palestinians are in one of the ugliest and most violent phases of their history, there is an alternate scenario for Israel and Palestine, too. Global and regional forces, along with Israeli and Palestinian domestic conditions, could converge in unexpected ways to support an end to the war, especially now that there is a ceasefire. These developments could, in turn, serve as an opening to advance a long-term final status solution based on Palestinian self-determination.

But for such a transformation to take place, the Israel–Palestine conflict needs a fresh idea—one based on equal rights, which cuts through the fears and resentments on both sides, honors ancestral connections to the land, and prioritizes mutual needs like security, the economy, climate, natural resources, and public health.

There is really only one realistic and pragmatic solution remaining that satisfies these aims: a confederation of two sovereign nations living peacefully in partnership on the same land. The two-state confederation model already has the buy-in of a significant number of Palestinians and Israelis who have been active leaders for peace over the years. Such a confederation model is fundamentally different from the two solutions usually discussed by policymakers: the failed “two-state solution” framework of the Oslo Accords of 1993, and the “one-state reality”—the currently emerging de facto condition of a single state of Israeli citizens and oppressed Palestinian subjects.

At a critical juncture in the Israel–Palestine conflict, multiple futures are possible. Policymakers—American, Israeli, Palestinian, or otherwise—now have a unique opportunity to transcend the failures of the past. But they must face, with clear eyes, the reality that circumstances have changed and a new vision is required for Palestinian self-determination alongside Israel.

Two States in Confederation

The political concept of two states in a confederation arrangement is a fresh idea for Israel and Palestine, but, on the global scale, it isn’t new or radical. In fact, it draws on successful models of partnership-based confederation-like models that once seemed unlikely, including the EU. For Israel and Palestine, it will also have elements of relatively successful conflict-resolution models, such as in Bosnia.

Palestinian and Israeli civil society actors—including former politicians, negotiators, scholars, peace activists, journalists, former fighters, and settlers—have worked together for years to create revitalized versions of the two-state solution, with these other examples as inspiration. Following are some of the key features that they have developed for a confederation model for Israel and Palestine:

• Two distinct states. Palestinians and Israelis will be entitled to self-determination and will have their own representative governments, political leadership, governing institutions, and borders, which will be close to the 1967 Green Line.
• Equal freedoms, including for movement and residency. Citizens of each state will have freedom of movement, work, and residency across each other’s borders, to be implemented over time.
• Inclusive citizenship. Israelis and Palestinians will be citizens in their respective nation-states, and citizens who respect the sovereignty and laws of the other state are entitled to rights of permanent residency. Palestinians who already have Israeli citizenship will retain it, with the option to have dual citizenship in Palestine. Palestinian refugees can attain Palestinian citizenship, along with the right of residency in Israel. Existing Israeli settlers will retain Israeli citizenship with residency rights in Palestine if they abide Palestinian laws and sovereignty, and most will not be expelled from where they currently reside.
• Enfranchisement. Palestinians and Israelis will be able to vote in the national elections of their respective states and in local elections, in whichever state they reside.
• Cooperating for the commons. Both states will deeply cooperate on matters of shared concern, including public health, climate, natural resources, security, and the economy. National or ethnic identity must not be the basis for this cooperation.
• Jerusalem for all. Jerusalem will host the capitals of the two states, but will remain an open city, reflecting both the economic and social interdependence of its populations and the spirit of pluralism in a place that is sacred to multiple faiths. The municipality should be structured, by institutional design, to represent both communities.

Decision-makers should recognize that this joint Israeli–Palestinian proposal of two states in a partnership-based confederated association is now the only realistic and pragmatic solution that remains. The fulfillment of this policy will be appropriately gradual, but the process begins with an acceptance of the main goals.

In the wake of the Gaza ceasefire, there is a danger that negotiations will instead fall back on obsolete policy concepts that have all failed. The partition-based two-state solution was negotiated a quarter century ago. It was viewed as progressive at the time, but the two sides have repeatedly been unable to reach an agreement for peace based on separation. Continuing with this approach ensures more failure: the Gaza ceasefire will collapse and the Israeli government will follow through on the stated intentions of some of its key members to annex Gaza and rebuild settlements. Indeed, this is already Israel’s current path, with the near-total destruction in northern Gaza appearing to be a material manifestation of these aims.¹

But even though a final status agreement to end the conflict might now seem remote, a political opening could suddenly emerge. Policymakers—most likely a combination of international actors and Israeli and Palestinian leaders—need to be ready with sound proposals for long-term peace.

The Only Remaining Solution

Hamas’s heinous attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s extreme war of destruction on Gaza laid bare the failures of separation-based policies. As a peace plan, the idea of two states grounded in separation was rejected by both sides during fourteen years of active bilateral Israeli–Palestinian negotiations, from 2000 to 2014. As a de facto policy, separation mechanisms were inaugurated during the Oslo process of the 1990s. Then, absent any political solution, these mechanisms morphed into a full-blown segregation and isolation paradigm for Palestinians—the worst of all worlds.

The Oslo Accords established the separation and fragmentation of Palestinian areas from both Israel and one another. Israel subdivided Gaza and the West Bank into areas A, B, and C, with a corresponding thicket of deepening permit regimes and restrictions on Palestinian movement. These measures hindered social and economic life, leading to rapid economic decline and anger.² As the peace process deteriorated in the 1990s, then formally failed in 2000, violence flared, and Israel deepened the lines of separation as a result. Removing settlements from Gaza in 2005 intensified Gaza’s separation, and the wall that Israel originally built to prevent terror attacks against Israelis not only separated the West Bank from Jerusalem but also became a land grab, making Palestinian areas almost inaccessible to each other.³

Gaza’s separation slid into radical isolation and closure; October 7 represented the most extreme failure of this approach.⁴ Hamas’s attack was the bloodiest violation of Israeli security and sovereignty in the country’s history, emanating from the most blocked-off region of the territory. The near-complete segregation of Gaza from both Israel and the West Bank strengthened Hamas’s monopoly on power. The empowering of Hamas was a result of Israel’s commitment to Palestinian political fragmentation. In keeping with this commitment, Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu even bolstered Hamas with cash infusions.⁵ For nearly two decades, Hamas thus lorded over a hopeless, suffocated society—fertile ground for its ideology.

If a two-state solution based on these same principles of separation, segregation, and isolation were extended to the West Bank, it would complete the decimation of Palestinian society. Broken-up, hemmed-in lands and an eviscerated population make sovereign statehood nonviable, or at least unsustainable. Collapse, violence, and Israeli reoccupation would be inevitable.

There is no option for a single state, if the aim is to reach a democratic, equality-based political solution. One state for Israel and Palestine exists today, with one law for citizens, and an authoritarian martial regime grounded in residual colonial laws and mechanisms for Palestinian subjects. There is no political pathway to a democratic version of this state.

The only policy framework that makes political, national, legal, moral, and pragmatic sense is a solution based on two states in a confederated, partnership-based arrangement.

The Anatomy of Past Failures

The antiquated version of the two-state solution was beset by obstacles that prevented its agreement and implementation. Over two decades of negotiations and discussion, the main obstacles to the partition-based two-state solution have become clear.

First, the plan has failed the test of political feasibility. Even during the most auspicious stretch of time, from the Camp David negotiations of July 2000 to the negotiations between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas in 2008, the two sides were unable to reach agreement on full separation. There was little question that negotiations under Netanyahu in 2013 and 2014 would fail as well.

Second, two-state negotiations have failed over specific items required for full separation. Israel could not bear to uproot settlers in 2000, when there were roughly just 300,000 (in the West Bank and East Jerusalem), and land swaps had to be painstakingly negotiated.⁶ In the process, Palestinians lost critical territorial contiguity. (Today, the number of settlers living over the Green Line has ballooned.) Full separation meant a cumbersome connection between the West Bank and Gaza, with a blocked-off Israel wedged in between. Both sides mooted the division of Jerusalem, but ultimately both loathed the idea.

Negotiators also proposed a menu of options for Palestinian refugees, but aside from a limited number of family reunifications, none of the proposals gave Palestinians access to their ancestral lands—a sacrifice that Palestinians could not tolerate. Israel rejected most such refugee solutions out of hand.

Even if all these items had been resolved, the fantastical vision of ethnic separation would still have been a fiction, since approximately 20 percent of Israel’s citizens are Arab Palestinians. With Palestinians making up such a significant minority of Israeli citizens, many Israeli Jews were angered that Palestinians expected all settlers to leave the future Palestinian state. These critics accused Palestinians of hoping for a judenrein Palestine—an accusation with some factual basis.

If full separation was undesirable then, it is now impossible. There are currently well over 700,000 Israeli citizens living across the Green Line (the 1949 Armistice lines demarcating sovereign Israel from the territories Israel occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem).⁷ There are approximately 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel. Both Palestinian insistence on the right of return for 1948 refugees and Israel’s de facto integration of the West Bank into its society and infrastructure have deepened.⁸ Settlers now include several generations born on the land, making their removal legally and morally problematic. Politically, Israelis from settlements hold top positions in the government, the judiciary, and the army—the main bodies needed to implement any forced evacuation of settlers.

The Palestinian and Jewish populations of Jerusalem are not only far more physically mixed, with residential neighborhoods nestled inside one another; they are also economically interdependent. Both populations avail themselves of Israeli health, education, social, and infrastructure services. Slashing the city in two would require decades needed to construct the physical architecture to serve the populations separately in intertwined regions. In the short term, such a division would devastate the Palestinian population economically and socially.⁹

Moreover, the two sides are more mutually dependent than is commonly understood. Israel depends on Palestinian labor for numerous fields, particularly construction—a sector that has suffered due to Israel barring Palestinian laborers.¹⁰ Israel also needs the Palestinian market, while Palestine is deeply dependent on Israel’s economy for work opportunities. The two national groups share a single currency, the Israeli shekel.

There can be no more illusions about Palestinian and Israeli interdependence for security. It is only security cooperation in the West Bank—politically poisoned as that cooperation is—that has kept both sides in that territory from committing October 7-like actions against the other. This cooperation continues despite terrible circumstances.¹¹ The political framework of occupation and Israeli domination needs to change, but the cooperation must continue, for the good of all. Poor Palestinian water infrastructure leaves untreated sewage that seeps into Israel’s aquifers, or blocks them. Diseases in Gaza, from fungal infections to polio, are cropping up in Israel; public health does not care about human politics.¹²

Many negotiators and the international community have long understood the need for shared policy solutions. For example, the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 (even as it was known as the “partition plan”) envisioned a shared economic zone, and provided for residency of one group on the other side as needed, in order not to uproot communities by force. The Oslo Accords recognized the need for cooperation on economic issues and public health, and established the security cooperation that still exists. The political framework of the Oslo process—interim steps involving separation with no final status but prioritizing Israeli control—proved to be the wrong approach. But Oslo included laudable plans for joint committees to share information, plans, and personnel on critical issues such as public health.¹³ The hard-separation paradigm never suited Israel or Palestine.

A Peace Based in Partnership

The better alternative—two sovereign states in a confederated association—starts with the recognition that each national group requires and has a right to national self-determination, through two states, with separate, representative governments.

The applicable two-state vision would recognize the right to access, visit, study, work, and live as permanent residents on the “other” side relative to one’s national identity. This vision contrasts with failed attempts to dismiss each society’s deep attachment to its historic, religious, and symbolic connection to lands on the other side. Permanent residents would vote in their country of nationality, but would have the right to participate in local elections wherever they resided. (Similarly, an EU citizen can vote in the national elections of her country of citizenship and the municipal elections of a second EU country in which she resides.)¹⁴

The condition for these rights is that any citizen of the confederated states must adhere to the law and sovereignty of the other side. Violators would lose privileges—thereby removing one of the biggest sources of friction and violence in the region.

This freedom of movement and residency provides a mechanism to circumvent the greatest obstacles in earlier separation-based negotiations. The border between the two states should be located close to the Green Line, for Palestinian territorial contiguity. However, the fact that Jewish Israeli settlers can remain on the land as recognized and protected residents—rather than being forced out of their homes—with freedom of movement and access to the rest of Israel, makes the location of the border less important. Some settlers are more open to compromises that are not predicated on their expulsion, which explains why certain individual settlers have actively supported the confederation initiative. Palestinians will be more inclined to support a border that reflects the land contiguity needed in a sovereign state. Meanwhile, negotiators have leeway to agree on adjustments for settlement blocs adjacent to the Green Line, without affecting the overall plan. Gaza and the West Bank can be more organically connected as the security situation improves over time.

Under the confederated two-state plan, Jerusalem would remain an open city, reflecting both the economic and social interdependence of its populations, and its spirit of pluralism as the axis mundi of three major Abrahamic faiths. Just as Israel has a capital building in the western portion of the city, Palestine can establish its capital in the eastern neighborhoods. The municipality should be structured, by institutional design, to represent both communities.

Palestinian refugees from 1948 would have full access to the Palestinian state, and through a gradual formula, they can live in Israel as permanent residents. As citizens of Palestine, they would not vote in Israel’s national elections—helping diminish the opposition of Israeli Jews to the fear that Palestinians would flood Israel’s voter population and undermine Jewish Israelis’ sense of self-determination. Citizens exercising their franchise in a home country while enjoying protected residency in another is a model well-known from the EU, where it has been relatively successful.

Palestinian citizens of Israel can choose to take dual citizenship. Other than this additional choice, their status and situation would be unaffected.

Collective Equality, Holistic Security

The new confederated two-state paradigm would be anchored in the principle of equality, in contrast to current formulations that prioritize Israeli security, defined in narrow, military terms. That limited understanding was an epic, deadly mistake, grounded in both military action and bureaucratic restrictions on movement—or hard physical separation, in Gaza and the West Bank. A new paradigm would differ in two fundamental ways.

The first difference would be a shift to individualized threat identification, rather than collective and asymmetrical restrictions based on national identity. Unequal, identity-based restrictions are fundamentally ill-suited to a reality in which security threats come from both sides. Israelis or Palestinians who represent a security threat can be identified and restricted or restrained by law. Information about who is a threat can only be known through methodical cooperation and intelligence sharing—a model that is already in place in the West Bank. However, that model is today predicated on the political aim of controlling the Palestinian population, rather than serving both populations, as democratic governments are expected to do. But authorities could easily engage in similar security cooperation in the service of all communities.

Second, security should be seen in a holistic way. Allowing freedom of movement significantly expands options for education, trade, professional exposure and opportunity. In the long term, these can slowly help narrow the massive socioeconomic gap between Israelis and Palestinians. Such access will also generate needs-based personal exposure to one another, and partnerships that are more resilient to inevitable political or security challenges than the well-meaning “people-to-people” laboratory-like interactions of the Oslo model.¹⁵ Those Israeli–Palestinian reconciliation activities of the past might have successfully forged some friendships for a time. But those friendships did not change the political reality, nor could they withstand the devastating experiences each side suffered. They were relationships of choice, not need—and therefore dispensable.

The combination of political and socioeconomic horizons can contribute, over time, to reducing despair and hostility, while providing incentives to preserve the peace. Together, these factors are a deeper anchor to augment conventional security and law enforcement, which would still exist.

Finally, the two states would necessarily cooperate over resources such as water and land use, climate change policy, and public health, through structures predicated on the equality of the two sides. Such cooperation is required under any framework, no matter how hostile—even during the war in Gaza, Israel and international organizations were able to coordinate to roll out a polio vaccination campaign, under threat of an outbreak of one of the world’s worst diseases.

It is quixotic to suggest that two bitterly hostile groups can cooperate over shared physical challenges of necessity while being completely segregated. These areas will be better managed through standing cooperation, supported at all levels of the executive branches of each government.

The Political Elephant

The updated, pragmatic, partnership-based two-state solution is the least disruptive to people’s lives and mainly adds a new set of benefits and opportunities. This makes it vastly more physically feasible than the chimera of forcibly uprooting at least 150,000 Jewish Israeli settlers, or the engineering miracle needed for a road infrastructure to separate Jerusalem into Israeli and Palestinian neighborhoods.

The greatest obstacle to realizing this new vision is the disastrous political situation in both Israel and Palestine, for different reasons. But it is critical to realize that the political obstacle is an elephant set to smash any political framework for resolving the conflict through democratic, political means rather than through military force. In other words, the confederated two-state solution is in no way uniquely vulnerable to political hazards. The fanatical, fundamentalist, and corrupt leadership of Israel has an ironclad commitment to ending Palestinian national identity forever. It hopes to expel Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank. It is physically destroying the civilian infrastructure required to live in Gaza, while eating away at the land available in the West Bank—expanding the areas declared “state land” to prime them for settlement, encroaching into Area B (nominally under Palestinian civilian control), undermining water access, and making life in the West Bank unlivable.¹⁶

Palestinian politics have been decimated by decades of corrupt and authoritarian behavior by the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, who exploit the privileges they have gained from cooperating with the ruling power (Israel). At the same time, these leaders are powerless to change the political fortunes of Palestinians. Fatah’s diplomacy has been a resounding failure, while Hamas’s violence has led to the worst destruction of Palestinian society in its history, no less than a second Nakba (the term Palestinians use to describe the mass expulsion of Palestinians at the time of Israel’s creation in 1948). Israel has committed the deeds, but as Hussein Ibish has argued, Palestinians should never forgive Hamas for its responsibility.¹⁷

However, there are also counterweights to these massive political problems, within both societies and outside them.

Israel’s international allies and its biggest backers have long preferred a comprehensive diplomatic solution to the conflict. Yet the most important backer, the United States, has never taken substantive enough measures to push Israel there. The incoming Trump administration has an interest in stabilizing the Middle East, and has articulated a goal of ending the war in Gaza. Before assuming office, the president-elect goaded Israel closer to a ceasefire deal in Gaza than at any previous point—apparently through unsentimental, transactional pressure on Israel, along with tough words for Hamas. As president, Trump might ultimately come to support a comprehensive resolution to the conflict, if he sees other benefits that will accrue to the United States or—no less important—to him personally.

The potential rewards for Trump are low-hanging fruit. Should he advance an end to occupation, he will win vast accolades from Arab and Muslim American voters, and from public opinion in the Middle East. These groups were irreparably hostile to Joe Biden, and Trump could capitalize on their fury.

The United States and the critical Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, would be unified over the aim of reaching a comprehensive political resolution based on two states—before even considering the specific type of plan.

More importantly for the success of any plan, Trump would earn tremendous appreciation of Arab leaders in the Middle East. Regional countries would no longer be caught between the desire for normalization with Israel and the demand to appear supportive of Palestinian statehood against all odds of fulfillment. The United States and the critical Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, would be unified over the aim of reaching a comprehensive political resolution based on two states—before even considering the specific type of plan.

The EU, which has long advocated a two-state solution, would naturally support such an effort. Most European countries would not flinch at the revised, updated confederation of two states, which many intuitively grasp from their own European experience.

Should all these forces come together, they would present a far more consequential front for a solution than the one Biden announced in May 2024.¹⁸ The infrastructure for such a “global alliance” is already in place, under the framework of that name spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and the EU in late 2024.¹⁹ To date, this forum has convened three times, including with U.S. representation, although without significant U.S. backing.

Building from the Ground Up

There has long been a community of Israelis and Palestinians who are convinced that only a comprehensive political solution can end the conflict. Perhaps surprisingly, recent public opinion studies have found a moderate rise in Palestinian support for a two-state solution. And while Jewish Israelis show a moderate decline in support for a traditional two-state solution, both sides show somewhat higher expectations than they have in the past that a Palestinian state will be established in the next five years.

Civil society activists have taken it upon themselves in recent years to keep the framework for two states updated. Among those who have recognized the need for a revised, partnership-based, confederated two-state solution is A Land for All (with which the author is a board member and longtime participant), the most prominent such organization advocating this approach. A Land for All was established more than a dozen years ago. During that time, its members have significantly expanded the public conversation around the two-state confederation, including in Israeli media, high schools, parlor meetings and other community events, and op-eds. Over time, these ideas have been incorporated into the thinking of the mainstream Jewish Israeli left: in surveys, support among Jewish Israeli left-wingers for a two-state confederation rose by more than 30 points from 2016 to 2022. (Though, it should be noted, support for all democratic-based solutions declined among Jewish Israelis during the Gaza war).

Other groups that have endorsed a confederated two-state model are Holy Land Confederation—which is equally led by Israelis and Palestinians—and the Israel–Palestinian Confederation movement. There are also other activists who support similar hybrid plans, such as a federated solution. Individuals ranging from comparative conflict experts, to Israeli and Palestinian analysts and academics, to former Israeli president Reuven Rivlin have, at times, expressed support for this solution.²⁰ Prominent liberal Jewish Zionist thinkers, ranging from Peter Beinart to Jeremy Ben Ami (founder of the American lobby group J Street), have also acknowledged that the new two-state idea is a legitimate and possibly better means to advance conflict resolution.²¹ Over the last decade, researchers and advocates for a two-state confederation have been included in mainstream forums and conversations in the international community, from think tanks in Washington, DC to diplomatic audiences in Israel and Palestine.

During the war, international interest in A Land for All has greatly accelerated both in the region and abroad. The group’s representatives have been interviewed on CNN by Christiane Amanpour, and held meetings with the U.S. administration officials and top American media commentators. European and Gulf diplomats alike have expressed interest in incorporating representatives from A Land for All into both private and public high-level discussion forums. A Land for All has reached tens of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians with public activities, including hundreds of media mentions and appearances in local outlets.

But while domestic activism is critical in Israel and Palestinian, the most likely political opening—perhaps the only one—for jump-starting peace within Israel is a sweeping international demand and plan that is thrust into Israel’s political life. Such a plan would ideally be advanced either ahead of the next elections (scheduled for October 2026), or even sooner, to precipitate a government collapse.

After the next Israeli elections, it is possible that secular right-wing and centrist parties will form the next government, and that these parties will exclude the ideologically driven core of opposition against political resolution. In this context, the advantage of the confederated two-state solution is that it can erode major sources of opposition to the old two-state deal among moderate, security-oriented right-wingers and even a portion of less extreme settlers—many of whom have become disillusioned with the fanatic political representatives of their community in the current government. The recognition of Jewish connection to the whole land, retreat from a singular blame-and-punishment policy directed at settlers (who have been backed from the start by the Israeli state as a whole), and expanded security cooperation can make this approach more appealing from the perspective of the ruling right wing.

In the time such processes will take, Palestinians might also establish a path toward a reconstituted, more representative Palestinian leadership, with the political mandate to make such far-reaching decisions. And any Palestinian leader who achieves a political horizon for a long-term end of the occupation will certainly benefit from a wave of domestic support.

Practical and Fair

The confederation model is the updated and practical version of the two-state solution. It includes a hybrid framework for conflict resolution and governance that involves distinct entities. It features equality for both states and their citizens, and institutional cooperation for policy areas that involve shared needs. Under the model, Palestinians and Israelis will all enjoy equal rights—including, eventually, the freedom of movement and residence—as well as minority protections for permanent residents living in each state.

The new two-state proposal abandons failed ideas that have only perpetuated hostilities and created new grievances, such as the antiquated notion of divided cities. So too, the forcible uprooting of law-abiding residents has no political future and is, in many cases, unjust—such as when settlers were born into their communities. The institutional design envisioned in the two-state confederation model, in contrast, allows for organic cooperation in critical areas such as security, economic policy, resources, energy, and public health.

Further, the new model has a proven track record. Hybrid frameworks based in partnership and featuring limited political separation are a tested mode of conflict resolution (such as in Bosnia), and have also helped maintain long-term peace in the EU. Even when such arrangements occur without a formal agreement, they have led to outcomes that are far more peaceful than the status quo in Israel–Palestine. In Cyprus, for example, freedom of movement and some cooperation have been the norm for more than twenty years, since the island’s de facto internal border was opened.

The confederated two-state model is the approach that should become paradigmatic in policy circles, even well in advance of an opportunity to put it into effect. It is also the only approach left that stands a chance.

This report is part of “Networks of Change: Reviving Governance and Citizenship in the Middle East,” a Century International project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.

Header Image: Al-Aqsa Mosque, in the Old City of Jerusalem, as seen on December 06, 2023. Source: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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19. “Israel-Palestine Global Alliance Implementation of Two-State Solution Announced,” European External Action Service,” September 26, 2024, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/israelpalestine-global-alliance-implementation-two-state-solution-announced-unga-margins_en.
20. Bernard Avishai, “Confederation: The One Possible Israel–Palestine Solution,” New York Review of Books, February 2, 2018, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/02/02/confederation-the-one-possible-israel-palestine-solution/; Said Zeedani, “A More Sensible Two-State Vision for Israel-Palestine,” +972 Magazine, https://www.972mag.com/a-more-sensible-two-state-vision-for-israel-palestine/; “Rivlin: Confederation of Two States Is the Only Solution,” Haaretz, December 3, 2015, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2015-12-03/ty-article/rivlin-confederation-of-two-states-the-only-solution/0000017f-f7e9-ddde-abff-ffedc5db0000.
21. Peter Beinart, “Israel’s Annexation Plans Threaten Two-State Solution,” New York Times, July 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/opinion/israel-annexation-two-state-solution.html.

Tags: israel palestine, Israeli–Palestinian Peace Process