Yousef Munayyer insists that unification of Israel and the Palestinian Territories into one state has become inevitable:
Everything about the Israeli state’s actual behavior suggests it has no intention of ever leaving the West Bank.
Recognizing that we have a “one-state problem” is the key to peace. The first step is ending discrimination in the law based on ethnicity or religion throughout the entirety of the territory. Palestinians must be part of shaping any future state they will live in, and they can do so only on equal footing with their Jewish counterparts before the law, not under military occupation. For the next steps, numerous historic examples of multi-ethnic democracies exist, including those that made transitions from parallel situations. South Africa is one. It is important to note that while each case is different, and no analogy is perfect, lessons learned from those experiences and examples can inform the path forward for Israelis and Palestinians, even as they simultaneously take into consideration the uniqueness of this case.
Bernard Avishai, on the other hand, claims the proponents of one state are chasing an illusion:
They speak, often sincerely, about Judaism as a religion that could continue to be practiced in a secular state that looks like some idealized Palestine before Zionism spoiled things, with no Hebrew, no history, no literature, no Yehuda Amichai poetry, no Yehudit Ravitz songs—none of that national culture that Quebecers learned long ago requires a state apparatus to protect, and which the provinces shrewdly kept within their jurisdictions. As Peter Beinart says eloquently in the current New York Review of Books, one can also find any number of Jews who deny that Palestinians constitute a nation, and who expect them graciously to disappear from the Land of Israel and assimilate into Jordan, Syria, and the Arab world in general.
In fact, advocates of a two-state solution are not a bunch of naïfs unwilling to see how badly the peace process is doing. They are terrified citizens, trying, against hope, to avoid Bosnia—that is, a terrible, engulfing violence in which memories of the fighting of 1948 will be eclipsed by much greater atrocities, which will leave us with exactly the same problem we had at the start: namely, Canada’s problem. How do you reconcile the fierce desire for national distinction—and the fear of national extinction—with civil rights for all?
Assaf David revisits the possibility of the third and usually unpopular option, a Jordan-West Bank merger:
It seems that all the parties involved might, under some circumstances and preconditions, entertain it. The most important of these for Jordan and the Palestinians is that the confederation would not be the dream scenario of the Israeli right wing: unilateral annexation of parts of the West Bank to Israel and de facto presumption that Jordan will be drawn into managing the remaining Palestinian territory to preserve order. That scenario would make both Jordan and the Palestinians Israel’s worst enemy—something Israel’s leaders don’t really want, either.
A confederation would not be an easy way out for any of the three parties. To get Jordan in, Israel would likely have to agree to something close to the 1967 borders, potentially with a land swap on a one-to-one basis, which would mean evacuating Jewish settlers from the West Bank and giving up on East Jerusalem. However, the confederation might be easier for all the parties to accept at this point than any of the various scenarios involving an independent Palestine.
The Dish 