As two-state hopes fade, more US Jews are open to a one-state future for the Middle East

JTA — For much of the modern history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the phrase “one-state solution” was a fringe idea, especially among Jewish supporters of Israel. The proposal that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs would live under one government was largely seen as the very antithesis of Zionism, which asserts the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism and the right to establish a Jewish-led state in Jews’ ancestral homeland.

That is changing — at least in some corners of the Jewish world.

A recent poll found that roughly half of American Jews under 35 support resolving the conflict by creating a single binational state spanning Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, with a government elected by both Jews and Palestinians. The Jewish Voter Resource Center poll, released May 21, found that among non-Orthodox Jews under 35, support was slightly higher.

Across the Jewish population as a whole, support for such a solution was far lower, about one-quarter, with older Jews much more likely to favor some version of two states or an explicitly Jewish state.

Indeed, the numbers do not mean that a binational state has become a consensus position. Among the people directly involved, there’s nowhere near sufficient support to make this happen.

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The idea remains deeply unpopular among Israelis — most of whom see it as an assault on Zionism, since they believe it would make it all but impossible to preserve the Jewish character of the state, and pose a direct threat to their security given the years of Palestinian attacks. The majority of Palestinians, for their part, see the idea as a surrender of their dreams of statehood and are deeply skeptical that they would ever be allowed full rights, power and dignity under such an arrangement.

But fueled by frustration over the war against Hamas in Gaza and what many regard as the death of the two-state solution, versions of the idea are getting their most public hearing in years. And young Americans aren’t the only ones embracing the idea.

Last week New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein interviewed the co-executive directors of A Land for All. The joint Israeli-Palestinian effort, first formed more than a decade ago, proposes a confederation model that recognizes both Israel and Palestine but imagines joint sovereignty with free movement and cooperation among the two governments.

“Palestinians vote for the Palestinian government, but they can have residency in Israel and, accordingly, all the civil rights and local rights that come with the residency status — and vice versa,” explained Rula Hardal, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel.

Her partner, the Jewish Israeli lawyer May Pundak, described the idea as “decoupling… nationality from a geographic space,” and offered Northern Ireland as an example of a bitter conflict largely resolved through power-sharing.

Writing on Substack in June, MJ Rosenberg, who supported the two-state solution as the policy director of the Israel Policy Forum in the early 2000s, declared his support for a “single democratic state in all of historic Palestine.”

“It would belong to everyone who lives there,” wrote Rosenberg. “Jewish civil rights would be fully protected. Palestinian civil rights would be fully protected. The government would derive its legitimacy from citizenship rather than ethnicity.”

Last month, leaders of the Israeli-Palestinian coexistence movement Standing Together launched a new joint Jewish-Arab political party in Israel whose name, Makom Lekulanu, translates to “a place for us all.” Although the party platform doesn’t advocate a one-state solution, Standing Together has endorsed A Land for All’s “two states, one homeland” vision.

A number of recent books have also proposed some form of power-sharing, often less than the one-person, one-vote model proposed by activists on the far left, but still a radical departure from the status quo.

In his 2021 book “Haifa Republic,” the Israeli-German philosopher Omri Boehm proposes a binational constitutional state encompassing Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Under his plan, Jews and Palestinians would remain distinct national communities, but the state would belong equally to both peoples.

“We are dealing with an intolerable situation where the impossible is necessary,” Boehm, who is on faculty at the New School for Social Research, told the German newspaper Der Spiegel last October. “We must find proposals for a political solution in the future. The only alternative to unlimited war is the compromise of a federation.”

In their 2025 book, “Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine,” Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man and Sarah Leah Whitson propose a transitional government of Israelis and Palestinians, which would lay the political and legal groundwork for a shared democratic future.

According to a survey in April by the independent, Israel-based Institute for National Security Studies, only 4% of the Israeli public supported a one-state binational solution — with 16% of that support among Arabs and only 1% among Jews. (A recent poll of Palestinians found only 6% backed the idea.)

By contrast, some 39% of Israeli Jews support separation from the Palestinians, according to the poll, although only 15% of Israeli Jews support “two states for two peoples.”

Meanwhile, a slight majority of American Jews — including many younger Jews — still support a two-state solution, according to the Jewish Voter Resource Center.

But the repeated collapse of negotiations, the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the weakening of the Palestinian Authority, the trauma of October 7 and the absence of meaningful diplomatic progress have left many people — especially younger Jews who came of age after the Oslo process, which tried to achieve a two-state solution — asking whether the two-state idea is still realistic.

If two states seem increasingly impossible, and permanent Israeli control over Palestinians without equal political rights is unacceptable, what alternative remains?

Some Jewish proponents of binationalism in its various forms say the idea has deep roots in Zionist history.

In the 1920s, a group of Jewish intellectuals, including Rabbi Judah Magnes, who served variously as president and chancellor of the Hebrew University, formed an organization called Brit Shalom that argued that Zionism should seek a shared political framework with Palestinian Arabs rather than a Jewish state based on exclusive sovereignty. Although she never became a member, Henrietta Szold, who as the founder of Hadassah was one of the most prominent American Jewish leaders of her generation, was sympathetic to its ideas.

In her 2024 biography of Szold, Francine Klagsbrun writes that Szold was a founder of Ihud, a successor organization to Brit Shalom that “aimed for a rapprochement between Jews and Arabs in Palestine through discussions and negotiations that would lead to their ideal of a binational state.” The German-Israeli philosopher Martin Buber was one of Ihud’s leading spokespeople.

“Ihud members published pamphlets and a periodical that spelled out their ideas, which came under attack almost immediately by the press and Zionist organizations” who favored partition, wrote Klagsbrun.

At the time, however, Jews were a minority in the Holy Land, and partitioning the territory into Jewish and Palestinian entities seemed out of reach. A power-sharing plan, said the Emory University scholar Geoffrey Levin in an interview, represented “an upgrade of sorts, but one quite different from what the mainstream of political Zionists were seeking.”

That mainstream increasingly favored Jewish statehood, while Palestinian Arab leaders largely rejected a Jewish national project of any kind. By the late 1930s and 1940s, as partition plans gained international support, binationalism became a minority position.

Magnes, in particular, became a controversial and isolated figure. His proposal for a binational state rooted in equal political rights for Jews and Arabs was viewed by many Zionists as abandoning the central goal of the movement.

After Israel’s establishment in 1948 and especially after the 1967 Six Day War, the political conversation changed.

Some Israeli intellectuals on the left revisited ideas of shared sovereignty as a response to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Others, including figures such as the activist and politician Uri Avnery, moved in a different direction: from early ideas of regional Jewish-Arab partnership toward advocating two states for two peoples.

For decades, two states became the dominant framework among liberal Jews internationally and eventually the left-wing Israeli political establishment. They insisted it offered the only possibility for preserving Israel as a democratic Jewish homeland while recognizing Palestinian national aspirations.

But after decades of violence and failed negotiations — the last major Israeli-Palestinian talks took place in 2014 — many advocates began searching for alternatives.

The result has not been a single new movement, but a range of proposals. “There is a variety of viewpoints among the folks I know who favor very different kinds of one-state solutions,” said Matthew Boxer, a Brandeis University sociologist who researches Jewish identity. “There are the confederation fans, the Greater Israel advocates, the Greater Palestine advocates, the folks who believe that most Israelis and Palestinians want peace and will have it together if only they can get the extremists on both sides to back off, etc.”

One recent graduate of Brandeis University said in an interview with JTA that he supports a one-state or binational solution primarily because he no longer believes a two-state solution is either feasible or has been pursued by Israel in good faith. He described his preferred outcome as some form of binational state or confederation, ideally with international guarantees for both peoples, while arguing that Israel’s current model of statehood is rooted in an outdated nationalist framework that disadvantages Palestinians. (He asked that his name not be published out of concerns over retaliation and doxxing by those who might think his position is extreme.)

“I see a lot of problems with the establishment and maintenance of the State of Israel, how it’s run, its human rights abuses, and genocide,” he said. The 22-year-old said he grew up in a deeply engaged Jewish household where he regularly attended a Reform synagogue and participated in Jewish cultural activities at Brandeis. He described his parents as Zionists, but said they, too, had moved to the left since October 7, feeling the Israeli response to the Hamas attacks was disproportionate.

“I definitely grew up with a sense of Israel as important to my family, to my parents,” said the recent grad, who hasn’t visited the country. “I understand the historical situation after the Holocaust, and I entirely understand why people, lacking another option, would want a state.”

However, the death toll among Palestinian civilians that followed October 7 was “confirmation that a state founded on the idea of demographic control is not viable in the 21st century.”

Probably the best-known American Jewish proponent of binationalism is the journalist Peter Beinart. In a 2020 essay in Jewish Currents magazine titled “Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine,” he proposed a shared, multicultural society where constitutional protections, bills of rights and confederal frameworks guarantee the safety and national identities of both peoples.

“It’s time to abandon the traditional two-state solution and embrace the goal of equal rights for Jews and Palestinians,” Beinart wrote in a subsequent New York Times oped. “It’s time to imagine a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state.”

Rachel Fish, co-founder of Boundless, a US-based Israel education nonprofit, suggested that support for binationalism is a reaction to frustration with the lack of alternatives. Fish, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the history of binationalism but does not back the idea, said supporters of one state are often offering a solution based on the American notion of federated states that has little to do with the complicated reality of either Jewish or Palestinian nationalism.

“It doesn’t surprise me that American Jews want something different that would align more closely with what America is. But that doesn’t mean it is realistic for this place,” she said in an interview, referring to Israel. “They want to see an end to the conflict, but their answer has been only in the political imagination, without political feasibility.”

The chatter around one-state solutions, and the profile of Beinart as one of the leading proponents, has grown loud enough that it has compelled some Jewish leaders to issue rebuttals.

In June, Andres Spokoiny, president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, wrote on Substack that the push for a binational solution “obscures the nature of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict” and emanates from “outside powers” who would impose their solution on two peoples who do not want it.

Moreover, he accused Beinart of promoting the idea not as a practical solution but in order to drive a wedge between American Jews and Israel.

Despite mainstream resistance and the idea’s unpopularity, approaches like these have attracted support from some figures who once championed conventional two-state diplomacy.

The Israeli politician Yossi Beilin, one of the architects of the Oslo process, has pithily argued that the future may require “cohabitation, not divorce.” His confederation model preserves Israeli and Palestinian sovereignty while allowing shared institutions, open movement and Israelis living in Palestinian territory — and Palestinians living in Israel — under agreed arrangements.

Similarly, political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin has argued that neither complete separation nor a single state is likely to work, and that some form of confederation may better reflect the reality of two deeply intertwined societies.

“The fact is that Israelis and Palestinians are two distinct national identities, each seeking self-determination, but they are also heavily interdependent based on geography, infrastructure, economics, and environment,” she wrote in an email to JTA. “A confederated association of two states is the most suitable framework to meet both needs.”

Supporters of binationalism, confederation or what a political scientist might call “consociationalism,” and even many of their critics, warn that the one-state solution is already reality — albeit one in which Israel is firmly in control. In a report this January, the Institute for National Security Studies wrote that Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank territory known as Area C and the expansion of settlements there have led to the “emergence of a one-state reality, which undermines the Zionist vision of a Jewish, democratic, secure, and prosperous state.”

In turn, proponents of a joint Israeli-Palestinian state argue that a political system based on equality is preferable to one based on permanent domination by one national group over another.

Critics and skeptics counter that these proposals underestimate the depth of national conflict and mistrust.

“How can you possibly have open borders and be safe?” Klein asked May Pundak of A Land for All on his podcast. “How can you have open borders and not have someone in the West Bank coming through with explosives strapped to them and then blowing up a bus in Tel Aviv, as happened many, many times — as you know much better than me?”

Pundak responded that there would be “sophisticated security arrangements,” and described the kind of gradual trust-building process that led former belligerents to form the European Union.

Even longtime peace advocates remain unconvinced by one-state proposals. David Makovsky, a proponent of the two-state solution at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has argued that a binational Israeli-Palestinian state is not merely impractical but dangerous because it would attempt to create a shared democratic polity in a region where power-sharing has repeatedly collapsed into sectarian conflict. He also maintains that both Israelis and Palestinians have struggled too much for national self-determination to willingly relinquish separate national identities.

“Yes, the road to two states is arduous, but the road to one state is a path that guarantees endless bloodshed,” he wrote.

Fish laments that supporters of binationalism insist on a seemingly unfeasible solution or dismiss Jewish or Palestinian nationalisms as hopelessly tribal. She would prefer that advocates for and critics of Israel alike instead engage with Israelis and Palestinians on the ground who are having “serious conversations” about their future.

“I am not sure that American Jews are going to be the ones that solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be invested in this place, these people and what’s happening to them.”

But in her interview with Klein, Pundak insisted on the need for a “new vision” that can “organize and excite Palestinians and Israelis.”

“That ‘never going to work’ mentality is part of what got us to this awful situation we’re in,” she said.