One need only to look at Gaza to know what hard separation of Israel and Palestine can bring. Fortified fences, underground barriers – What if more openness and less separation is a better answer? It sounds mad, but there's a logic

Confession: For about a decade, I’ve supported a confederated association of two states as the better framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (there is no best). There are some key differences between this approach and the traditional two-state solution, whose details were hammered out over 20 years ago in negotiations. But the key distinction is that a confederation rejects complete separation as the condition and the basis for peace.

Instead, this approach rests on limited shared institutions, borders designed for freedom of movement subject to security needs, residency rights on the “other” side, and coordinating economic and security policy. It accepts the overlap of populations for both symbolic and pragmatic reasons, rather than striving for ethno-national separation of Israelis from Palestinians.

In the current climate, abandoning the separation paradigm in favor of greater togetherness seems mad. But a short, honest history reveals why separation-based attempts at peace have failed spectacularly, and why a political framework grounded in cooperation, open access and sharing resources is the only way forward.

For years, two states seemed like the neatest political solution. Metaphors about couples getting divorced, or separating squabbling children, seemed so sensible. Split the land, place an international border and a wall, or both, between them. Jerusalem could be sliced down the middle. Each nation would sacrifice its existential connection to the other half of the land, for the sake of being done with each other.

The problem was that neither side wanted this enough. Both Israelis and Palestinians view the whole land as sacred, based on historic, religious and cultural attachments. There was a one-sidedness to the imaginary separation, in which the Palestinian state was supposed to remove all Jews while Israel would remain a country with 20 percent Palestinian citizens. It was both offensive to Jews and worrying for Palestinians in Israel: if the ultimate aim was ethno-national homogeneity, how secure could they be?

Free to reside in the ‘other’ state

After October 7, many Israelis, not limited to the right wing, are desperately concluding that such peace was tried and failed. But this is wrong: two separate states was never tried – it could not be implemented because the sides could never agree to it.

Instead, I and others, represented by the Israeli and Palestinian grassroots movement called A Land for All, envision two states, so that each side enjoys national self-determination. There will still be a border demarcating them. But each side’s longing for a connection with the whole land is honored, if each accepts a compromise: neither nation can own the whole land. Instead, the two peoples would have freedom of movement on an equal basis, with security limitations as the exception, based on individual or organizational threats rather than collective, and unequal, limitation of Palestinians as the default.

There are threats from Israelis too; security must be seen as a mutual, equal need. Citizens of each state would have the right to visit, travel, study and work in the other state – even live there if they are law-abiding residents who accept the sovereignty of the other side. Freedom of residency accepts that there will be people of one nation living in the other state. But each side votes only in the state of its citizenship for national elections, so residents on the “other” side wouldn’t affect the electorate or the government significantly.

Therefore, the mechanism can provide settlers with a choice, while allowing the return of Palestinian refugees from 1948, under timing and terms that the two sides can work out in negotiations.

Fears about the dangers of greater openness of the populations miss an obvious point: there are dangers in separation, fragmentation and isolation that many have somehow failed to see.

Walling each side off from the places they consider sacred fuels angry spoilers of the future, especially if they hold religious commitments to those places. What else does hard separation do? One need only look at Gaza to know. Gaza was the most isolated slice of land in all of Israel-Palestine; it was the separation paradigm on steroids, with the heavy border regime established during the Oslo Accords era, a tightened vise from the time Hamas took over in 2007, physical walls, fortified fences, underground barriers. The movement of goods and people between Gaza and Israel or the West Bank was reduced to a minimum.

Society festered, chafing and impoverished, as industries collapsed and unemployment rose to over 40 percent, with increased dependence on Israel. Its domestic product was despair. Right-wingers arguing “imagine what would have happened if there had been a Palestinian state” should put a finer point on it: Imagine what would have happened if the whole Palestinian state, West Bank and Gaza, was premised on hard or hermetic partition: Gaza writ large.

By contrast, freedom of movement supplies spiritual needs but also hard economic opportunity, to help close the gaps and open horizons. Ease of movement takes pressure off the specific location of the border, which could be closer to the Green Line, opening up greater Palestinian contiguity. Jerusalem would remain a shared capital of two states. The idea of dividing it was folly anyway, if anyone bothered to look at a map of “east” and “west” Jerusalem, overlaid with post-1967 Jewish neighborhoods. It’s not an apple that can be cut in half; it looks like a Rorschach splotch created by a madman.

But don’t take my word for the consequences of segregation versus overlapping populations and free(er) movement. Consider daily life in other zones of Israel and Palestine.

Self-determination with benefits

Gaza is the most isolated, with the most disastrous results, and the greatest security threat to Israel. The West Bank is no great model of peace, but it is less volcanic at present than Gaza – though this could clearly change. Despite the complete deterioration of Palestinian leadership, with its paltry powers, the West Bank has not descended into violent chaos. The economy is marginally better. There is a wall in place, but it’s partial, porous, and the Gaza barriers were more hermetic, with worse results.

The fact is that Jewish settlers and Palestinians have regular interaction and even some economic interdependence. And cooperating on security policy, as Israel and the PA do, boosts security. Palestinians justifiably loathe this cooperation, because it helps maintain the occupation and protects Israelis, not Palestinians. But under a confederated arrangement, any security policy would serve Palestinians, not control them. Violence will exist as long as this is a relationship of power and oppression, but there are more examples of West Bank nonviolence than you’d know from the news.

The best example is right under our noses. The Israeli and Palestinian communities with the greatest possible interaction and total freedom of movement are Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In pharmacies, medical professions, universities, the workplace, restaurants and malls, beyond one mercifully limited outburst of violence in May 2021, Israelis and Palestinians in Israel are living peacefully, if far from equally, together.

This isn’t a one-state argument. The tension that does exist among citizens is driven by the long-thwarted Palestinian national aspirations, which Jews perceive as a threat to their identity (when they get it, maybe Jews can stop worrying). Each side still wants national self-determination, and ought to have it. But the mechanisms of free movement, shared economy and exposure to each other in daily life have proven themselves.

In sovereign Israel and the occupied (or controlled) areas, Israelis and Palestinians are locked together by geography, resources, water, climate and epidemiology. From COVID to the fear of cholera due to the current war, reality has lashed our fates together.

Sharing these responsibilities requires cooperation as equals, between trained professionals and committed administrators and managers. These relationships shouldn’t be frantically invented in a crisis after everyone hates each other, but built through joint agencies over time, staffed by people with trusting working relationships, and best practices to help prevent crises from the start.

These needs-based cross-community bodies should replace the heartwarming but aimless “people-to-people” models of the past. The models are there: EcoPeace Middle East has been doing this for years as an Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian NGO dealing with environmental policy. There is an Israeli-Palestinian Chamber of Commerce, and the Palestinian Internship Program in Israel. Build on these.

I’ve saved the most painful question for last. How can anyone see a way there, from the misery of here, today?

The answer involves the future. The long-term future is easy enough to see: no one is going away, and Israelis and Palestinians will continue to live on this land. The only question is how.

The medium-term future is inconceivably difficult. The situation of Gaza is catastrophic; the next phase must end Gaza’s isolation, not deepen it. I believe only a multilateral effort of Western and Middle Eastern countries can coordinate security and rehabilitation of governance through temporary international help, as a bridge to future Palestinian reunification, elections and ultimately independence.

None of this can begin until the fighting ends. And this is the answer for what should be done as soon as possible.