Gregg Carlstrom is a correspondent in Tel Aviv for the Times and the Economist.

TEL AVIV—It was vague, like so many of Donald Trump’s pronouncements, and yet it was the president of the United States, standing at a podium in the White House, putting his imprimatur on a one-state solution. “I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like, I can live with either one,” he said on Wednesday, during a joint news conference with his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

For two decades, the two-state solution has been the focal point of American policy in the Middle East. Bill Clinton had the Camp David summit, and his “Clinton parameters.” George W. Bush had the “road map for peace” and the Annapolis conference. Barack Obama had two rounds of U.S.-led talks (both abject failures without catchy names). His secretary of state, John Kerry, devoted his final major speech to the subject, an anguished 75-minute cri de coeur aimed at Israel’s right-wing government. Less than a month into his presidency, Trump said he would be willing to cast aside those efforts.


On the Israeli side, you could get whiplash trying to keep up with Netanyahu’s stated positions. He accepted the two-state solution in a landmark 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University; renounced it shortly before Israel’s 2015 general election; and then renounced his renunciation a few days later, after he had secured a fourth term. In December, he told CBS that he was still committed to “two states for two peoples.” In January, he told members of his Likud party that he would offer the Palestinians only a “state-minus.” And on Monday afternoon, boarding his plane to Washington, he ducked the question altogether.

Polls still find that majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians support a two-state solution, but only in theory; their support drops off rapidly when they are asked to contemplate the details of such an agreement. Israel’s growing conservative faction certainly does not support it. And while the one-state option still has the support of Israel’s center-left, and an older generation of Palestinians, even they sound increasingly pessimistic about its prospects. A single-state solution presents its own complications, of course—and yet, it might be more politically realistic, better in tune with the changing mood on both sides.

But here’s the key question: What would a one-state solution even look like?

The peace process has long been viewed as a dichotomy: either Israel and Palestine agree to two states, or one binational state. “The only alternative to two sovereign and democratic states on the 1967 border is one single secular and democratic state with equal rights for everyone,” Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said on Wednesday.

But the reality is slightly more complex. If a one-state solution is on the table, Israel has three broad choices. It can proceed with an equitable one-state solution—though not necessarily a binational state. It can take the opposite tack, and explicitly condemn the Palestinians to statelessness. Or it can attempt to muddle along with the status quo. And with Team Trump removing itself to the sidelines (“We're not going to dictate what the terms of peace will be,” a senior official said on Tuesday night), any of these is possible.

Option 1: Switzerland on the Mediterranean

A few months ago, I had coffee in Ramallah with a senior Palestinian official, one of the elderly men who have been involved in the peace process since before the Oslo Accords were signed in the early 1990s. He spent a half hour detailing all the reasons why a two-state solution was unworkable: the ceaseless growth of settlements, the rise of the right in Israel, the political and geographic divisions within Palestine. When he finished his grim litany, I asked whether he still supports the two-state solution. “Of course,” he said.

For decades the two-state solution has been the centerpiece of U.S. policy, and the goal of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. The leadership in Ramallah, and the aging center-left “peace camp” in Jerusalem, cannot conceive of an alternative vision—even when they admit that the two-state solution is no longer realistic.

But an eclectic group of young activists, religious settlers, the occasional ex-militant and even a few graying center-leftists are bringing new thinking to an old debate. Calling themselves "Two States, One Homeland," this grass-roots group is trying to find another approach to the conflict: a confederation.

The two-state solution is unpopular, above all, because it requires dividing the land. A one-state outcome creates a different problem, one of identity: After decades of conflict, neither Israelis nor Palestinians trust that they would truly have national rights in a binational state.

A confederation would try to dodge both issues. Like the two-state solution, it would create two political entities, Israel and Palestine, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. But the citizens of both would enjoy freedom of movement: A Palestinian from Nablus could commute to work in Tel Aviv each day, and vice versa.

Israeli settlers could stay in their homes in the West Bank, while a proportionate number of Palestinians could take up residence inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders, affording a limited “right of return.” Jerusalem would be a shared, undivided city. The two governments would share responsibility for overlapping issues, like national defense and infrastructure.

The concept is still in its infancy, but it has a number of high-profile supporters—many of them from the far right of the political spectrum. “It would mean creating an entirely new system of government— something we’ve never seen before,” Dani Dayan, formerly a leading member of the Yesha Council, the umbrella movement for Israeli settlers, told me during the last election, when he made a short-lived bid for a Knesset seat. “But it’s more realistic than the two-state solution.” (Dayan is now Israel’s consul general in New York, and has said he will support whatever happens to be government’s policy; he discussed the confederation idea before his appointment.)

It would be implemented slowly, supporters say, to build trust on both sides. But it would end with equal rights for all. Reuven Rivlin, the Israeli president, has long supported such an outcome: He is a lifelong Likudnik who opposes Palestinian statehood, but also a classical liberal, one of the few right-wing politicians in Israel who still speaks passionately about equality and against racism. At a conference in Jerusalem this week, the day before Netanyahu and Trump met in Washington, he repeated his call for this kind of one-state outcome. “Applying sovereignty to an area gives citizenship to all those who live there,” he said. “There is not [a different] law for Israelis and non-Israelis.”

Option 2: A South African model

Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners, flush with enthusiasm about the Trump administration, wanted him to use his first White House meeting to bury the two-state solution altogether. At the head of the group was Naftali Bennett, the leader of the pro-settler Jewish Home party, who warned that “the Earth will shake” if Netanyahu even mentioned a Palestinian state.

Bennett’s faction is small―it controls just eight seats in the 120-member Knesset―but it increasingly sets the agenda for the broader Israeli right, at least on issues of land and peace. And at the top of his agenda is annexation.

More than 30 years ago, Israel annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, which were captured during the 1967 war against its Arab neighbors. The Knesset applied Israeli law to the territories, and the citizens of both became eligible to apply for Israeli citizenship. But for a variety of reasons, from diplomacy to demography, Israel did not annex the West Bank. While it has taken a number of de facto steps toward annexation, the territory is not formally a part of Israel.

Bennett wants to change that. His party already has drawn up legislation to annex Ma'ale Adumim, one of the largest settlements in the West Bank―a first step, he believes, toward claiming the entirety of “Area C,” a designation from the Oslo Accords that covers roughly two-thirds of the land in the occupied West Bank. “Israel has annexed areas in the past. The world does not recognize it to this very day, but we do,” he says. “Even if we can’t do it tomorrow, it’s a vision that I’m working towards.”

Despite its size, Area C contains only 10 percent of the West Bank’s Palestinian population, fewer than 300,000 people (there are no precise figures). Under Bennett’s “sovereignty plan,” they would be offered full Israeli citizenship, though it’s unclear how many would accept: Most of the residents of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights opted to keep their Jordanian and Syrian nationalities. The other 2.5 million Palestinians in the rest of the West Bank would remain stateless. They would have a limited self-government, something like the Palestinian Authority, a donor-supported body that struggles to provide even a modicum of basic services.

“It’s less than a state, in the sense that it’s not open gates for millions of descendants of refugees, and [without] an army, but barring that, it’s full self-governance,” Bennett says. “It’s autonomy on steroids, for lack of a better term.”

The less-than-a-state would not even be contiguous: The pockets of Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank would all be separated by Israeli territory. Nor would it be economically viable. Israel would get the Jordan Valley, the breadbasket of the West Bank, and the Dead Sea, with its lucrative tourism and mining industries. The Palestinians would get a constellation of urban centers, and their economy, already kept afloat by foreign aid and a bloated government payroll, would become even more stagnant. “The name for this is bantustans,’” says Mohammad Shtayyeh, a Palestinian economist.

About 40 percent of Israelis, and a majority of those who identify as right-wing, support large-scale annexation. Netanyahu does not, because he fears the diplomatic consequences—but many of the populist politicians vying to replace him do not share his reservations.

Option 3: The not-so-status quo

An unusual advertisement started to appear in cities across Israel last month, on roadside billboards and in the pages of leading newspapers. It featured a photo of a flag-waving Palestinian crowd, with a message written in bold, red Arabic script: “Soon, we will be the majority.” Most Israeli Jews cannot read Arabic. So a Hebrew footnote urged them to dial a hotline, where a retired Israeli general named Amnon Reshef delivered a recorded warning.

“Are you sick of these Palestinian billboards? So are we,” he said. “They will disappear in a matter of days. What will not disappear is the millions of Palestinians who live in the West Bank.”

Israeli liberals hated the ads: They saw the message as profoundly racist, portraying the Palestinians as an implacable threat. But the ad wasn’t aimed at them. It was aimed at the center, which pays lip service to a two-state solution but does little to actually advance one. The ex-generals who sponsored the billboards, like their counterparts in Ramallah, believe they are running out of time to sell Israelis, who are becoming more and more comfortable with the current state of events, on a partition.

Because the status quo—a single state in which Israel continues to expand slowly into Palestinian territory—in its own way, is also a one-state solution—not a dramatic one, but a solution, nonetheless. It’s also the most likely option, for the foreseeable future. Netanyahu has pursued it for the past eight years. His main challenger in the polls, the centrist Yair Lapid, would probably take a similar tack; he speaks about the conflict only in the vaguest of generalities.

Over the past three months alone, Israel has approved the construction of 6,000 new homes in the occupied territories. Netanyahu has announced plans to build a new settlement in the West Bank, the first since the 1990s. And the Knesset passed a law to retroactively authorize dozens of “illegal outposts,” wildcat settlements that were built without the government’s approval.

To be fair, the outpost law will almost certainly be struck down by the Supreme Court, and much of the new construction is in the larger settlement “blocs,” which will likely remain part of Israel in a final agreement. But it is nonetheless another step toward cementing the Israeli presence in what is meant to be a future Palestinian state. Each new outpost or batch of homes makes it harder to argue for limits on the next round, and it raises the cost, both human and financial, of a two-state solution.

Last month, after a two-year delay, the Israeli government finally carried out a court order and evacuated Amona, an outpost that was built illegally on privately owned Palestinian land. In the days before it was demolished, hundreds of young Israelis flocked there to show their support. More than a few pointed to the adjacent hilltop, where Ofra, an authorized settlement, was established in 1975. “Why can we build there, and not here?” they asked. As the years drag on with no solution to the conflict, it is a question members of the Netanyahu government, like many of their predecessors, have struggled to answer.

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None of these outcomes mention Gaza. The blockaded enclave, home to 1.8 million Palestinians (the West Bank is home to 2.7 million), is a problem that no one really wants to solve. The United Nations has warned that the strip will be uninhabitable by 2020. Its economy is shattered with nearly half of the population unemployed and 70 percent reliant on foreign aid. Fuel shortages are common; electricity is available for only a few hours each day. The aquifer that supplies Gazans with most of their water will soon be too salty to drink. But Israel has no long-term plan for helping Gaza. Nor does Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the territory.

In theory, the withdrawal from Gaza was meant to signal Israel’s commitment to the two-state solution. But in practice, the pullout—which was not coordinated with the Palestinians—has only made a deal more remote. The blockade has failed at its main goal, toppling Hamas, but Israel and Egypt refuse to lift it; and Hamas cares more about preserving its grip on power than the welfare of the population. And so a two-state solution comes to look like three states.

The other possibilities are flawed as well. A single state requires trust, something that is in short supply. The Oslo process, the separation barrier, the Gaza blockade—all of this has created a situation in which Israelis and Palestinians do not interact with each other. Annexation and the status quo, on the other hand, both leave millions of Palestinians without fundamental rights.

But these futures appear more realistic than the aging two-state paradigm. The Oslo Accords, signed 24 years ago, were meant to be a five-year interim measure. And yet when Isaac Herzog, the putative head of the peace camp, talks about negotiations with the Palestinians, he envisions a process that needs at least another five years.

Many people are simply giving up. The Israeli right talks of annexation; younger Palestinians talk of abandoning their struggle for statehood, and reframing it as a civil rights struggle. Trump’s breezy dismissal of the two-state paradigm, hasty as it seemed, may have been better aligned with the public mood than John Kerry’s meticulous speech.