IN 1942, as the Holocaust in Europe was entering its most horrific phase, a pacifist American rabbi called Judah Magnes helped found a political party in Palestine called Ihud. Hebrew for unity, Ihud argued for a single binational state in the Holy Land to be shared by Jews and Arabs. Its efforts—and those of like-minded idealists—came to naught. Bitterly opposed to the partition of Palestine, Magnes died in 1948 just as the state of Israel—the naqba, or catastrophe, to Palestinians—was being born. Decades of strife were to follow.

At the United Nations, in the White House and around the world, there is a strong belief that any solution ending that strife must be based on two separate states, with a mainly Jewish one called Israel sitting alongside a mainly Arab one called Palestine. The border between them would be based on the one that existed before the 1967 war—known as the “green line”—with some adjustments and land swaps to reflect the world as it is. Jerusalem would be a shared but divided capital.

In the face of the manifold obstacles facing such a solution, however, something like Magnes’s one-state variant has been coming back into vogue, both in left-wing Western (and Jewish) circles and among a growing minority of Palestinians. In 2004 a British-born Israeli writer, Daniel Gavron, published a book, “The Other Side of Despair: Jews and Arabs in the Promised Land”, that called for the creation of a democratic binational “State of Jerusalem”. Some Israeli intellectuals are airing the notion of “Post-Zionism”. Avraham Burg, a former Speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, says a “post-national” model must be explored. “I have no doubt something is emerging, though I am not sure what it is.”

One but not the same

Avi Shlaim, a leading British chronicler of the Israel-Palestine saga who was born in Baghdad and brought up in Israel, says he has “shifted…to supporting a one-state solution with equal rights for all citizens,” though he concedes that “this is not what I would ideally like.” Past and present Israeli governments, he thinks, have killed the two-state option, partly by entrenching Jewish settlements so deeply on the West Bank, the heartland of a would-be Palestinian state, that they cannot be removed.

This is an assessment the idealists share with hawkish Israelis and a growing number of Palestinians. More and more often, the two-state solution is pronounced dead. Mathematics suggests that the alternative is a one-state solution. But though there are a lot of different one-state outcomes under discussion, none of them really looks like a solution.

If one state is simply the rejection of two states, then many Israelis on the right are up for it. In 2009, under American pressure, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, gave a speech at Bar-Ilan University in which he grudgingly endorsed the two-state idea. Since then he has shown barely a flicker of enthusiasm for it. In a speech to the American Congress in May 2011, he declared triumphantly, and to sustained applause, that Jerusalem would be undivided, evidently under Israeli control, noting that “the vast majority of the 650,000 Israelis who live beyond the 1967 lines reside in neighbourhoods and suburbs of Jerusalem and Greater Tel Aviv.” Yet it is barely conceivable that the Palestinians would ever accept a state that excluded all of Jerusalem.

Mr Netanyahu has made clear that he will not countenance the bulk of the West Bank’s settlers being pushed out in order to let the Palestinians have their state. And he is emphatic that Israel must control the Jordan valley as well as the airspace above the Palestinians; their West Bank state would exist under an Israeli lid. “He never made a clear-cut commitment to the two-state solution,” says Mr Netanyahu’s predecessor as prime minister, Ehud Olmert.

Regardless of Mr Netanyahu’s position, his Likud party has refused to endorse the creation of any kind of Palestinian state. Most of its Knesset members have joined a “Greater Israel Caucus” that says the West Bank must stay part of Israel for ever. Avigdor Lieberman, a rough-hewn populist whose largely ethnic-Russian party merged with Likud before the election, backs partition but also wants to encourage the fifth of Israeli citizens who are Arabs living within Israel’s 1967 boundary to leave—ethnic cleansing, in Palestinian eyes. Arab Israelis who fail a “test of loyalty” to the state of Israel should, he says, be deprived of various rights, such as the vote. Mr Lieberman is currently out of office, pending an investigation into alleged fraud, but the 31 seats held together by his party and Likud is easily the biggest bloc in the 120-seat Knesset.

You gave me nothing

Naftali Bennett, a 40-year-old software tycoon with a hip Californian manner, is the most strident new voice on the Israeli right: blunter than Mr Netanyahu, more openly dismissive of the two-state idea, and more hawkish than another, bigger beneficiary of Israeli voters in January’s general election, Yair Lapid. (Mr Lapid’s party won 19 seats in the Knesset to Mr Bennett’s 12.) Asked about removing Jewish settlements from the West Bank and creating a Palestinian state between Jerusalem and the Jordan river, Mr Bennett breezily replies that “It just ain’t gonna happen.” Of the Palestinians, he says “I will do everything in my power to make sure they never get a state. It would be national suicide for Israel.”

Instead, Mr Bennett wants Israel to annex the 61% of the West Bank known as “Area C” (see map), in essence the territory’s central and eastern slab, going down to the Jordan valley. The Palestinians—at least 50,000—who live there would become Israeli citizens, should they stay. The other 2.6m or so Palestinians on the West Bank would have to be content with “full-blown autonomy” in their towns and villages. This, in essence, would mean municipal rights (he mentions garbage collection). Jewish settlers would stay put. Mr Lapid, a jovial former television anchorman now deemed a kingmaker in the Knesset, is considered a centrist by Israelis. But he is no enthusiast for a two-state plan, at least not of the sort promoted by Western diplomats or in the UN. He chose to make his chief election speech at the university of Ariel, one of the largest and most controversial of Jewish settlements, a town of 20,000 people (with another 12,000 students) built deep within the West Bank. The second person on his party’s list in the Knesset is a settler rabbi. Mr Lapid also argues for Jerusalem to remain undivided under Israeli control. The only mainly Jewish parties that treat negotiations towards a two-state solution as a priority are Tzipi Livni’s group (which won a paltry six seats in the recent election), Meretz (which also got six) and the rump of Ariel Sharon’s Kadima party (just two). Three Arab-Israeli parties, all two-staters, got 11 seats between them. The Labour Party, long Israel’s leading proponent of a two-state solution, got 15 seats. But its campaign concentrated almost exclusively on domestic issues. Indeed, the degree to which the election and its coalition-cobbling aftermath ignored negotiations with the Palestinians to any end at all was telling. Mr Bennett’s provocative no-state-for-the-Palestinians oratory was noticed. But he was never rebuked for it by, say, Mr Netanyahu.

In sum, despite Mr Netanyahu’s glum espousal of the two-state idea in his speech at Bar-Ilan, proponents of a state of Israel that encompasses all or most of the West Bank are plainly the strongest force in the Knesset. On March 14th, Mr Netanyahu announced a proposed government in advance of a visit by Barack Obama on March 20th. It contains Mr Lapid and Mr Bennett; Ms Livni will probably be its only member keenly committed to negotiations with the Palestinians.

Within Israel, the Palestinian question simply does not seem urgent. Even the settlers do not seem to feel threatened. With a web of well-built roads knitting their infrastructure into that of Israel proper—some of them reserved for Israeli use—a visitor barely notices which side of the green line he is on. Those living in the settlements have scant contact with Palestinians whose villages lie close by. In 2012, for the first year since 1973, not a single Jewish Israeli was killed as a result of Palestinian violence on the West Bank.

Palestinians, for their part, talk more and more of “a one-state reality”—while most caution that it is not a “solution”. They argue that the notion of a viable, contiguous, sovereign Palestinian state sitting peacefully alongside Israel is no longer feasible. An ever more popular parallel for the situation is South Africa before and after its emergence from apartheid.

The main similarity is the existence of two separate systems of government and law for two people living side by side on territory that is occupied as a result of conquest and confiscation. The web of Israeli roads and the restrictions that Palestinians face in terms of travel are compared to the sequestering of black South Africans in wretched “bantustans”. Israel’s security fence, in many places a five-metre (15-foot) concrete wall wound round Jewish settlements is inevitably known to Palestinians as “the apartheid wall”. Scores of checkpoints recall the old South African “pass laws” whereby blacks needed permission to go from one area to another, especially in search of work in “white” areas.

The campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, which is growing in strength in America and Britain, sees the one-state reality as a precursor to a civil-rights movement that would then bring down the “apartheid state” with the help, as in South Africa, of external support inflamed by the injustice. If Jewish settlers were determined to remain on the West Bank, they might be able to do so—but under Palestinian authority.

Not the best analogy

To drag the past out into the light

Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, and its former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert—men in what used to be the mainstream of national politics—worry about just such a future. They have warned that, unless the occupation of the bulk of the West Bank ends, or Palestinians in the West Bank are given full voting rights in Israel, the country will lose its claim to be a democracy. It will, says Mr Peres, become a “pariah”, just as South Africa did. The BDS campaign may thus, he implies, become unstoppable. Even the Americans might find it hard to go on backing Israel come hell or high water.

More hawkish Palestinians, typified by the Islamist movement, Hamas, are not giving up on a two-state solution; they never believed in it in the first place. They still dream of a land where they hold sway from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river, with Jews and Christians living there, if they are lucky, on sufferance. Accepting that this harsh scenario is unlikely to come to pass in the short run, its proponents talk merrily of the long game, waiting for a generation or even two.

These true-believing one-staters have a strong position in Hamas, and it is one that will likely get stronger if people like Mr Bennett call the Israeli tune. “We consider the whole of Palestine our land,” says Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader in Gaza, sitting at home beside a portrait of two sons killed fighting the Israelis. History and time, he says with a big smile, are on Hamas’s side. “The Islamic trend is coming to power. Ten years is enough to neutralise the power of Israel and its supporters.” An Islamist regime has come to power next-door in Egypt; Syria may be next; Hamas’s allies in Jordan are shaking King Abdullah’s throne. “No one can guess what will happen tomorrow.”

“In the end I am sure there will be just one state,” says Basam al-Naim, for seven years Hamas’s minister of health in Gaza. “But what kind of state I cannot say. Many Jews would leave and many Palestinians would come back. In ten to 20 years there will be a completely different geopolitical map.” The 1m-odd Russian Jews who have bolstered Israel since the Soviet Union collapsed, he says, would have to go. “They are already segregated in Israel,” he adds. “And many of them are not even Jews.”

Over the years, some Hamas leaders, such as Khaled Meshal, have groped towards accepting Israel, at least as a “reality” to be grudgingly accepted. Some now posit a two-state solution, albeit often as a step on the way to a single state, once Muslims, Jews and Christians learn to live happily together, perhaps in some federal halfway house.

In every one-state outcome, be it created by virtue of persuasion or under duress, Jews would eventually be a minority (see chart). Mr Bennett seeks to avoid this by advocating “autonomy” outside Israel for much of the West Bank. But he must know that the autonomy he advocates will never satisfy the Palestinians, nor the neighbouring Arab countries that host several million Palestinian refugees, most of whose forebears fled when Israel was founded in 1948. “I do not have a clear-cut solution,” he concedes, before reverting to the old argument that “Jordan is Palestine.” Most Jordanians, it is true, are of Palestinian origin. But would Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza, let alone those within the borders of Israel, be satisfied with a state on the east side of the Jordan river, presuming that the present monarchy would grant it to them? Not a chance. Though Mr Bennett might want them to, the Egyptians aren’t going to let Gaza be dumped on them, either. But, like the activists of BDS, Mr Bennett and his friends know that granting Palestinians proper civil rights within an enlarged Israel would mean that the Jews would soon be outnumbered and later outvoted by the Palestinians. Though ultra-Orthodox Jews are the fastest growing community in Israel, Palestinians still outbreed Israelis as a whole. Palestinians in Israel already add up to 1.6m, along with 2.6m on the West Bank and 1.7m in Gaza. Jewish Israelis on both sides of the green line number about 6m. “In ten to 15 years Palestinians would have a majority in one state,” says Mr Olmert. This means that none of the one-state options makes sense for Israel in the long run. The idealists paint a picture of Arabs and Jews getting along swimmingly together: dream on. The hawks think the Palestinians can be kept quiet for ever if they are denied a state: again, dream on. At the same time, the analogy with South Africa is fatally flawed. Israel within its 1967 borders has international legitimacy; no white South African state could ever have claimed as much; beyond a few Afrikaner zealots the idea would have been a non-starter. So a two-state solution was never possible. And a situation in which blacks outnumber whites by ten to one is completely unlike a situation where the sides have comparable numbers. In conceding the principle of one-person-one-vote South Africa’s whites knew that they were losing their political primacy for good. Israeli Jews will not do that.

Do you feel the same?

Even if the Palestinians were remarkably tolerant—and that is questionable—Israel as a Jewish state would disappear. Even the name would go. It is barely conceivable that Jews, after running their own vibrant polity for half a century and praying for a return to their ancestral homeland for two millennia, would quietly submit to Palestinian majority rule, however idealistic its proponents. That is why Dov Khenin, a Jewish member of the Knesset’s mainly Arab and communist-inclined Hadash party, sees two states as the only practical path to peace even while sympathising with the ideals of the one-staters. “If the two peoples want to have a binational state, OK,” he says wistfully. “But my impression is that Israelis and Palestinians don’t very much like each other.” Nor, he implies, will they ever do so.

Academic gatherings, such as a conference last year at Harvard to discuss the one-state option, have yet to put flesh on the idealists’ notions. Would a federal framework provide for separate assemblies? What sort of army and police would there be? Would, as Mr Gavron’s book suggests, the Jews have to drop their Law of Return (allowing any diaspora Jew to become a citizen) and the Palestinians likewise have to drop their Right of Return (letting all refugees and their descendants back)? Few have begun to address such nettlesome questions, because in truth, few see a one-state outcome as a true goal. Most come to it out of exhausted despair or amiable fantasy.

Israel, as Mr Netanyahu must know, cannot remain both democratic and Jewish if it continues to control several million Palestinians without granting them full political rights. At the same time, he dreads the encirclement of hostile Arab states around him, and frets that America, under Barack Obama, may fail to make good on its promise to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. Meanwhile he lamely repeats the old mantra that “there is no Palestinian partner for peace.”

Quite possibly he does not know what he should, can or will do. Had Mitt Romney won the American presidency, he might have given Mr Netanyahu a fillip. Mr Obama has no such desire. Instead, he will repeat to the Israeli leader what Mr Netanyahu has almost said but cannot bring himself fully to endorse—that there is no serious alternative to a two-state deal.