TEL AVIV — The new Israeli government, right-wing and fragile, holds no immediate hope for progress toward peace. But peacemakers should not give up. Precisely because of its vulnerability — in Israeli politics, and in the opinions of the wider world — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government may feel pressured to show a commitment to peace. Israel’s more moderate parties might even join a unity government, if they were promised a freeze on settlement construction and a reopening of serious talks with the Palestinians.

So we who know that a peace settlement is essential for Israel’s future should now rethink the ultimate goal. When I do that, I keep returning to the idea of an Israeli-Palestinian confederation, rather than a classic two-state solution. By acknowledging that our two peoples live too close together to ever be completely separate, we might finally persuade both sides to make historic concessions to each other.

This idea isn’t new. For a brief time in the 1990s, it animated some of my earliest discussions about peace with a spokesman whom Palestinians revered, Faisal al-Husseini. But that was before the Oslo Accords of 1993. Once they were signed, political leaders on both sides adopted the popular assumption that a final peace settlement must resemble a divorce — each side ridding itself of the other. Ehud Barak coined a campaign slogan: “We are here and they are there.” And after a hurricane of violence began in 2000, too few of us in the Israeli peace camp opposed building a separation wall. In that way, even we contributed to fear and separation.

In hindsight, it is clear that we should have been looking all along at confederation — cohabitation, not divorce.