15.02.2017 | 20:06

Explained: What is the difference between a two-state solution and one-state solution

The Trump administration appears to be easing away from longstanding U.S. support for Palestinian statehood as the preferred outcome of Middle East peace efforts, which may please some allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. But the alternatives are few, and each comes with daunting and combustible complications, including for Israel itself.

The idea of two states in the Holy Land - a Jewish Israel and an Arab Palestine - rests on a particular logic: There are two quite different peoples of roughly equal size living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River; each wants their own nation-state to control and dominate numerically; each has shown tenacity toward this goal.

This would require Israel to let go of most and maybe all of the territory it captured in the 1967 war, when it completed its takeover of all the land that British colonizers abandoned in 1948. That includes the West Bank, where there are now islands of Palestinian autonomy, scattered Jewish settlements and overriding Israeli military control; the eastern part of Jerusalem, which Israel has fully annexed and populated with Jews; and the coastal Gaza Strip, which was actually evacuated in 2005 and is now controlled by the Islamic militants of Hamas and blockaded by Israel and Egypt.

One State Solution

For years this was the goal of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and for many Palestinians it is indeed the preferred option: a single democratic state, not defined as specifically Jewish or Arab, in the area of British colonial Palestine. Many prefer it anyway to the two-state notion whereby even if Israel gives up all the land it captured in 1967 it retains almost 80% of Palestine.

The problem is that almost no one in Israel is arguing for the true extension of full rights to Palestinians in the currently occupied territories because even with Gaza excluded it would leave Arabs constituting close to half the country's population - and that is clearly the end of the Zionist dream of a Jewish state. This is why Israel has never annexed the West Bank and why the more sophisticated nationalists profess to support a partition, albeit on terms the Palestinians have not accepted and are not likely to.