Israel/Palestine – From Separation to Federation

For years, most Israelis were taught to accept that separation from the Palestinians was not only desirable, but ultimately possible. It was the premise behind Oslo, the logic behind disengagement and the quiet assumption behind much of our strategic thinking.

October 7 ended that illusion.

Hamas’s attack did more than expose an intelligence and operational failure. It exposed a conceptual failure. The idea that walls, fences and technology could separate Israelis and Palestinians, that we could manage the conflict by disengaging from it, collapsed in a single day.

What replaced it is harder to confront: we are not separate, and we never really were.

Israelis and Palestinians live in a deeply interdependent reality. Economically, infrastructurally, and territorially, the space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is already a single system. One labor market, one set of supply chains, one overarching security framework. The attempt to divide it into two clean, self-contained entities has run up against facts on the ground that no longer bend  to diplomatic formulas.

October 7 also revealed something else: interdependence comes with vulnerability.

Israelis discovered that even the most sophisticated border cannot insulate them from what happens in Gaza. Palestinians, once again, experienced how profoundly their lives are shaped by Israeli power. Neither side can disengage from the other. Neither side can escape the consequences of the other.

At the same time, Israeli politics has shifted. The country has moved to the right, not only out of ideology, but out of fear and disillusionment. For many Israelis, the two-state solution no longer feels like a credible path to peace. After October 7, it feels like a considerable risk.

This shift is no longer confined to the traditional right. It has spread into the political center. Proposals that do not convincingly address security concerns are dismissed almost automatically. Trust, always fragile, has eroded further.

On the Palestinian side, the picture is equally grim. The Palestinian Authority is weak and lacks legitimacy. Gaza has been devastated. The prospect of statehood feels distant, if not illusory. Yet the absence of a political horizon does not mean separation has succeeded. It simply means both societies remain trapped in a reality neither controls.

Because despite everything, the basic fact remains: this is one shared space. The question is no longer whether Israelis and Palestinians share the land. We do. The question is how that shared space should be governed.

For decades, the answer was supposed to be partition. Today, that answer looks increasingly detached from reality. Territorial fragmentation, demographic intermingling, and political constraints have made a clean separation almost impossible to implement.

Recognizing this does not dictate a single alternative. It opens the field to several possibilities: confederation, rights-based one-state frameworks and other hybrid models. What they share is a recognition that interdependence is not going away.

Among these, federation deserves serious consideration. Federation does not ask Israelis and Palestinians to abandon our respective national identities. It does not pretend that history, trauma, or distrust can be erased. Instead, it offers a framework in which two national communities govern themselves while sharing responsibility for what cannot be divided.

Security, economic policy, infrastructure, water, mobility, and Jerusalem are already shared in practice. The question is whether they should continue to be managed through unilateral control – or through agreed, institutionalized cooperation. Today, these shared systems exist without shared governance. That is the core problem. Palestinians live under Israeli authority without meaningful representation, while Israelis remain exposed to the instability that Palestinian fragmentation produces. This asymmetry generates recurring crises.

It is not a stable equilibrium. It is a system under constant strain.

The current Israeli government shows little interest, if any, in returning to a partition-based approach. At the same time, indefinite control over millions of Palestinians carries growing costs—internationally, morally, and internally. Palestinians, for their part, have no realistic path to statehood under current conditions. Both sides are effectively locked into a single system, without a political structure capable of managing it.

Federation offers one way to address that gap.

It would not emerge overnight. Nor would it require a sudden leap into a fully formed political union. More likely, it would develop gradually: through practical cooperation, shared institutions, and increasing coordination in areas where separation has already failed.

A bottom-up approach—building on existing Israeli regional councils and Palestinian administrative districts—could allow both societies to preserve our distinct identities while participating in shared governance where necessary and agreeable.

There are precedents for this kind of evolution. Federal systems in Europe were not born out of trust, but out of necessity. Switzerland, Belgium, and even the European Union itself developed mechanisms to manage deep divisions by distributing power rather than centralizing it.

They did not eliminate conflict. They made it manageable.

That is the real promise of a federal approach-not harmony, but structure. Not agreement on everything, but a system that allows disagreement without collapse.

In the aftermath of October 7, the need for such thinking has only grown. Israelis demand security. Palestinians demand dignity. Neither demand can be met in isolation from the other. Unmanaged interdependence produces unmanaged vulnerability. That is the lesson we are living through.

Federation is not the only possible response to that reality. Other models deserve to be explored seriously. But continuing to rely on a paradigm that no longer fits the facts is not a strategy. It is avoidance.

The era of separation has, for all practical purposes, ended. The illusion of clean partition has been overtaken by a far more complex reality. The challenge now is not to restore what has failed, but to design something that reflects what already exists.

Israelis and Palestinians are not going anywhere. We share one land, one system, and – whether we like it or not – one future. The question is whether we can build a political framework that acknowledges this, and manages it, before the next crisis forces the issue again.

This op-ed is the abbreviated version of an article published by the author in the current (March 1 2026) issue of The Federalist Debate.