What Do People Mean by “One-State”?

A recent poll conducted by the Jewish Voter Resource Center found that nearly half of American Jews under the age of 35 support replacing Israel with a binational state as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Whether this finding represents a lasting generational shift among American Jews remains to be seen, but it raises an important question: is a one-state solution a viable alternative to the traditional two-state paradigm?

Before answering that question, however, we must first ask what a “one-state solution” actually means.

Some observers may notice a growing alliance between American progressives—both Jewish and non-Jewish—and Palestinians who say they support a one-state solution “where everyone has equal rights.” But are they necessarily referring to the same thing?

When American progressives speak about a binational state in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they often envision something similar to Belgium.

Belgium has two major national communities: the Dutch-speaking Flemings and the French-speaking Walloons. Rather than assimilating them into a single national identity, Belgium has institutions that recognize both communities and allow them to preserve their distinct identities through a system of shared power. Many issues of daily life, such as education, language, and culture, are administered at the regional level, enabling each community to maintain its traditions and heritage. Belgium’s political system also contains constitutional safeguards that ensure neither group can permanently dominate the other.

In other words, a binational state such as Belgium is not merely a one-person-one-vote democracy. It is also a system that grants both communities collective national rights alongside equal individual rights, allowing each nation to exercise a degree of self-determination under the same federal government.

Applied to Israel-Palestine, such a model would likely involve a decentralized federal government that recognizes both Hebrew and Arabic as official languages, grants Israelis and Palestinians autonomy over matters such as education, language, and culture within their respective communities, and incorporates power-sharing mechanisms designed to prevent either national group from dominating or assimilating the other.

While such a model may appear attractive on paper, there are several important differences between Belgium and Israel-Palestine that may make a binational state significantly more difficult to achieve in the latter case.

The first and most obvious difference is the history of violence and displacement. Unlike the Flemings and Walloons, Israelis and Palestinians have spent more than a century locked in a conflict marked by wars, terrorism, occupation, and displacement. While Belgium demonstrates that distinct national identities can coexist within a single state, it does not necessarily demonstrate how two deeply traumatized national communities can do so. Israelis and Palestinians both carry deep historical traumas, many of which are directly tied to actions taken by the other community, making trust and coexistence significantly more difficult.

A second obstacle is the lack of public support for binationalism itself. Although support for a two-state solution has declined in recent years, polling consistently suggests that support for a genuine binational state remains even lower. According to the 2022 Joint Israeli-Palestinian Pulse Poll, 33 percent of Palestinians and 39 percent of Israelis supported a two-state solution, compared to only 23 percent of Palestinians and 26 percent of Israelis who supported a single democratic state.

However, the challenge is not merely that Israelis and Palestinians would need to agree on the mechanics of a binational state. They remain divided over more fundamental questions: To whom does the land belong? Whose historical narrative is correct? Is the other community entitled to collective national rights at all?

As a result, the debate over a one-state solution is often not simply a debate about constitutional structures. It is a debate about whether two distinct national communities exist and whether both deserve recognition.

Indeed, many Israelis and Palestinians believe that all of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea rightfully belongs to them and their nation alone. Some Israeli Jews reject the notion of Palestinian peoplehood, arguing that Palestinians are simply part of the broader Arab world. Likewise, some Palestinians reject the legitimacy of an Israeli national identity, viewing Jews primarily as a religious community rather than a people with their own national claims.

It is this cycle of denial that helps explain why different people often mean very different things when they speak of a one-state solution.

While some supporters of a one-state solution genuinely envision a binational state in which both peoples retain equal collective rights, others envision a state in which one national community ultimately becomes the dominant one.

Among Palestinians, this can take the form of a sovereign Palestinian Arab state exercising exclusive national sovereignty over the entire territory. Under such a vision, Jewish inhabitants may enjoy equal individual rights as citizens, but they would no longer exercise national self-determination as a distinct people.

One prominent example is Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian activist and co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Although Barghouti supports a single democratic state, he has made it clear that it would not be a binational state. In a 2009 interview with the Electronic Intifada he said, “I am completely and categorically against binationalism because it assumes that there are two nations with equal moral claims to the land and therefore we have to accommodate both national rights.”

For Barghouti, the problem with binationalism is precisely that it recognizes both Palestinians and Israeli Jews as nations entitled to collective rights. His position illustrates how some advocates of a one-state solution envision not a Belgium-style power-sharing arrangement between two nations, but a state in which Palestinian national rights are recognized while Jewish national rights are not.

Similar reasoning can occasionally be found on the Israeli right. Just as some Palestinians envision a Palestinian state that absorbs Israeli Jews into a broader Palestinian national framework, some Israeli nationalists envision extending Israeli sovereignty over the entire territory while expecting Palestinians to integrate into Israeli society as an Arab minority.

One example is Caroline Glick, an Israeli commentator associated with the political right who has argued that Israel should extend its sovereignty over the territories and grant citizenship to Palestinians living there. In her book The Israeli Solution, she argues that demographic concerns about such a policy are overstated and that Israel could remain both Jewish and democratic under a one-state framework. While many analysts disagree with her demographic assumptions, her argument illustrates a broader point: support for a one-state arrangement can emerge across the political spectrum when individuals believe their preferred national community would ultimately remain dominant within it.

These competing visions differ significantly from a Belgium-style binational state. In the Belgian model, both national communities retain their distinct identities and collective rights. In contrast, in a state defined exclusively as either Israeli or Palestinian, one national community ultimately becomes dominant while the other is absorbed into a broader political framework.

The debate over a one-state solution is therefore often less a debate about institutional design than a debate about national legitimacy itself. A Belgium-style binational state would require Israelis and Palestinians to recognize one another as distinct but equally legitimate national communities deserving of permanent shared sovereignty. Yet many advocates of one-state arrangements—among both Palestinians and Israelis—envision something fundamentally different: a single state in which their own national community ultimately defines the character of the state. Until Israelis and Palestinians can agree not only on equal individual rights but also on the legitimacy of each other’s national aspirations, the political and constitutional arrangements that make binational states work elsewhere are unlikely to succeed between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.