The Two-State Solution Has Long Been Dead. Here's How to Bring Peace to Israel-Palestine Instead
In their new book, Dawn's Sarah Leah Whitson and Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man lay out a blueprint to end the occupation and transform an undemocratic one-state reality into a democratic one.
Long before the start of the Gaza war in 2023, there was a growing consensus among global policymakers, political activists, and the broader foreign policy community that Israel-Palestine was stuck in a political and diplomatic vortex. It was becoming clear that the Oslo process – and the very idea of a two-state solution negotiated under the skewed and coercive power dynamics of permanent military occupation – was no longer a relevant framework for resolving the situation in Israel-Palestine, and that a growing chorus of experts no longer believed it to be viable. As of 2025, it is undeniable that even the broadest interpretation of the Oslo process offers no viable path forward that can be translated into policy.
Instead of pushing for progress to remedy the conflict, prior to the Gaza war, the international community appeared relatively resigned to the quasi stability of a brutish, perpetual, but manageable Israeli military occupation, relentlessly expanding settlements in the West Bank; unlawful annexations on top of those in East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights; intermittent wars and episodes of armed conflict marked by indiscriminate and deliberate attacks on civilians; and a near-total siege of Gaza. Within the international legal and human rights communities, a growing consensus had also emerged that Israel was committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution against the Palestinians it rules over, and that the occupation, because of its permanent nature, marked by violations of occupation laws and deliberate denial of Palestinian rights to self-determination, was itself illegal. The International Court of Justice affirmed that consensus in its July 19, 2024, advisory opinion, determining that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end.
Yet the United States and Israel seemed to believe this state of affairs was stable and acceptable enough to keep pushing forward efforts to normalize Israel’s relationship with Arab dictatorships. It was only Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the doubly unprecedented genocidal war and destruction Israel unleashed in Gaza in response that shook the sleepwalking international community into the understanding that there could be no stability or security without a real resolution to the conflict.
Alternatives to the two-state solution envisioned by the Oslo Accords exist as theoretical visions for the future. Different groups and thinkers have put forth and advocated for one democratic state, a confederation, a federal system, a binational state, and even different proposals for regional integration. Others have sidestepped the question of self-determination for Palestinians, offering only a plan for economic development. None of them, however, offers practical roadmaps or a plan for how to achieve those visions or translate them into policy.
A ‘One-State Reality’
The march toward permanent occupation and apartheid has not been a subtle development or even particularly difficult to identify. As far back as 1979, then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin openly declared that Israel did not intend to withdraw to the 1949 Armistice Lines, stating that “the green line no longer exists – it has vanished forever.” Benjamin Netanyahu has been far clearer, long declaring that Israel will never withdraw from the territory between the river and the sea.
For more than a decade, academics, analysts, and even former Israeli government officials have described that situation as a “one-state reality,” largely based on the understanding that the occupation is, at this point, no longer temporary – if it ever was. “Israel’s [current] government did not create this reality but rather made it impossible to deny. The temporary status of ‘occupation’ of the Palestinian territories is now a permanent condition in which one state ruled by one group of people rules over another group of people,” foreign policy experts Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine in April 2023.
Our new book, From Apartheid to Democracy, accepts the premise of a one-state reality and picks up where the punitive steps offered by a legal and human rights framework naturally end. It provides a positive policy vision for how to move forward – practical steps, developed in granular detail, to transform an undemocratic, de facto one-state reality into a democratic, rights-respecting regime with equality for all peoples under its control and to afford both Jewish Israelis and Palestinians the opportunity to exercise self-determination in one, two, or more states if they choose. It seeks to inject energy and creativity into what we believe can be a renewed, vibrant debate about what should happen in Israel-Palestine to ensure a democratic, rights-respecting outcome.
Space for a New Approach
Despite their horrors, the events of October 7 and the genocide that followed have created a window of opportunity to advance new ideas and seek new solutions. Whereas before October 7, the global community was relatively comfortable resigning itself to what appeared to be a stable status quo of occupation and apartheid with no serious resistance, the situation is different today. Where there was certainty, there is now uncertainty in the face of tremendous volatility and confusion about how to end this war or restore relative stability and security. This volatility corresponds with a tremendously dangerous moment for Palestinians in particular, who are facing possible extermination and complete expulsion from Gaza and parts of the West Bank.
But there is space for changed conceptions and approaches. Faced with Israeli rejectionism and genocide, much of the international community is pivoting back to punitive steps against Israel, demanding an end to the occupation and war, while some governments are again vaguely referring to a “pathway” to Palestinian statehood. The 2024 International Court of Justice opinion concluding that member states must end any assistance to Israel for its occupation and apartheid rule has added additional legal impetus to challenging the status quo and encouraged a growing international movement of states and civil society to sanction Israel.
What’s still missing, however, is a plan that would actually result in an end to the occupation and apartheid, an end to the conflict, and self-determination for Palestinians. We are in many ways back where we started: the world is outraged by Israel’s policies but has little to offer beyond outrage and condemnation. Even if Israel faces international prosecutions, isolation, and crippling sanctions, the international community is still unable to articulate any positive policy demands or a vision for a just peace and rights-respecting governance. Alongside historical guilt over the Holocaust that makes it difficult for some governments to criticize Israel, this sad state of affairs is also a result of simply running out of ideas – or at least ones Israelis are willing to entertain.
A Blueprint
The international community’s approach to Israel-Palestine has, for the most part, prioritized resolving national-political aspects of the conflict over steps to ensure an end to Israeli crimes – namely the illegal occupation and apartheid rule – and protecting basic individual civil, political, and human rights. Instead, and particularly in the absence of any political or diplomatic horizon, the blueprint we present in our book urges the international community to reevaluate its priorities and insist first and foremost on ending Israel’s ongoing crimes. We believe there should be no negotiation over ending some of the worst crimes under international law or the non-derogable human rights of Palestinians. Furthermore, because Palestinians currently have no legitimate, elected, or accountable leadership and because no leader has the authority to negotiate away individual rights, the book argues that the best way to resolve differing views on the future governance of Israel-Palestine should be through a democratic process in which every person in the territory can participate.
Thus, we place the onus on the State of Israel – as the state exercising effective control over all peoples in Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza – to meet its international legal obligations by ending its crimes and respecting the rights of all people under its rule. Only once Palestinians have political, civic, and human rights equal to Israeli Jews living in the Territory will Palestinians and Israelis be able to democratically determine what political structures and outcomes best serve their collective, national, political, ethnic, and religious interests. Ours is not a plan for achieving national self-determination; it is a plan to create the conditions under which achieving self-determination and deciding political issues of governance are possible.
To that end, in our book, we present a blueprint that describes practical policy steps that, taken together, would end apartheid and occupation and effectively transform an undemocratic one-state reality into a democratic one. We also detail the legislative, institutional, and policy changes necessary to achieve that transformation and the timetable for achieving them. Most notably, it involves a three-year transitional government tasked with transforming an undemocratic one-state reality into a more democratic one, dismantling repressive and supremacist institutions and laws, creating equality where there is none today, guaranteeing equal political representation, and laying the foundations for a transitional justice process that is impossible today. The steps detailed in the book include systems for ensuring proportional political representation alongside safeguards against majoritarianism. Our blueprint strives to do all of this without discounting the legitimate fears and needs of Israeli Jews and Palestinians alike, including security.
The political reality that the blueprint creates would indeed look and act very much like a single state, and some readers may argue that it is a thinly veiled plan for a “one-state solution.” The blueprint is not, however, designed to create an immutable structure or structures. Ideally, following a successful transition to a democratic reality, the people of the territory between the river and the sea can decide by referendum what type of state or states they want more permanently and what relationship they might have with each other. Those choices are not available to Israelis and Palestinians today. Our plan is designed to make them possible.
Political Will Needed
Such a transformation cannot be forced upon Israelis or Palestinians; it requires a level of earnest political will where there is almost none today. That type of change does not typically come about spontaneously, particularly on the part of privileged groups with the most to lose by giving up their privilege. The most privileged group in Israel-Palestine, Jewish Israelis, will not give up that privilege under the current power dynamics, as well as those in the region and the world. The plan is therefore predicated on the assumption that it will only become relevant for adoption and implementation as a result of dramatic shifts in Israelis’ – and relatedly, Palestinians’ – strategic outlooks. An event, a series of events, or major shifts in the international system must first create the conditions in which the Israeli government and Jewish Israelis are forced to reevaluate their core values and interests. That can only occur if Israelis believe that their country’s security, prosperity, or political survival is no longer tenable or that the current situation poses an existential threat to their lives and livelihood.
Such a turning point can come about in several ways. Prior to the Gaza war, we found that the easiest scenario for most people to imagine was one in which growing outrage over Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid rule led to sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and economic pressure similar to those used against Apartheid South Africa. These would be the ideal means for the international community to pursue a coercive but nonviolent, diplomatic, and multilateral effort to resolve Israeli intransigence. A second path that could lead to such a reckoning was more difficult to articulate before the Gaza War: unimaginably painful, intractable violence from which neither side can see a path to lasting victory – an unacceptably painful stalemate. More people are able to imagine the latter scenario today, although it does appear that Israel will be successful in militarily defeating its adversaries on the battlefield. What’s more, at least at the time of writing, it appeared that the criminal devastation Israel has wrought on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice has found is plausibly genocide, combined with now-institutionalized Israeli rejection of the idea of a two-state outcome, may have a correlative relationship with and even amplify momentum toward sanctions and international isolation. Some of this is already taking place.
Even with massive pressure, however, such a moment cannot be willed into existence. On the contrary, ours is a practical policy vision that the United States and other global powers can adopt and use to guide their approaches and strategic thinking vis-à-vis Israel-Palestine, replacing their unhelpful policies and helping them see past the long-expired idea of a negotiated two-state solution in the Oslo framework. The Gaza war has demonstrated quite clearly that there are hard limits to the world’s ability to coerce Israel into policies and diplomatic initiatives it opposes, even by nominally leveraging the military assistance Israeli military analysts describe as critical for survival. Yet, while the United States and international community cannot force Israel to end the occupation and apartheid rule, they can and must provide a practical, positive vision for how to do so and design their diplomatic, economic, and military policies vis-à-vis Israel so that those policies advance the viability of that new vision.
Reprinted from ‘From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine’ by Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man and Sarah Leah Whitson, courtesy of University of California Press. Copyright 2025.
Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man is the director of Israel-Palestine at DAWN. Prior to joining DAWN, Michael worked as a journalist in Israel-Palestine for more than 10 years, including as the editor-in-chief of +972 Magazine.
Sarah Leah Whitson is the executive director of DAWN. Previously, she served as executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division.
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The only way to bring peace to Israel and Palestinian is to completely dismantle this genocidal and apartheid regime and heal the wounds, those responsible for this genocide need to be brought to justice. The world need to be done to the ZioNazi what they did to the Nazi, that is the only peace can take roots in that part of the world.
It is Palestine. Has always been. Only because of our guilt and shame, it became 77 years of havoc and more murder and shame.
greetings from germany.