Seeking an Egalitarian State in Palestine/Israel: The Recent Debate about Binationalism

After the signing of the Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO in September 1993, most Israelis and Palestinians hoped that a peaceful solution to end the century-long confrontation could be found and believed that such a settlement would fall under the rubric of “Two States for the Two Peoples.” Actions on the ground by Israeli governments that opposed that option, led by the radical right and nationalist parties, worked to prevent such a resolution. Extremists, often with the authorities’ support, engaged in a vigorous and unremitting campaign to found new settlements and expand existing ones. By the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Jewish settlers were living in some two hundred villages and towns in the West Bank and made up more than twenty percent of its population. Today, even most of those who seek a peaceful solution realize that uprooting these settlements (without the use of force), in some of which have a majority of second- and even third-generation residents, is unrealistic. And they conclude that effective partition—Two States/Two Peoples—is no longer practical.