JTA — For much of the modern history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the phrase “one-state solution” was a fringe idea, especially among Jewish supporters of Israel. The proposal that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs would live under one government was largely seen as the very antithesis of Zionism, which asserts the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism and the right to establish a Jewish-led state in Jews’ ancestral homeland.

That is changing — at least in some corners of the Jewish world.

A recent poll found that roughly half of American Jews under 35 support resolving the conflict by creating a single binational state spanning Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, with a government elected by both Jews and Palestinians. The Jewish Voter Resource Center poll, released May 21, found that among non-Orthodox Jews under 35, support was slightly higher.

Across the Jewish population as a whole, support for such a solution was far lower, about one-quarter, with older Jews much more likely to favor some version of two states or an explicitly Jewish state.

Indeed, the numbers do not mean that a binational state has become a consensus position. Among the people directly involved, there’s nowhere near sufficient support to make this happen.

The idea remains deeply unpopular among Israelis — most of whom see it as an assault on Zionism, since they believe it would make it all but impossible to preserve the Jewish character of the state, and pose a direct threat to their security given the years of Palestinian attacks. The majority of Palestinians, for their part, see the idea as a surrender of their dreams of statehood and are deeply skeptical that they would ever be allowed full rights, power and dignity under such an arrangement.

But fueled by frustration over the war against Hamas in Gaza and what many regard as the death of the two-state solution, versions of the idea are getting their most public hearing in years. And young Americans aren’t the only ones embracing the idea.

Last week New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein interviewed the co-executive directors of A Land for All. The joint Israeli-Palestinian effort, first formed more than a decade ago, proposes a confederation model that recognizes both Israel and Palestine but imagines joint sovereignty with free movement and cooperation among the two governments.

“Palestinians vote for the Palestinian government, but they can have residency in Israel and, accordingly, all the civil rights and local rights that come with the residency status — and vice versa,” explained Rula Hardal, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel.

Her partner, the Jewish Israeli lawyer May Pundak, described the idea as “decoupling… nationality from a geographic space,” and offered Northern Ireland as an example of a bitter conflict largely resolved through power-sharing.

Writing on Substack in June, MJ Rosenberg, who supported the two-state solution as the policy director of the Israel Policy Forum in the early 2000s, declared his support for a “single democratic state in all of historic Palestine.”

“It would belong to everyone who lives there,” wrote Rosenberg. “Jewish civil rights would be fully protected. Palestinian civil rights would be fully protected. The government would derive its legitimacy from citizenship rather than ethnicity.”

Last month, leaders of the Israeli-Palestinian coexistence movement Standing Together launched a new joint Jewish-Arab political party in Israel whose name, Makom Lekulanu, translates to “a place for us all.” Although the party platform doesn’t advocate a one-state solution, Standing Together has endorsed A Land for All’s “two states, one homeland” vision.

A number of recent books have also proposed some form of power-sharing, often less than the one-person, one-vote model proposed by activists on the far left, but still a radical departure from the status quo.

In his 2021 book “Haifa Republic,” the Israeli-German philosopher Omri Boehm proposes a binational constitutional state encompassing Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Under his plan, Jews and Palestinians would remain distinct national communities, but the state would belong equally to both peoples.

“We are dealing with an intolerable situation where the impossible is necessary,” Boehm, who is on faculty at the New School for Social Research, told the German newspaper Der Spiegel last October. “We must find proposals for a political solution in the future. The only alternative to unlimited war is the compromise of a federation.”

In their 2025 book, “Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine,” Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man and Sarah Leah Whitson propose a transitional government of Israelis and Palestinians, which would lay the political and legal groundwork for a shared democratic future.

According to a survey in April by the independent, Israel-based Institute for National Security Studies, only 4% of the Israeli public supported a one-state binational........

© The Times of Israel