Two states in partnership: confederation models

The challenge

The familiar separation proposals kept running into the same questions: what happens to hundreds of thousands of settlers, what happens to the refugees, and how Jerusalem is divided. According to the authors of the confederation proposals, both peoples are attached to the whole land, which makes full separation especially hard¹.

Hence the idea: keep two states and a border between them, but allow movement, residence and cooperation across it. Both models stress that these are two separate sovereignties²³.

The road there

1. 2012A meeting in Beit Jala of about ten Israelis and Palestinians, initiated by journalist Meron Rapoport and activist Awni al-Mashni, gives rise to the movement Two States, One Homeland, later A Land for All¹.
2. February 2022The Holy Land Confederation proposal is published, edited by Hiba Husseini and Yossi Beilin, after work by a joint team in 2020–2022³.

The people

Proposed

Yossi Beilin · Hiba Husseini

What was proposed

• A Land for All: two independent states based on the 1967 lines; open borders and freedom of movement; Jerusalem as an open, shared city; shared institutions; redress of past injustices without creating new ones¹.
• A Land for All: Israelis could live in Palestine as Israeli citizens and Palestinian residents, and Palestinians could live in Israel as Palestinian citizens and Israeli residents. Each state keeps its own security forces, which cooperate and jointly protect the external borders².
• Holy Land: a border based on the Green Line with 1:1 land swaps, following the maps of the Geneva Initiative; a corridor under Palestinian administration between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip⁴.
• Holy Land: settlers beyond the border could move to Israel or stay as permanent residents of Palestine, subject to Palestinian law; a comparable number of Palestinians would receive permanent-resident status in Israel³⁴.
• Holy Land: Jerusalem is the capital of both states and a partly open city – at first the open area is limited to the Old City⁴.
• Holy Land: Palestine has no army; a third-party force is deployed on its territory; a joint security coordination mechanism. A 30-month implementation period, a review every five years, and an option to dissolve the confederation without changing the border⁴.

Read the document

The geography

The hard decisions

• Criticism of the confederation idea in general and of A Land for All (Shira Efron and Evan Gottesman, +972 Magazine, 2021): open borders clash with Israel's security doctrine, and Israel is unlikely to agree to share control of the external borders⁵.
• According to the same authors, the power gap would remain: Palestine would be the weaker partner economically, politically and militarily, and Palestinians might not feel truly sovereign. They also point to a large income gap and to the difficulty of joining the institutions of two very different systems of government⁵.
• Also according to the authors, a 2021 RAND Corporation study found that the idea is little known among Israelis and Palestinians and that acceptance rates are low⁵.
• Criticism of the Holy Land proposal (Yossi Alpher, Americans for Peace Now, 2022): leaving about 200,000 settlers on Palestinian territory is in his view a recipe for friction and violence; admitting Palestinians into Israel could be read as realising the right of return; and confederations, he argues, have not lasted⁶.
• Barriers: Meron Rapoport, a founder of A Land for All, acknowledges that the idea raises questions that are hard to answer today – the future of the settlements, the right of return, Jerusalem, the economic gaps and security¹. Alpher notes that the proposal currently has no real political backing⁶.

Where accounts differ

According to A Land for All

Full separation does not fit both peoples' attachment to the whole land; two states with an open border and shared institutions make it possible to redress injustices without creating new ones¹.

According to The authors of the Holy Land Confederation

Confederation is not a substitute for the two-state solution but a way to facilitate it, partly because it does not require a mass evacuation of settlers³.

According to Shira Efron and Evan Gottesman

The confederation model does not solve the problems of security, sovereignty and unequal power, and in some cases sharpens them⁵.

According to Yossi Alpher

The proposal does not explain why a confederation would solve the problems of settlements and security more efficiently than an ordinary two-state arrangement⁶.

What remains open

• A confederation is not a single state: in both proposals each people has its own state, citizenship and institutions²⁴. The difference from separation proposals lies in how open the border is and in the status of those who would live on the other side.
• The proposals do not answer every question in the same detail: in the Holy Land proposal the refugee issue rests on earlier frameworks without numbers⁴, and in A Land for All the security arrangements are stated as a general principle².