Two States in One Homeland: Recycling a Politically Defunct Partition Paradigm

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, US President Bill Clinton, and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat at the signing of the Oslo Accord. (Photo: Vince Musi, via Wikimedia Commons)
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In recent years—before the genocidal war on Gaza—the collapse of the Oslo Accords and the fading illusion of the two-state solution led to the emergence of several alternative political proposals to resolve the colonial conflict in Palestine. Most prominent among these is the one democratic state vision, which primarily takes two forms: a unitary state or a binational state.

The most recent iteration is the seven-year-old One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC), which builds its program on the original liberation project endorsed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1971. The ODSC, a Palestinian-led campaign, has updated this original program by drawing on the extensive literature produced by Palestinian intellectuals, academics, and politically educated activists since the late 1990s. While these two forms disagree on certain issues, they diverge from traditional models on one fundamental component: the necessity of dismantling the structures of colonial domination and creating a single state—either with three parliaments or with one parliament, one constitution, and one judiciary. The ODSC adopts the unitary state model as the fairest and most sustainable solution.

Recently, however, an Arab- Israeli Jewish initiative titled Two States in One Homeland has emerged, claiming to offer an alternative to the traditional two-state solution. In reality, it is merely a recycling of an already defunct paradigm—one effectively destroyed by the Israeli colonial and genocidal regime.

Following the emergence of the Two States in One Homeland initiative as a political proposal, questions have increasingly surfaced within Palestinian academic and political circles, as well as among international solidarity activists, regarding the fundamental differences between this model and the vision advanced by the (ODSC). At first glance, the two projects appear to share important features. Both acknowledge that the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has become a single geopolitical and economic space, making the traditional territorial partition envisioned by the Oslo process increasingly impossible. Both also recognize that the classic two-state formula has reached a historic dead end.

This apparent convergence, however, conceals a far more profound divergence. Beneath the shared vocabulary lies a fundamentally different understanding of the nature of the conflict, the meaning of justice, and the political future of Palestine. While the Two States in One Homeland proposal seeks to preserve the basic logic of partition in a modified form, the One Democratic State Campaign argues that the political, legal, and moral assumptions underlying partition have themselves collapsed. The disagreement, therefore, is not merely institutional or constitutional; it concerns the very framework through which Palestine should be understood and decolonized.

The significance of this debate has grown as the Two States in One Homeland initiative has become increasingly institutionalized, attracting external funding and the participation of a few Palestinian academics and researchers, particularly from within “Israe. By contrast, the One Democratic State Campaign—which is a Palestinian-led organization—has remained a voluntary political campaign since its establishment. It brings together Palestinians from across all segments of the population—including citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jerusalemites, and the diaspora—alongside Israeli Jewish academics and activists committed to anti-colonial and anti-Zionist principles. This broad social and political composition has given the campaign a higher degree of legitimacy within significant sections of Palestinian political discourse, making it widely accepted among Palestinians. Furthermore, the ODSC project derives its inspiration from the Palestine Liberation Organization’s original vision, rather than being a framework presented or imposed by foreign powers. This originality makes it far more appealing and convincing.

It is equally important to clarify that the emergence of the One Democratic State Campaign was never simply a reaction to the collapse of the two-state solution. Although the accelerating failure of partition undoubtedly reinforced its relevance, the campaign originated from a broader conviction: that lasting peace cannot be achieved without historical justice. Its central premise is that the Palestinian question is not fundamentally a border dispute requiring territorial compromise, but a settler-colonial question requiring decolonization. Consequently, the objective is not merely to replace an unworkable political formula with another constitutional arrangement, but to establish a framework capable of addressing the historical injustices upon which the existing colonial order was built.

This discussion has acquired even greater urgency during Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. Amid the immediate humanitarian catastrophe and the imperative of survival, political thinking about the future risks being marginalized and postponed indefinitely. Yet precisely in moments of profound violence, strategic clarity becomes indispensable. If Palestine is understood as a case of anti-colonial liberation rather than simply humanitarian suffering, then developing a coherent political horizon becomes an essential dimension of resistance itself. Protecting collective political consciousness from proposals that obscure the structural roots of the conflict is therefore no less important than confronting its immediate manifestations.

This necessity becomes particularly evident as international diplomacy increasingly attempts to revive variants of the two-state paradigm. Such initiatives are frequently presented as pragmatic efforts to restore peace, yet they rarely confront the realities that rendered partition impossible in the first place: the continued expansion of settlements, the fragmentation of Palestinian territory, the institutionalization of unequal legal systems, and the ongoing denial of Palestinian national and refugee rights.

In this context, renewed appeals to partition often appear less concerned with securing justice for Palestinians than with preserving Israel’s international legitimacy while avoiding meaningful accountability for decades of occupation, colonization, and systematic dispossession.

The core distinction between the two political visions begins with their competing interpretations of the conflict itself. If the conflict is understood primarily as a national dispute between two peoples possessing equal historical claims to the same land, then compromise through partition—or through some modified version of partition—may appear reasonable. Such an interpretation naturally encourages institutional arrangements designed to balance competing national identities while preserving separate sovereignties.

The One Democratic State Campaign rejects this analytical framework. It argues that Palestine should instead be understood as a classic case of settler colonialism and apartheid, in which an indigenous population was dispossessed and replaced through an ongoing project of elimination, territorial expansion, legal discrimination, and demographic engineering.

From this perspective, justice cannot consist merely of regulating relations between two national entities. Rather, it requires dismantling the colonial structures that produced brute violence and inequality in the first place and replacing them with a single democratic constitutional order based upon equal citizenship, individual rights, and collective equality for all who live in the country.

This difference explains why the campaign views proposals such as Two States in One Homeland as misleading, despite their apparent departure from the traditional two-state model. Rather than transcending partition, the proposal attempts to rescue it by preserving two national states—Israel and Palestine—while opening borders, allowing reciprocal residency, and creating selected shared institutions inspired partly by the experience of European integration. While these innovations undoubtedly represent a departure from the Oslo framework, they nevertheless leave intact the foundational principle that sovereignty should remain organized around separate national states.

The analogy with the European Union is, in this respect, deeply problematic. European integration emerged among sovereign states that mutually recognized one another following the end of imperial wars. The Palestinian case, by contrast, concerns an ongoing settler-colonial relationship in which one state continues to exercise overwhelming political, military, and legal domination over another population.

The central obstacle is therefore not the existence of borders alone, but the colonial system that created and continues to enforce unequal power relations. Opening borders without dismantling that structure risks softening some of its visible manifestations while leaving its underlying logic fundamentally untouched. Furthermore, under this deficient paradigm, the Israeli state would continue to control 78% of historic Palestine, which represents a grave injustice. Therefor it would be impossible to convince the majority of the Palestinians, who are supposed to undertake the agency of their liberation.

Justice, Decolonization, and Democracy

The practical implications of these competing frameworks become particularly evident when examining three issues that lie at the heart of the Palestinian question: the right of return, Israeli settlements, and the character of democracy itself.

For the One Democratic State Campaign, Palestinian refugees are not a humanitarian concern to be managed through compensation, symbolic recognition, or limited resettlement. They are the holders of an inalienable legal and political right to return to their homeland and to participate equally in rebuilding a democratic state. The right of return is therefore not an obstacle to peace, but one of its indispensable foundations. A political settlement that fails to restore this right cannot claim to achieve historical justice, because it leaves unresolved the original act of dispossession and elimination upon which the conflict was built.

The Two States in One Homeland proposal faces a fundamental dilemma on this question. As long as Israel remains a Jewish nation-state, the return of millions of Palestinian refugees would inevitably challenge the demographic and political foundations upon which that state defines itself. Consequently, advocates of the proposal tend to rely on compromise formulas—return primarily to a Palestinian state, symbolic return, negotiated quotas, or other special arrangements. Although presented as pragmatic, these approaches effectively reproduce the same limitations that characterized the Oslo process by subordinating an established right to political feasibility. The result is not a genuine resolution of the refugee question, but its indefinite postponement and ultimate liquidation.

A similar tension appears in relation to Israeli settlements. Supporters of Two States in One Homeland generally argue that settlers could remain in place as Israeli citizens residing within the Palestinian state, just as Palestinians might reside in Israel under reciprocal arrangements. While this proposal seeks to avoid another cycle of displacement, it leaves unanswered a more fundamental question: can settlements established through colonization simply be transformed into ordinary civilian communities without addressing the injustice that created them?

A decolonial perspective insists that transitional justice requires more than peaceful coexistence. It demands recognition of historical wrongdoing, restoration of rights wherever possible, and the transformation of institutions that have perpetuated policies of erasure and inequality. Reconciliation cannot be built upon the normalization of colonial outcomes while leaving untouched the structures through which land was confiscated, communities were displaced, and legal privilege became institutionalized.

At the same time, the One Democratic State Campaign rejects any vision based on collective punishment or the exclusion of Israeli Jews. It does not regard Jewish Israelis as permanent enemies, even though the majority have supported the genocide in Gaza. Rather, it distinguishes between individuals who have become part of the country’s social reality and the settler-colonial system that granted them unequal political privileges. The objective is therefore neither expulsion nor reversal of domination, but the abolition of institutional privilege itself. Equality requires replacing an ethnocratic political order with a democratic constitutional framework in which citizenship derives from common political membership rather than ethnic or religious identity.

This commitment reflects the campaign’s broader understanding of decolonization. Decolonization is often misrepresented as revenge or demographic replacement. In fact, it signifies something fundamentally different: dismantling the legal, political, and constitutional structures that organize rights according to ethno-national hierarchy. The aim is not to replace one system of domination with another, but to establish a democratic polity where sovereignty belongs equally to all citizens and where both individual and collective rights are constitutionally protected.

The contrast between the two projects becomes equally clear in their understanding of democracy. Under the Two States in One Homeland model, democracy remains confined within two separate nation-states. Israel continues to define itself constitutionally as a Jewish state, while Palestine becomes a Palestinian national state. Cooperation may increase, borders may become more permeable, and joint institutions may emerge, but citizenship continues to be mediated through competing national sovereignties.

The One Democratic State Campaign advances a fundamentally different conception. Democracy cannot coexist with permanent constitutional privilege based on ethnicity or religion. A genuinely democratic state must derive political rights from equal citizenship alone. Cultural, religious, and linguistic identities remain fully protected, but they no longer determine access to sovereignty, political power, immigration policy, or constitutional status. Equality is not an accommodation between competing privileges; it is the abolition of privilege itself.

Supporters of Two States in One Homeland often argue that their proposal is more politically realistic because it avoids confronting existing national identities. Yet realism should not be measured solely by short-term political acceptability. It must also be judged by a proposal’s capacity to resolve the structural causes of conflict. History repeatedly demonstrates that settlements which postpone fundamental questions of justice may reduce violence temporarily, but they rarely establish durable peace. Stability built upon unresolved colonial inequalities ultimately reproduces the conditions for bloodier future conflict.

The experience of the past three decades reinforces this conclusion. Efforts to manage the conflict without dismantling the structures of settler colonialism have produced deeper occupation, expanding settlements, increasing fragmentation, and unprecedented violence. Against this background, proposals that seek to preserve the underlying architecture of partition—even under innovative institutional arrangements—risk becoming exercises in political recycling rather than genuine historical alternatives.

The debate between these two visions is therefore not about constitutional engineering or administrative design. It is a debate about the future of justice in Palestine. Should political efforts focus on managing the consequences of settler colonialism while preserving its foundational structures, or should they seek to dismantle those structures altogether? Should peace be understood as coexistence within an unequal constitutional order or a genocidal regime, or as the creation of a single democratic community founded upon equality, the right of return, transitional justice, and shared citizenship?

From the perspective of the One Democratic State Campaign, only the second path offers a sustainable and morally coherent future. The project does not promise an immediate political breakthrough, nor does it claim that decolonization will be easy. Rather, it proposes a long-term process of rebuilding the Palestinian national movement around a democratic, anti-colonial vision capable of uniting Palestinians across all geographic and political divisions while also attracting Jewish democratic and anti-colonial partners. Instead of reviving a partition paradigm that Israel and its imperial allies have rendered obsolete, it seeks to establish a new political horizon grounded in universal principles of freedom, equality, and historical justice.

– Awad Abdelfattah is a political writer and the former general secretary of the Balad party. He is the coordinator of the Haifa-based One Democratic State Campaign, established in late 2017.