Media365
5 min readOct 13, 2026 08:04 PM IST
First published on: Oct 13, 2026 at 08:04 PM IST
Earlier this month, the Green Party of England and Wales voted to declare Zionism a form of racism. The reaction was immediate and ferocious, well out of proportion for a party with only five MPs. Jewish groups condemned the motion as antisemitic. The Israeli government branded the Greens a body legitimising terrorism and banned its leader, who is himself Jewish, from entering Israel. Lost in the uproar was the truly significant wording hidden inside the resolution’s text. For the first time, a mainstream Western political party was calling ‘’for the establishment of a single democratic state throughout historic Palestine.” In short, a ‘’one state solution’’.
The conventional wisdom that has dictated international diplomacy, including India’s, for three decades — the two-state solution — is well and truly dead. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s repeated insistence that Israeli security leaves no room for Palestinian sovereignty merely stated aloud what 30 years of policy had achieved. With elections imminent, Israel’s political opposition has failed to present a clear or convincing mandate for Palestinian statehood. Public support for two states, low to start with, has collapsed — dropping to 17 per cent in recent Pew polling as security concerns continue to escalate three years after the October 7 Hamas attack and the devastating Israeli retaliation on Gaza.
The unworkability of a two-state solution goes beyond Israeli domestic politics. A separate Palestinian state, along the borders prior to the 1967 Six-Day War, is no longer viable. Anyone who has travelled through the West Bank knows that 30 years of expanding hilltop settlements, military outposts, restricted bypass roads, and dividing fences have fractured the territory into an absurd patchwork quilt of jurisdictions. You cannot build a coherent, sovereign state with a sustainable economy on a land so fragmented. Getting the 750,000-odd Israeli settlers in the occupied territories to relocate to Israel’s legal borders is well nigh impossible.
Israel cannot occupy Gaza indefinitely. It may have degraded Hamas militarily, but it cannot crush the humiliation and despair that feed Palestinian militancy. Continuing down this path will only cement Israel’s status as a global pariah.
As the Greens’ resolution proposes, the only available path to lasting peace is a single, secular, democratic state of Israel-Palestine with equal rights for all residents, Jewish and Arab alike. Persisting with the ideal of the two-state solution only prolongs an oppressive status quo.
Sceptics will point out that a one-state solution is highly unrealistic: Israelis and Palestinians are too deeply divided by decades of trauma to ever share a single country. But every other option is even more delusional. Ask Israelis: Would you prefer an armed, hostile neighbor on your doorstep, or full integration with 5.5 million Palestinians alongside the 2 million Arab citizens already living more or less peacefully in Israel (albeit as second-class citizens)? Ask Palestinians: Would you prefer to cling to the illusion of having your own country, or gain equal democratic rights in a prosperous power?
These are very difficult questions and it will take time to change hearts and minds on both sides. But history demonstrates that entrenched ethnic and sectarian conflicts can transition into shared democratic governance. Multiethnic democracies like Belgium have managed complex linguistic and cultural divisions within a constitutional framework that guarantees protections for different ethnic groups. Israeli Jews would need these safeguards, ideally underwritten by acceptable foreign powers, to overcome their fears over being outnumbered by Palestinian Arabs. Northern Ireland showed that after decades of sectarian violence, former enemies can share power under a single democratic system overseen by Britain and the Republic of Ireland. Other precedents — South Africa, Bosnia, even fragile Lebanon — are far from perfect, but they prove that shared governance is possible, and vastly superior to endless war and misery.
A shared state is not an anti-Zionist anomaly; it echoes Zionism’s founders, many of whom were democratic socialists rooted in liberal, humanistic values. In his 1902 utopian novel Altneuland (“Old New Land”), Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, envisioned a secular state where Arab citizens held equal voting rights, sat in parliament, and benefited from economic advancement. Herzl would be appalled to see his vision hijacked by ethnonationalists like Netanyahu.
Persisting with the myth of two states only guarantees endless bloodletting. The Green Party’s resolution should be seized as a catalyst to kick-start the process of building consensus around a single democratic state where Israelis and Palestinians share peace, dignity, and equal rights. India can play a critical role in this. Despite its recent tilt towards Israel, India’s historically staunch support for Palestinian rights gives it sufficient credibility to take the lead in evolving a one-state solution. This might just be the bold leap of political imagination required to return India to the top table of multilateral diplomacy.
The writer is an investor
