For my entire lived memory, the question has been how to divide the land. Every negotiation, every shuttle diplomacy tour, every roadmap to peace has assumed that partition is the key; that the only way forward is to cut the territory into three pieces with at least two governments. What we've seen instead are opportunistic land grabs, capitulation to the most extreme voices, and an endless cycle of small infractions snowballing into outright war.
The multi-state solution will perpetually leave a weakened Palestinian people living at the mercy of its better armed, more economically prosperous neighbor, and this disparity has been baked into all previous agreements. Geography alone has made this unavoidable: settlements and bypass roads, military zones and walls have diced the land into fragments that no amount of cartographic creativity can stitch into coherent, sovereign states. There can only be one winner in this arrangement.
The populations are already woven together in ways partition can't cleanly undo: labor markets, supply chains, water systems, and familial ties make a unified nation far more functional long term. Rather than adding layers of bureaucratic complexity in an attempt to undo what naturally exists, building around this material reality will ease the lives of everyone.
The solution is clear: one state, with equal rights for all. This will require international oversight, as both sides have shown themselves incapable of honest brokerage. Outside enforcement is necessary to guarantee the transition is fair, to protect civilians from retaliation, and to keep the process from collapsing into another round of score-settling.
Post-apartheid South Africa proved that a single polity could be forged from the wreckage of systematic inequality. Northern Ireland's Good Friday Agreement showed that power-sharing can hold if the alternative is endless bloodshed. In a shared state, the land stays whole, the holy sites remain accessible, and the economy becomes something capable of competing both regionally and globally.
The objections are immediate and fierce. Security fears are real, but they stem from deprivation. Economic stability, where the starvation ceases and children have access to education and medicine, strips away the soil in which armed resistance grows. Political dominance is a danger, but constitutional safeguards, rotating leadership structures, and guaranteed representation for minorities are proven tools. Cultural identity need not be erased, but it cannot rest on the subjugation of Palestinians.
Partition has given us only war, in ebbs and flows. A one-state framework is the only viable path, one that treats every life under the same law, with the same rights, on the same soil.
The blame game chain of cause and effect has long been an ouroboros: targeted assassinations have hollowed a once legitimate resistance into a movement that now kills indiscriminately, while the crimes of the Israeli government are well documented and ongoing. Each of these realities feeds the other.
The choice is not between one state and two. It is between one state and endless suffering. That means an international force must step in, to occupy the territories, ensure food and medicine reach those in need, and oversee a transitional technocratic government while a permanent solution is built.