In a 2019 article for Foreign Affairs, Yousef Munayyer declared the two-state solution dead. Munayyer, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who leads the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center Washington, DC, wrote that the time had come to “consider the only alternative with any chance of delivering lasting peace: equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians in a single shared state.”

The next year, Peter Beinart, an Orthodox Jewish journalist who has moved left since editing the then-pro-Iraq War New Republic, made his own case for a single state. The articles, along with others like them, brought renewed attention to a similar proposal made by the late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said in 1999.

A one-state solution would make all Palestinians and Israelis equal citizens of one nation that encompasses the land on both sides of what is called the Green Line, which refers to the borders established by Israel’s 1949 armistice with Arab nations.

During the 1967 war, Israel expanded beyond the Green Line by seizing, among other territory, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Those areas now include more than 5 million Palestinians who have been living under direct or indirect Israeli rule for more than 50 years. Unlike the roughly 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel within the pre-1967 borders, Palestinians beyond the Green Line are not Israeli citizens and cannot vote in national elections. They are not afforded the rights given to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem who, despite illegally occupying Palestinian land, are Israeli citizens.

Under a one-state solution, Israel would cease to be a Jewish state and would instead become like the United States and other nations that are not organized on ethno-religious grounds. Abandoning this commitment to Zionism remains anathema to a large majority of Israeli Jews and American Jews.

It would also be a major break from the longstanding push for a “two-state solution,” which would entail establishing a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish-majority state of Israel. Those who favor two states generally call for Palestine to be based in the West Bank and the much smaller Gaza Strip. (Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 but has effectively turned it into what critics call an “open-air prison” by maintaining almost complete control over who and what is allowed to come and go from the area.)