Introduction

The war between Israel and Hamas has renewed the salience of enduring questions about the future of Gaza, but after more than eight months, there are still no clear answers about what kind of political framework might emerge postwar. While Israel has made significant progress towards destroying Hamas’s military and governance capacities, the absence of a tenable political formula for regime change has meant that the “day after” remains shrouded in uncertainty.

There is a widespread perception that Israel has marched headlong into the infamous “occupation trap” without a viable exit strategy or plan for postwar governance.ⁱ Between the security threats emanating from Gaza, strategic aversion to creating a political vacuum, the campaign of an influential minority to cement permanent Israeli control over the territory, and Israel’s vehement rejections of proposals for Palestinian statehood, there is little reason to expect Israel to fully relinquish control of the territory when the war ends.ⁱⁱ

Historical precedent suggests the same. Even after the 2005 disengagement ended Israeli civilian and military presence in the strip, Israel continued to regulate Gaza’s territorial borders, airspace, sea, and population registry in ways that led many to argue that it remained within the legal category of occupation.ⁱⁱⁱ Since October 7, Israel’s political and military elite have largely advocated for the exercise of even greater security control, while suggesting that some form of compliant administrative apparatus should assume responsibility for Palestinian civilian affairs. Although such proposals have little traction among any other actors with interests in the conflict, they should be taken seriously as reflecting a particular set of Israeli ambitions, even if they are unlikely to be realized precisely as imagined.

As Israel has reasserted control over Gaza during the war, it has also intensified measures of de facto annexation in the West Bank.^iv Developments in these two arenas are closely related to each other, as the fates of the West Bank and Gaza have always been related, despite efforts to separate them. Together, they show how the Israeli state is reconfiguring the distribution of power and authority between the river and the sea to ensure that there is only one sovereign authority that possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The war between Israel and Hamas has created a critical juncture in that process. This process, which is increasingly being described as the consolidation of a “one-state reality,” did not begin in October, but the war has provided a catalyst for it.

While the language of a “one-state reality” has proliferated in recent years, significant differences in its meanings, usages, and presumed implications are often obscured by polemics, inconsistencies, and imprecision. This article steps back from debates about the alleged validity and utility or deficiencies and dangers of talking about a one-state reality, and instead analyzes the one-state reality as a discourse. It traces the constituent features of this discourse, explains its proliferation, and assesses its relevance after October 7.
This discourse of a one-state reality should be carefully distinguished from that of a “one-state solution.” They are analytically distinct even though arguments about a purportedly logical, even “necessary” or “inevitable” connection between them are common. The analysis below explains why these two discourses are often associated with each other, often inaccurately. It suggests that the idea of a one-state reality offers a far more powerful tool of critical analysis and mobilizational rhetoric than any constructive program.

When, Where, and What is the One-State Reality?

A headline from late 2023 asserted that this was the year in which the one-state reality had gone “mainstream.”^v  The widespread adoption of this language in international circles of policymakers and analysts, as well as by mainstream media, marks a longer-term discursive shift in the vocabularies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No longer is the idea of a one-state reality confined to Palestinian rights advocacy networks and NGO reports. Today, even Richard Haass, former president of the Council of Foreign Relations, whom Ezra Klein characterized as “the walking, talking center of America’s foreign policy establishment,” has described the current situation as a “one state non-solution,” which, despite the slight variation in phrasing, accepts the premise that a one-state reality exists.^vi Already for several years, the one-state reality has been the focus of scholarly symposia, academic books, and appeared in the programming and writing of prominent think tanks like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Middle East Institute, RAND, Centre for European Reform, Israel Policy Forum, and the Institute for National Security Studies.

The popularity of the term often obscures the fact that there is no agreement on what the one-state reality is, or when and where it exists, or the implications of its existence. Most often, it refers to the relationship between Israel and the West Bank, although often, and increasingly after October 7, it includes Gaza, to encompass the entire space between the river and the sea. There are two distinct variants of the one-state reality discourse that should be differentiated. In the first variant, the one-state reality depicts a scenario that could materialize or is in the process of coming into existence, but fundamentally exists in the future tense. In the second variant, the one-state reality describes a situation that already exists on the ground in the present tense. These two variants are analytically distinct and advanced by different constituencies, even though a degree of convergence and overlap has developed.

The One-State Reality as Future Scenario

In the future-tense form, the idea of a one-state reality appears mainly in the political rhetoric of Palestinian, Israeli, and international actors who remain invested to a two-state framework, whether articulated in terms of an “outcome” or a “solution.” In this use, the idea of a one-state reality is generally invoked to criticize Israeli actions considered detrimental to the realization of two states for two peoples, such as settlement expansion, unilateral moves towards annexation, and undermining of the Palestinian Authority. This one-state reality depicts a future scenario towards which Israel has been rapidly sliding down a slippery slope. It will be realized through a process of de jure annexation.

Analysts, pundits, and politicians who talk about the one-state reality in this way typically depict such a scenario as a nightmare that must be avoided. In their view, its materialization will mark the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and the end of prospects for Palestinian statehood. They conjure visions of a one-state reality in which there will be never-ending conflict and self-determination for neither Jews nor Palestinians. Such imaginings are designed to mobilize people against annexation and in support of territorial separation.^vii This use of the one-state reality reflects efforts to salvage the political project of two-states for two peoples.

For the Palestinian leadership of the PA and PLO, invocation of a slide into a one-state reality functions to protect their personal interests and their investments in the political project of a separate Palestinian state alongside Israel. They threaten that if a one-state reality is consolidated through annexation, they will change their strategy to seeking equal rights within a single state, thus posing an “existential” threat to Israel. At the same time, deferring the arrival of a one-state reality into a future which may never arrive allows them to avoid taking more radical action that would undermine their domestic or international standing.

In Israeli politics, the arguments underlying the one-state reality—typically about demographic and security threats and fears of international isolation—have long been central features of Zionist advocacy for territorial separation. Supporters of the Oslo process, including Rabin, frequently described it as a strategic maneuver to avoid the materialization of a binational state. Both Sharon and Olmert made similar arguments to justify disengagement. These rhetorical tactics frame territorial withdrawal not as concessions to enemies made from positions of weakness, but as strategic initiatives taken from positions of strength to secure Israel’s future as Jewish and democratic. The argument that Israel must act to reverse the slide into a one-state reality is an old argument that has been adapted as a response to the possibility of de jure annexation.

Despite the future tense of the language used by those cautioning against the realization of a one-state reality, the features of the future they describe often resemble the political situation that already exists on the ground. It is already the case that separation of Jewish and Palestinian populations is politically unfeasible at this time, that life on the ground is rife with violence and security threats for both Jews and Palestinians, and that the condition of Israeli and Palestinian politics makes the realization of any negotiated arrangement impossible. Indeed, one critique of this future-tense discourse of the one-state reality is that short of full de jure annexation, it lacks clearly specified criteria for identifying precisely when this reality has arrived.^viii This temporal indeterminacy, and the tendency to perpetually defer its arrival to a future moment, directs attention the second variant of the one-state reality discourse.

The One-State Reality as Description of the Present

In contrast to depictions of the one-state reality as a future scenario, an alternative use holds that this reality already exists on the ground. Proponents of this view argue that between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean there is only one sovereign state, irrespective of attempts by the parastatal organizations of the Palestinian Authority, PLO, and Hamas to acquire the attributes of statehood.^ix Only one authority possesses the core attributes and competencies of a state, and this is Israel.

 This perspective is based on a claim that it is no longer is intellectually tenable or politically constructive to maintain a conceptual commitment to the separateness of Israel within the 1949 Armistice lines and the territories occupied in 1967. The duration and success of the project to permanently incorporate the West Bank and Gaza into Israel have obliviated the illusion of the occupation being temporary. In this view, the idea of a two-state solution, and debates about its viability as a short-term policy objective, are obsolete, irrelevant, or even detrimental for the trajectory of the conflict. Proponents of this perspective present the one-state reality as an alternative that will divert intellectual and political resources towards more practical objectives.^x Not everyone who holds this view wants to abandon the two-state solution as a political horizon. Some do argue that the project of two states should be relegated to history, but others who adopt this framework of a one-state reality in the present remain committed to a two-state solution, or outcome, as their long-term objective, even if it is not currently viable.

 This present-tense meaning of the one-state reality has been steadily expanding in usage as various constituencies have come to understand, at differing paces, that the Oslo peace process would not be resumed as it had existed in the 1990s. The idea emerged gradually from activist and intellectual networks where disillusionment with the peace process and with unilateral attempts at territorial separation had provoked a search for alternative lenses through which to think about the existing situation on the ground and its transformation. Although many of the ideas germinated in Palestinian circles, it was their adoption by Israeli intellectuals that helped legitimize and disseminate them, both in Israel and abroad. Milestones by Israeli scholars were the publications more than a decade ago, in Hebrew and in English, of The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine by Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir and Beyond the Two State Solution by Yehouda Shenhav.^xi Both books argued that acknowledging the extent to which the separateness of Israel and the West Bank had collapsed was essential for developing new ideas that could help break free of the analytic and political morass of the conflict. These arguments foreshadowed those that are frequently made today.

A deeper genealogy would locate the origins of this conception of the one-state reality in older debates about the significance of Israel’s erasure of the Green Line and the reversibility of de facto annexation.^xii Since at least the mid-1970s, but especially after Likud came to power in 1977 and massively expanded the settlement project, intellectuals in Israel and abroad have argued that de facto annexation had occurred and debated its implications.^xiii Meron Benvenisti loomed large in these debates, and by the late 1980s, a volume of essaysedited by Ilan Peleg and Ofira Seliktar determined that the time had arrived to describe “the State of Israel as a binational political entity” and examine its emerging political dynamics.^xiv In short, the main components of the argument that a one-state reality exists on the ground have been in circulation for several decades, but they have taken on a new degree of intellectual coherence and political salience in recent years.

The meaning of the one-state reality as a description of the present is full of ambiguities and unresolved tensions that reflect contrasting intellectual and political commitments by those who use this language. Disagreement about when this one-state reality came into existence complicates efforts to develop it into a coherent framework. Has it existed since 1967 or since a critical threshold, typically unspecified or inconsistently demarcated, was crossed in the development of Israeli rule over the territories? Whether and how Gaza should be included is also contested. Differing accounts of the origins and development of this one-state reality contain varying implications for the prospects of its future transformation. These differences are often obscured when the term is treated as a slogan, but even much of the analytic and scholarly writing on the topic has thus far fallen short of addressing these inconsistencies.

Explaining the Timing of an Emergent Discursive Shift

Why have discussions about a one-state reality, in both its meanings, proliferated in recent years? The popularity of this language, and the salience of debates about it, reflects growing recognition that separation into two states is not an imminently achievable political objective and Israeli rule over the territories has become too deeply entrenched to be considered an interim arrangement awaiting negotiations over final status. The one-state reality offers a way of thinking about the present that does not necessarily tie it to any specific outcomes or solutions.

While one reaction to the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was to propose and debate alternative “solutions” to the conflict, another was to reject “solutionism,” with its connotations of naivete and irresponsibility, and instead focus analysis on possible outcomes. The language of a one-state reality has not fully displaced either discussions of outcomes or solutions, but offered a supplemental framework for conceptualizing the situation that materialized while many analysts and activists were preoccupied with evaluating hypothetical futures. The utility of talking about a one-state reality, according to those who use this terminology, is that it directs attention away from debate over hypothetical futures and towards “facts on the ground.”

It emerged primarily among activists, journalists, and intellectuals who decided that public discourse about the conflict, especially the focus on elite negotiations and debates about one-state versus two-state solutions, was fundamentally misguided and needed different intellectual coordinates.^xv Although it arguably had roots in the late 1990s as disillusionment with Oslo grew, this shift began to gain momentum during the Second Intifada and it accelerated after the return of Netanyahu to power in 2009, continuing to gain speed throughout successive right-wing Israeli governments. It gained far greater traction in Palestinian society than among Israeli Jews, as grassroots activists began to try to shift the national discourse away from state building and towards more holistic forms of cross-sectoral Palestinian rights advocacy. The BDS movement, with its assertion of the unity of fragment Palestinian populations and the inseparability of Palestinian rights claims, has played a key role in popularizing the view that maintaining a distinction between “Israel proper” and the “occupied territories” is untenable.^xvi The process of “mainstreaming” these ideas was slow. Despite periodic references to a one-state reality in high-profile op-eds and other public commentary, its migration into the vocabularies of more mainstream political discourse in Israel and abroad took more than a decade.^xvii

The main catalyst for the mainstream adoption of one-state reality terminology was the emergence of annexation on the agenda of successive Israeli governments. Complete absence of any official expressions of interest in a viable peace process, continual settlement expansion in the West Bank, consolidation of the Israeli right in power, and a prominent campaign to advance annexation legislation in the Knesset all contributed to the perception that Israel was consolidating its rule over the territories in ways that gave credence to the views that a one-state reality had either arrived or was on its way.

It was the debates about annexation, beginning in the fall of 2019, that propelled the discourse of the one-state reality into the political mainstream. The possibility that the Israeli government might unilaterally annex portions of the West Bank provided opponents of such moves with rhetorical ammunition to argue that Israel was on the brink of sliding into a one-state reality that would be an apartheid regime. Preventing this situation by deterring the annexationists was the objective around which a wide range of Israeli, Palestinian, and international actors mobilized. Palestinian leaders warned that annexation would create a one-state reality in which they had no choice but to end their longstanding campaign for independence and instead advocate for equal rights within that single state. Israelis who opposed annexation argued that to preserve Israel’s Jewish and democratic character, it was imperative to arrest the slide into a one-state reality.

The political effects of this crisis reverberated long after the government retreated from the agenda of de jure annexation in the summer of 2020. Among these effects was that annexation remained in the mainstream political discourse and the one-state reality language stuck. The patterns of violence that have emerged since, including the May 2021 intercommunal violence that erupted across both sides of the Green Line and the Hamasattack on October 7, have provided additional evidence that the conflict cannot be contained to the West Bank and Gaza. In short, dynamics have been emerging that suggest that the conflict has been slowly “returning to its roots” of intercommunal struggle within a single territory between the river and the sea rather than primarily over the future of the West Bank and Gaza.^xviii

In late 2022, the return of government support for “applying sovereignty” in the West Bank, and the manifestation of this agenda in bureaucratic changes that transferred responsibilities for administering life in the West Bank from military to civilian hands, drove a resurgence of arguments that Israel is quietly annexing the West Bank and creating a one-state reality.^xix Since Israel’s invasion of Gaza after October 7, concerns that the war will lead to long-term Israeli control over the strip have given further vitality to the one-state reality discourse. Though there remain disagreements about whether this one-state reality is here already or looming on the horizon, the fact is that the legitimacy of this language has been established beyond the political fringes and it continues to grow.

Implication of the Discursive Shift

If the spread of the one-state reality discourse is widely evident, its implications are less clear and more contentious, especially after October 7. The distinction between the future- and the present-tense meanings is increasingly difficult to maintain when the features described in the future scenario routinely appear in the present. Even among constituencies who continue to mobilize around preventing the materialization of a one-state reality, it has become common to admit that some of the dynamics they are trying to avoid already exist. Their language has therefore subtly shifted towards halting or reversing, rather than preventing, a transformation that is already underway. This convergence between the two meanings of the one-state reality is likely to continue and political projects built on recognizing and acting upon vs. mobilizing to prevent the one-state reality are going to increasingly compete for supporters, resources, and attention.

Proponents of the view that the existing situation is already a one-state reality often call for its “recognition,” with an expectation that acceptance of this view will catalyze new thinking, mobilize forms of engagement that have been absent, and facilitate the formation of previously untenable political alliances. Whether such changes could mobilize people in a way that would challenge existing configurations of power is contestable and ultimately depends on more than a change in language.

There are two main reasons that that such calls for recognizing the one-state reality are controversial. The first is that it means grappling with the character of the regime of this one-state reality, which is a regime of unequal rights that is difficult to defend against charges of apartheid. The NGOs that have published reports and opinions arguing that a threshold has been crossed into apartheid are, in essence, accepting the existence of a one-state reality even if they do not use this precise language.^xx Resistance to the one-state reality label comes primarily from constituencies who want to protect the image of a democratic Israel by maintaining the separateness of the occupation.

The second reason for controversy is that many of the people who argue that a one-state reality exists also advocate for the pursuit of equal rights for Jews and Palestinians within that state. In other words, that the existence of a one-state reality implies transformation into a one-state “outcome” or “solution” through a process of democratization. Both proponents and opponents of describing the current situation as a one-state reality often suggest that this is the likely direction of change and that it will mark the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and thus the end of statist Zionism.

There is no denying that some people who describe the situation on the ground as a one-state reality do advocate for one state between the river and the sea, or who claim that because the one-state reality exists already, a one-state solution will inevitably emerge, even if its character is uncertain.^xxi But there is no necessary correspondence between these two propositions. It is inaccurate to claim that there is any singular prescription or direction of change that follows from diagnosis of a one-state reality.

Prominent Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals who have argued for the utility of a one-state reality framework, as well as foreign analysts, do in fact advocate for two states. Contrary to what some proponents and detractors ofthe one-state reality framework like to suggest, there are many different futures could materialize out of a one-state reality. There is nothing determinate or inexorable in a one-state reality. Consolidated states break apart, independent states merge, and the future is long. At this historical juncture, the only thing that wide-ranging calls to “recognize” the one-state reality have in common are appeals to reject the status quo. They contain no common vision of the future or strategies to mobilize for change, and thus the implications of such calls are fundamentally indeterminate. The main implication of the discursive shift towards a one-state reality is to subject Israel to forms of criticism that it could once deflect by claiming to be committed to a two-state solution and engaging, even disingenuously, in a peace process. Ultimately, it will be political contestation more than intellectual innovation that determines how the idea of a one-state reality gets carried forwards.

Israeli resistance to countenancing Palestinian statehood after October 7 is understandable on both security and political grounds. Fear of repeat attacks from autonomous or independent Palestinian territory and concern that recognition of Palestinian statehood would be interpreted as a reward for the Hamas attack are both legitimate reactions. Yet the problem facing Israel is that continuing refusal to move towards externalizing the West Bank and Gaza from Israel’s system of control is only going to exacerbate the problems and trends diagnosed by both variants of the one-state reality discourse. Attempts to stem the growth of this discourse are failing. More debate over its legitimacy as a framework for understanding is only increasing its visibility. It appears likely that the only way to effectively combat the spread of the one-state reality discourse will be for Israel to take concrete steps towards an outcome of the war that will be acceptable to both Palestinian and regional actors, one that would neutralize the claim that Israel is in the process of solidifying permanent control between the river and the sea.