If it were any other country in the world it would be obvious: one state from the river to the sea in which Palestinians have full citizenship and equal rights. The same solution that was applied in South Africa. The problem is that everyone involved has an entrenched interest against the obvious solution: the Israeli government because it would effectively cease to exist, the PLO/Fatah because they'd lose their fiefdom to rob for personal benefit and Hamas because they'd lose the "us vs them" dynamic that keeps them in power in Gaza.
Nevertheless it would be very, very hard for even the Gazan militants to publicly oppose such a solution. For example, the former head of Islamic Jihad (the second largest militia in Gaza) once said
We are the indigenous people of the land. I was born in Gaza. My family, brothers and sisters, live in Gaza. But I am not allowed to visit them. But any American or Siberian Jew is allowed to take our land. There is no possibility today of a two-state solution. That idea is dead. And there is no real prospect of a one-state solution...
I will never, under any conditions, accept the existence of the state of Israel. I have no problem living with the Jewish people...
We have lived together in peace for centuries. And if Netanyahu were to ask if we can live together in one state, I would say to him: "If we have exactly the same rights as Jews to come to all of Palestine. If Khaled Meshaal and Ramadan Shalah can come whenever they want, and visit Haifa, and buy a home in Herzliyah if they want, then we can have a new language, and dialogue is possible."
In other words, they might talk a big game about an Islamic Palestinian state but they'd settle for a secular state.
On the Israeli side it would be a harder sell but my counter is: what's your long term alternative? Because in the short run you can flatten Gaza and be as brutal as you want but Israel's demographics are going to doom any prospect of simply dominating the Palestinians and neighbouring countries through military superiority. The secular Ashkenazim, who provide Israel with the technical superiority of a world class military industrial complex and the money to pay for it, are the fastest shrinking demographic in the country and are being replaced by haredim who don't fight in the IDF and live on the tax dollars of the aforementioned Tel Aviv tech workers. The proportion of boneheads who want to needlessly antagonize Israel's neighbours is also increasing in inverse proportion to the IDF's military superiority over those neighbours.
If the status quo continues Israel will inevitably end up in another regional war, and with the absolute population imbalance it would have to win every fight overwhelmingly to even survive. There are a lot of comparisons between Gaza and Artsakh going around but in the long run Israel is more similar to Armenia: a small but highly cohesive society that historically punched above its weight militarily and that benefitted from a huge diaspora and good relations with the local hegemon. But over time, these advantages all come to fade, and by the time they realize that the tables have turned it's already too late to cut a deal.
At this moment, Israel is clearly still superior, but will that be true in ten years, twenty years, thirty years? In the 90s the Gazans impotently threw rocks at Merkavas, in the 00s they impotently shot AK47s at Merkavas, a decade ago they took out the occasional light vehicle with rockets and this week they overran IDF positions, pillaged Israeli towns (an unprecedented event going back to 1949) and popped the formerly invincible Merkavas with ease, dragging the crew out as hostages or bloody trophies. A week ago it would have been impossible to imagine the Jordanian or Egyptian armies overrunning the IDF and achieving a reverse Six Day War but today there are surely people in both countries imagining the unimaginable. If Israel continues to choose violence and domination then it's only a matter of time before someone tries their luck.
Whereas at this moment Israel could still choose to end things on favourable terms:
* Learn from the successes and failures of South Africa.
* Decentralize power to localities to prevent graft and ethnoreligious power struggles, something that helped avoid conflict in Switzerland during Europe's wars of religion.
* Let people arm and defend themselves: the only Israeli border community to come out of the Hamas attacks unscathed was saved not by IDF superiority but by a lowly reservist and some armed locals catching the attackers by surprise.
* Mercilessly pursue terrorists of all stripes, whether they be Hamas or the militant West Bank settlers, and apply the same standard for the rules of engagement to both sides.
Not to say a one state solution wouldn't have problems, but at least it
could work.
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