What is the best long term solution for Israel/Palestine ?

[ingemann]

It’s meaningless to talk about a solution right now, let’s come back in a year and look at the result of this conflict, and then discuss what solution is when we have seen the situation on the ground.

[WalterWhite]

We should wait for the war in Gaza to end before we discuss this.

However, with how systemic the violence in Israel and Palestine is, our best bet would be to start from scratch. At a bare minimum, we should abolish the current Israeli and Palestinian governments. A temporary 31-state solution (like the one I described earlier) with the possibility of a 30-state, 2-state, or 1-state solution in the future might be our best bet.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

The best long-term solution is one that can, in relative terms, limit long-term ill will and violence between the two communities, while still being able to be approved by local political elites.
What that precisely looks like remains to be seen.

[Reactionary Libertarian]

Unfortunately there is no liberal solution to this conflict. Either:
1) The status quo continues, with Israel slowly gaining more power and land over time, as it has since 1967.
2) Total Israeli victory that involves mass expulsion of Palestinians and annexation of the West Bank. Still not sure what happens to Gaza.
3) Total Palestinian victory that involves mass expulsion and genocide of Israelis.

3 seems the least likely to me, as the Palestinians have only become weaker as years have passed. Every terrorist attack, as awful as it is for Israel, only strengthens Israel's resolve and international support.

1 is what we have now, but we don't know how sustainable it is. However it has proved to be more sustainable than many people have predicted over the years.

2 is the only realistic way I can see the conflict actually ending. As of now it remains unlikely. However if 1 collapses at some point then 2 becomes much more likely.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Gaza becomes some sort of protectorate, I don't particularly care who administers it because literally anyone else will be better than Hamas.

Israel annexes the West Bank, granting full citizenship to all residents regardless of religion or ethnicity, and embarking on a program to deradicalize those Palestinians sympathetic to terrorist groups. Ideally within a decade most Palestinians can vote in elections, etc.

For the latter part, the only question is whether to just do it now to rip the bandaid off, or delay a decade or so to strengthen Israel's demographic cushion. Such a cushion is needed to ensure Israel can remain both Jewish and democratic after the annexation.

The status quo on the Temple Mount is also unacceptable, though understandable given the fraught circumstances. Any true solution needs to include an allowance for Jews to pray on the Mount - our holiest site -  on at least some fixed number of days each year.

A one and a half state solution, I guess. The West Bank is much less radicalized than Gaza and unlike Gaza I don't think annexing it would endanger Israel's Jewish and democratic character. Israel will need to pump a LOT of money into deradicalization, education, and workforce training for the West Bank Palestinians but that is worth it and far better than the current situation. But before this can happen the Palestinians (Hamas aside) will need to recognize that they've lost, they aren't getting a state, and it's time to look forward rather than backward.

I literally do not care what the path forward is for Gaza as long as whoever administers it next doesn't allow it to be a safe harbor for terrorism. And *anyone else* is better than Hamas.

“So to strengthen Israel’s demographic cushion”

So you want to force an autonomous state into your own country while keeping them a supressed minority? This is invasion s**t and you are on the same moral level as the orcs invading Israel right now. Settlers trying to invade the West Bank can honestly get f**ked and the Palestinian government has every right to do what they want with them.

I guess you don’t care about border security when it’s people you like doing the invading.

Here is a better solution: Israel stays the f**k out of the West Bank, get the invaders out, and actually focuses on defending their borders instead of spending military resources protecting settlers???

Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. Palestine had so many chances and they turned every one down. And if you think the Jews uniquely have no right to a state where they are the majority after the last 2,000 years of expulsions and genocides, then I don't know what to tell you. Two major world religions are confounded by our continued existence and refusal to convert, and historically every time we think things are finally going smoothly it all goes to shlt again. After 1945 we as a people firmly resolved that never again shall we be led like lambs to the slaughter, resisting only too little and too late. We are done getting pushed around.

Integrating West Bank Palestinians is only possible if it is widely recognized that this will not endanger Israel's Jewish character, yes. These things take time too even in the best of cases. The whole point is that they would not be a "suppressed" minority - like Arab citizens of Israel today, they would enjoy the full rights of citizenship and democratic, civic and economic participation.

I'm not going to dignify Snowstalker's post with a response.

Uniquely?

[WalterWhite]

I have been credibly informed that there are anarchists who are calling for a zero-state solution. Many people are saying this.

[CumbrianLefty]

Uniquely?

Indeed, the Kurds would like a word for sure.

[CookieDamage]

Full citizenship to Palestinians and acknowledge Israel is the homeland of Jews and Arabs. The only way forward is assimilation between both ethnic groups under a new identity. Oh and defeat Hamas if it isn't obvious.

Yes Jews and Arabs should simply forge a new identity.

Real life isn't a crusader kings III game

[CookieDamage]

The way I see it I doubt there will ever be an independent Palestine. The likelihood was low before but after October 7 it will never happen. Israeli settlers will probably become the majority or huge plurality in the WB leading to it's wholesale annexation.

Either the WB Palestinians will be incorporated into Israeli society and given real rights or they will be deported. Hopefully it's the former.

Gaza is a different issue. It would ideally be an independent Arab majority city state but if it remains Hamas' nest that won't happen either. I'm not sure there's much Israeli desire to annex it either. It should belong to Egypt.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

The Palestinians leadership has been woeful and passed up many opportunities for peace but Israel settlements in the west bank have made a viable Palestine state impossible.

A one state solution is ultimately the only possible solution at this point.

[Coldstream]

It’s hard to imagine a two state solution now, and everyone knows apartheid isn’t sustainable.

A binational state is plausible, but I can’t see why Israel would ever agree to it.

Ethnic cleansings a la Artsakh seems like the only way this will go now.

I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it. This feels like a seismic shift.

[Meclazine for Israel]

It’s meaningless to talk about a solution right now, let’s come back in a year and look at the result of this conflict, and then discuss what solution is when we have seen the situation on the ground.

Correct. The forces controlling what is about to happen are not in any way influenced by anything written on this forum.

All we can do is sit in our digital goldfish bowl and watch. We are, in essence, less influential than a lounge room goldfish with regards to changing the situation.

Apart from abusing each other, banning a couple of black goldfish in our forum, no solution can reasonably be offered at this point in time.

Good analysis is our best bet.

[CumbrianLefty]

Ethnic cleansings a la Artsakh seems like the only way this will go now.

Vastly more people, with (unlike the Armenians in question) literally nowhere else to go.

It would be a catastrophe with few parallels since WW2, and I fervently hope that Israel's friends are making it quite clear - if only in private - that it is an absolute and total non-starter.

[Aurelius2]

It’s hard to imagine a two state solution now, and everyone knows apartheid isn’t sustainable.

A binational state is plausible, but I can’t see why Israel would ever agree to it.

Ethnic cleansings a la Artsakh seems like the only way this will go now.

I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it. This feels like a seismic shift.

I could definitely see them agreeing to annexing and integrating the West Bank as long as the demographic cushion remains to sustain the Jewish majority, which is now increasingly the case. Gaza is another matter and should probably be some sort of internationally guaranteed protectorate.

I agree with you that a "binational state" - i.e. no longer having a distinctly Jewish state of Israel - will not happen. Nor should it.

[Coldstream]

Ethnic cleansings a la Artsakh seems like the only way this will go now.

Vastly more people, with (unlike the Armenians in question) literally nowhere else to go.

It would be a catastrophe with few parallels since WW2, and I fervently hope that Israel's friends are making it quite clear - if only in private - that it is an absolute and total non-starter.

I’m not sure what else you think the money Blinken is offering Egypt is for…

Seems plain that at the very least major population transfers are expected. And I can’t see why Israel would agree to a right of return for people fleeing Gaza now when they haven’t done it for those who fled in 1948 for 75 years.

[All Along The Watchtower]

The two-state solution was forever undermined when Yasser Arafat was murdered by a Palestinian Islamic extremist, when Palestinians kept building settlements in Israeli territory, when Palestinians kept assassinating Israeli leaders, when Palestine’s superpower ally kept undermining UN efforts at peace and mediation, and when 19 Iranian and Palestinian suicide hijackers killed 3000 people on September 11, 2001 in New York City, Arlington, Virginia, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, because they were completely irrational psychopaths who had been brainwashed to hate America for its freedoms and for no other reason—leading the US to, in a fit of rage, accidentally invade Israel and kill a lot of civilians in bombings and drone strikes.

Fortunately, cooler heads eventually prevailed, but the US keeps sending Palestinians weapons even though the Palestinians make plenty of sophisticated weapons of their own and have a thriving modern military-industrial complex. I guess that’s a testament to the power of the American-Palestinian Public Affairs Committee in Washington (“no daylight between the US and Palestine”), along with the well-organized and well-funded political power of all the Americans who support the Palestinians for religious reasons. It’s so unfair to the Israelis!

[Saint Milei]

Full citizenship to Palestinians and acknowledge Israel is the homeland of Jews and Arabs. The only way forward is assimilation between both ethnic groups under a new identity. Oh and defeat Hamas if it isn't obvious.

Yes Jews and Arabs should simply forge a new identity.

Real life isn't a crusader kings III game

The alternative is genocide. I'm uninterested in moderate solutions. Either coexist together or one dies. Those are the two options and nothing anyone who is pro Israel or Palestine can say that will convince me.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

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.