Opinion | Want Israeli-Palestinian Peace? Try Confederation

Sam Bahour
7 min readFeb 12, 2021

Politicians and experts should not doubt a two-state solution. But they should finally consider a plausible version of it.

Bernard Avishai and Sam Bahour

Mr. Avishai, an American-Israeli professor and writer for magazines, lives in Jerusalem. Mr. Bahour is an American-Palestinian who lives in Ramallah in the West Bank and is a management consultant. They have proposed a confederation to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for years.

A Palestinian demonstrator at the Israel-Gaza border fence in the southern Gaza Strip. Credit… Yousef Masoud/SOPA Images, via LightRocket, via Getty Images

Donald Trump has left the Biden administration myriad international crises, and nowhere more obviously than in Israel and the Palestine Authority.

Mr. Trump dismantled relations with the Palestinian side and greenlighted an extremist Israeli government to act as it pleased, ratifying Israel’s exclusive claim to Jerusalem and its continuing settlement project. The normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, whatever their other features, were presented as a way to pre-empt legal recognition of Israeli annexation of territory where Palestinians live outside Jerusalem.

As if to mock a President Biden administration, in November, Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet opened bids for the construction of 1,257 units in Arab East Jerusalem, and the United Nations has reported that settler…

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