Israeli American scholar Omer Bartov says the two-state solution is dead after decades of Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, making the creation of an independent Palestinian state all but impossible. He says a one-state solution — a single democratic state for all Jewish Israelis and Palestinians — is also unlikely to work given the competing national visions of the two communities. “The only solution is a confederation,” says Bartov, describing a scenario in which two states would be closely intertwined and interdependent. He also discusses the phrase “from the river to the sea,” used by both Israelis and Palestinians to refer to the land.
