United Arabia: dissolving the conflict into a larger federation
A thought experiment: the whole region, Israel and Palestine included, joins one large federation of autonomous states, so that the question of who owns the land between the river and the sea stops being about sovereignty.
What happens to Israeli Jews
Self-rule inside a federation where they are a small minority, which after the history of Jews in the region most Israelis would see as the end of their safety (see 'majority-is-safety').
What happens to Palestinians
Belonging to a large Arab whole without the fight over borders, but without the independent state their movement has sought for a century.
What it requires
- A federation strong enough to guarantee minorities, and loose enough that its members would join
- Jews accepting minority status in a much larger, mostly Arab and Muslim union
- Arab states accepting a Jewish member state as an equal
- Institutions that have never existed in the region
Who supports it
Nobody runs on it; it's here as a thought experiment, because it shows what the other solutions are trying to secure. Pan-Arab unions have been tried: the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria (1958–61) and the rival Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan (1958) each collapsed within a few years. Earlier ideas of an Arab federation with a Jewish region inside it were floated in the 1910s–30s ⚠.
What history says
- The United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria, 1958–61)
- The Arab Federation (Iraq and Jordan, 1958)
- The Ottoman Empire itself: a multi-ethnic polity in which Jews and Arabs were both subjects
The hard questions
- If even two Arab states couldn't stay united, what would hold this one together?
- Would a Jewish minority be safer than it was in the Arab world before 1948?
- What does the thought experiment show about what each side needs from any solution?