What this conflict was, and what it became
For most of its history, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had an unusual profile. It was the most watched, most debated, and most emotionally charged conflict in the world. And yet, by the grim arithmetic of modern wars, it was also one of the more contained: for decades it killed dozens or hundreds of people per year, with terrible spikes, while less famous wars elsewhere killed hundreds of thousands.
October 7 and the Gaza War changed that. A conflict that used to kill in the hundreds now kills in the tens of thousands, and there is no good reason to believe the next round would be any smaller. The conflict has moved into a different category. The thinking about it, for the most part, has not.
The purpose of this plan is simple to state: to bring the death count of this conflict down to zero, and to keep it there. Not through trust, and not through occupation, but through physical separation, Palestinian statehood, and a new and carefully designed system of consequences.
(GRAPHIC — place here: "Deaths in the Israel–Palestine Conflict, 1948–2048 (conceptual)." A single line across a century: the spikes of 1948, 1967, 1973, the intifadas, the Gaza rounds, then the 2023–25 mountain dwarfing them all, then a marked implementation point followed by a long tail at near zero, with one or two small blips in the early years. Caption: conceptual illustration, not real data.)
Five convictions
Five convictions underlie this framework.
First: after a catastrophe of this scale, "managing the conflict" is no longer an acceptable goal. October 7 and the Gaza War stand as twin cataclysms, in national trauma and in death toll (with the Gaza War far surpassing October 7 in casualties). Many people have concluded from all this suffering that peace is hopeless, and that the conflict can only be managed and minimized, forever. This document draws the opposite conclusion: a descent into this level of suffering must not be allowed to happen again, and the people of the region (and the generations that come after them) deserve a serious new attempt at actually ending the conflict, however remote that possibility feels right now.
Second: this is a window of opportunity, and windows close. Israel, the Palestinians, and the region are in an entirely new strategic environment, with new risks but also new possibilities. This is precisely the moment when fresh, unconventional ideas should be considered alongside the traditional approaches that have failed.
Third: statehood without a post-state security plan would lead to more war, not less. October 7 killed the trust-based two-state solution for Israelis — and in hindsight, it was never a sound idea. The unwavering commitment of Hamas and other militant groups to destroying Israel means that statehood alone would increase both the ability and the motivation of far too many actors to attack. Attacks would begin shortly after independence; Israel would respond with force; and the two decades that followed the 2005 Gaza disengagement (rockets, blockade, and repeated wars, ending in catastrophe) would likely replay at a larger scale. A peace plan that has no answer for post-state violence is not really a peace plan. It is, in effect, a plan for the next war.
Fourth: even so, a Palestinian state alongside Israel remains the only realistic framework for long-term stability. Every alternative — permanent occupation, one state in any of its forms, or indefinite muddling through — fails on its own logic, as this document argues in detail.
Fifth: if its security can be genuinely protected, now is the time for Israel to end the occupation and settle its borders once and for all. Israel should use its post-war position to do two things at once, unilaterally: physically separate from the Palestinians, and put in place a new deterrence mechanism designed for the attacks that will, realistically, follow the creation of a Palestinian state.
The rest of this document works out that fifth conviction in detail.
What this document offers, even if you reject the plan
Most readers will not accept everything proposed here, and some will reject all of it. That is expected. But the document brings four ideas to the conversation that are worth taking seriously even if the plan itself is rejected.
1. A test that every peace plan should have to pass. It is usually assumed that establishing a Palestinian state is the hard part. It is not. The hard part is keeping a two-state reality from unraveling (through terror, retaliation, and escalation) into war and eventual re-occupation, which would put everyone back at square one with many more dead. So here is a simple test, and it should be put to every framework, every editorial, and every diplomat that advocates for two states: a rocket is fired at Israel three weeks after Palestinian independence. What, exactly, happens next? Does Israel bomb? And then what? This document refers to this as the first-rocket test. Any plan that cannot answer it in specific, operational terms has not solved the conflict; it has only postponed the next round of it. This plan may be wrong in a hundred ways, but it does answer that question, in detail. And once the question has been asked, it becomes difficult to take seriously any plan that ignores it.
2. A new tool: consequences without violence. The land-loss mechanism — a pre-announced, fixed, automatic, and non-violent penalty for unprovoked attacks — is offered as a genuinely new option in a deterrence toolbox that has not changed in seventy-five years. Perhaps its numbers are wrong; perhaps a better version of it exists. But the general category, mechanical consequences that nobody has to die for, deserves a place in the debate, whether or not this particular version survives scrutiny.
3. The idea that unilateralism can be a feature, not a failure. A Palestinian state, on defined terms, imposed rather than negotiated: this document argues that this is actually in the interest of both peoples, because negotiation gives every rejectionist a veto, and has a thirty-year record of producing process instead of results. Readers may find this the plan's most uncomfortable idea. It is also the idea that the last three decades argue for most strongly.
4. A realistic sequence for deradicalization. The demand that Palestinians deradicalize before receiving a state gets the order of history backwards. Nowhere have people changed their beliefs on command, as a precondition, while living under occupation. Beliefs follow facts (this was the case in Egypt, in Jordan, and in Northern Ireland), and so the realistic sequence is: statehood first, consequences for violence from day one, and hearts and minds catching up over a generation. Anyone designing any framework, including frameworks nothing like this plan, needs to get that sequence right.
A permanent arrangement — or a bridge
Finally, a note on what this framework is for. It can be read as a permanent end state. But it can equally be read as a bridge: a long, stable arrangement, lasting decades rather than years, under which two societies that cannot currently share a room learn to share a border. After that, future generations may choose something warmer for themselves: confederation, integration, open borders, or whatever else they wish. Supporters of those warmer visions should consider this framework seriously rather than oppose it. Without a long bridge of verified quiet, binationalism and confederation are not just unrealistic; they are dangerous. The road to any shared future runs through a long period in which the two peoples verifiably stop killing each other. This plan is a design for that period.
Start with the Brief for the full argument in about fifteen minutes. Or continue to "Why Now" and "Why Every Other Path Fails" for the case from first principles.