The Brief

A framework for ending the Israel-Palestine conflict through physical separation and a new kind of deterrence. This brief summarizes the full plan. Reading time: about fifteen minutes.

Where things stand

The wars that began on October 7, 2023 have mostly run their course, with mixed results. Israel fought in Gaza, in Lebanon, and alongside the United States against Iran. It won militarily on every front, and none of it has produced a durable political outcome. Gaza is divided, with Hamas still armed and governing half of it, while the technocratic committee that is supposed to take over waits in Cairo without an entry date. The West Bank simmers. The Iran file lurches between ceasefire and strike. And in Israel, on the eve of an election, nobody — not the government, not the opposition — has a real answer to the question "what now?" The familiar options (permanent occupation, a trust-based two-state process, muddling through) were discredited before these wars, and the wars discredited them further.

This document puts an answer on the table. It will strike many readers as radical, and it is. But it is also specific, which almost nothing in this debate is, and it is written for the world that exists after October 7, not the world of Oslo.

The proposition

Israel acts unilaterally, in three moves: it separates, it transfers land, and it replaces its deterrence doctrine.

Move one: separation

Israel annexes the major settlement blocs near the Green Line — Ma'ale Adumim, the Gush Etzion bloc, Modi'in Illit, Beitar Illit, Givat Ze'ev, and, reaching deeper, Ariel with several of its satellites. These blocs hold the large majority of the West Bank's roughly half-million settlers, so annexation brings over 90% of the settler population inside Israel's new borders without anyone moving house. From that day there are no more "settlers" in these towns, just Israelis.

The remaining 25,000–40,000 Israelis, who live deep in the West Bank beyond any defensible line, are relocated with generous compensation — in most cases to an annexed bloc a few kilometers away. The 2005 Gaza disengagement uprooted communities with nowhere to go and left a national trauma; this time the destinations exist in advance, and they are nearby.

With annexation and relocation complete, Israel fixes its international borders permanently, in every direction. A patrolled, permanently uninhabited buffer zone runs along the entire frontier, between two barriers: a heavy, permanent one on the Israeli side that never moves, and a lighter one on the Palestinian side that is deliberately engineered to be movable. The reason for the movable barrier will become clear shortly.

(Embed MAP 1 here — proposed borders: annexed blocs, relocated settlements, the buffer zone, and the two land tracts.)

Move two: the land transfer

Unilateral annexation, on its own, is theft. So the plan pairs it with a land transfer that leaves the Palestinian state larger than the territory Palestinians hold today — visibly larger, on any map. Two tracts of mostly empty Israeli land pass to the new state:

• "New Gaza": a large area of the Negev along the Egyptian border, appended to the Gaza Strip and roughly tripling its size — from 365 km² to about 1,095 km². Gaza is the most crowded place in this conflict; New Gaza gives it room to build, and somewhere to put the industrial zones and seaport its recovery needs.
• "SoWeBa": an area appended to the southwestern West Bank, partially offsetting the land lost to the annexed blocs.

The arithmetic:

The new state starts at 110% of what Palestinians hold today. That is its maximum size, fixed forever, for both sides. It comes to roughly 40% of the non-desert land between the river and the sea, for about 45% of the population.

Attached to this land is a pre-committed development program: Gulf-funded projects across New Gaza and SoWeBa — cities, ports, industry, agriculture — with the capital deposited in escrow on day one, under a published, phase-by-phase schedule with named projects. Why the escrow is deliberately irrevocable will also become clear shortly.

The two halves of the state are physically connected: a high-speed rail line from Jenin to Rafah through every major Palestinian city, and two covered corridors linking the West Bank to Gaza and New Gaza. Jerusalem is divided into an Israeli zone and a Palestinian zone, with a shared international civic zone between them for the sites sacred to both peoples. It is the one place where the two populations keep mixing daily. It gets its own chapter in the full plan.

Move three: the new doctrine

Israel announces, in advance and in public, a fixed schedule of consequences for unprovoked attacks from the new state. The penalty is land. In exchange, Israel gets out of the retaliation business entirely: no airstrikes, no incursions, no targeted killings inside Palestinian territory. When the first rocket is fired after independence — and the plan assumes there will be one — there is no war room debating a proportionate response. There is just the schedule.

The mechanism

The core rule is one sentence: every Israeli killed in an unprovoked attack costs the State of Palestine five square kilometers of land — a fixed amount, tied to the day-one map, forever. It never gets cheaper. The price of a life does not float.

Attacks are classified by incident rather than by counting casualties. Lethal attacks are priced per death. Attacks that kill no one but hospitalize three or more people carry a flat penalty of 2.5 km² per incident, so there is no discount for engineering an atrocity that falls just short of killing. Nuisance attacks — the rocket that lands in a field but sends families to shelters — are priced in money rather than land, as explained below. Israelis killed abroad count the same as at home.

The schedule prices organized armed attack, not crime. A weapon of war crossing the border enters the ledger; a teenager throwing a stone is a matter for the police. (If the Palestinian state tolerates rather than polices a pattern of such acts, the pattern itself can be certified into the schedule — but the default is that crime is crime.) The underlying legal principle is an old one: no state may allow its territory to be used to attack another. The schedule takes that principle and attaches a price list to it.

Forfeited land is never annexed. Israel takes nothing. After a six-month grace period, the movable barrier advances, the buffer widens, and the ground returns to nature. No one gets the land. The plan depends on this absolutely — Israel's own borders stay exactly where they were fixed on day one, and an international body exists to guarantee it.

There is also no mystery about which land goes. The forfeiture order is published in advance as a standing queue: the empty outer band of New Gaza first, then progressively inward, sector by sector. Anyone can open the plan's official calculator — a trilingual public application, maintained as a formal organ of the mechanism — enter "ten killed," and see how many square kilometers are forfeited, from which sector, and which development phase is cancelled. A Hamas planner should be able to compute the cost of his operation before he runs it. That is the point.

The tiers

A flat formula, left to run forever, would eventually become monstrous, and the plan says so openly rather than hoping nobody notices. The schedule slows down and then stops, by published tiers:

A few things about this structure are worth spelling out. A young state whose rejectionists attack in its fragile early years loses land it never previously held, and can earn all of it back through nothing more than quiet. The map heals, and every Palestinian government has something concrete to campaign on from day one. But the healing is hostage to the violence: a faction that keeps killing, at any rate, however low, freezes restoration at zero — in effect holding the nation's territory for ransom in front of its own people.

And the ceiling never rises. No amount of exemplary peace adds a meter beyond 110%. Restoration can un-do subtractions; it never extends the state. The bath starts full, and the only question is whether anyone drains it. (The exact rates and bands here are offered as a considered starting point, not revealed truth — this is precisely what a working group should stress-test.)

Whether an attack counts as unprovoked, and whether Israel implements each forfeiture exactly as prescribed and not a meter more, is decided by an international adjudication body: independent of any single government or leader, with Palestinian and Arab-state representation, operating on evidentiary standards committed to in advance, with a mandate as permanent as the mechanism itself. Note what this body actually does — it demands nothing of Palestinians and it binds Israel. It is the institution that can rule that Israel may not take that hill. It is the Palestinians' shield against overreach, and it works whether or not they ever recognize it.

The second ledger: the development schedule

The escrowed Gulf capital is the mechanism's other currency. Every adjudicated attack, on top of its land price, permanently strikes tranches from the back of the published development schedule — and these losses are never recoverable. Nuisance attacks burn money only; serious attacks burn both. So the announcement after a deadly year reads, in full: this many square kilometers forfeited along the northern buffer, and Phase 5 — the SoWeBa agricultural corridor, with its named towns and published plans — cancelled, with the funds reverting to their donors. No one gets the land; no one gets the money. Land can come back with quiet. The city that was going to stand on it cannot.

The failsafes — each with a named fear and an expiry date

Ideally the mechanism is never tested. To cover the years while it earns its credibility, Israel keeps a small set of safeguards. Each one is insurance against a specific, nameable catastrophe, and each has a published shape over time:

• Border crossings — a ten-year glide path, not a cliff. Gaza armed itself through tunnels under an unwatched frontier, so contraband interdiction is the heart of the matter. Years 0–5: Israeli operation of all crossings, including the Jordan Valley perimeter and the Philadelphi Corridor. Years 5–10: Palestinian administration under international inspection, with an Israeli security hold on flagged cargo only. Year 10: full handover, perimeter included. Sovereignty arrives in stages, on dates, visibly.
• Airspace — five years, covering civil air-traffic control in the interval before Palestine's own airport opens. Combat aviation is handled separately, below.
• Weapons — tiered, and honest about it. The existential categories — combat aircraft, armor, ballistic and long-range rockets, advanced air-defense systems, and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles (named specifically, because one such missile on the approach to Ben Gurion could end the whole framework in an afternoon) — are prohibited permanently, adjustable only by mutual consent. This is the Sinai model: demilitarization has constrained sovereign Egyptian territory for over four decades, and nobody argues Egypt isn't a state. A middle tier — mortars, anti-tank weapons, armed drones — sunsets at thirty years. And everything a serious internal security force needs is unrestricted from day one, because a Palestinian gendarmerie strong enough to crush its own rejectionists is not a concession to Palestine; it is an Israeli interest. The plan commits Israel to assist that force, when and only when invited: intelligence, equipment, training through third parties, quietly, with every success belonging to the Palestinian state alone. Israel gains nothing from Palestinian failure under this plan — that is by design — so helping the new state defeat its rejectionists is not charity. It is the mechanism working.
• No foreign forces — permanent. A weapons schedule that binds only Palestine could be circumvented by any patron willing to station "advisors" and foreign-operated systems on Palestinian soil. So: no foreign military forces or bases, ever. Palestine's diplomatic and economic alignments, on the other hand, are entirely its own affair.
• Surveillance — stated, and shrinking. Overflight monitoring for ten years, then confined to a border-adjacent corridor. Better to write this down than to smuggle it in; a safeguard the plan is embarrassed to name is a safeguard that will be abused.

These dates are automatic. They do not extend for bad behavior, and they do not accelerate for good behavior. Statehood is not probation. Israel's credibility in this plan rests on the two commitments it can never adjust — borders fixed in space, and fixed in time. (Catastrophic violence is handled by the act-of-war threshold, which suspends the whole framework. Nothing short of that touches the calendar.)

It is also worth listing what Israel does not keep, because it is the longer list: no presence in Palestinian cities, no veto over the government, no curriculum, no conditions on ideology or alliances, no demand for anyone's consent. And to settle the statehood question properly, the plan calls for Israel itself to sponsor Palestine's admission to the United Nations on day one.

Why this deterrent is different

Israel's existing doctrine — hit us and we hit back harder — has been tested for seventy-five years, and it has failed on its own terms. The reason is fairly simple: it asks the adversary to pay in a currency the adversary holds cheap. Hamas has demonstrated, at catastrophic length, that it will spend lives without limit — its fighters' and its civilians' alike. It cannot spend land. A deterrent priced in casualties invites the next round. A deterrent priced in territory threatens the one asset the national movement cannot replace, and the one loss its own people will not forgive.

It helps to see the plan against the two great experiments that came before it, because each supplied half of what stability requires and failed for lack of the other half. Oslo had an end-state vision but no enforcement — it ran on trust, phased everything, and handed every rejectionist a veto over completion. The 2005 Gaza disengagement had unilateralism but no end-state and no doctrine — Israel withdrew without finality, and without any answer to the question "what happens after the first rocket?" What filled the vacuum was the old reflex, which decayed into mowing the grass every few years, until October 7. Those urging Israelis into a new Oslo process today are asking them to re-run the first failure. Those citing Gaza against any withdrawal are describing the second. This plan is the combination that has not been tried: unilateral finality plus a published consequence architecture. It is, more or less, what 2005 would have been if anyone had designed the day after.

The mechanism has three properties the old doctrine lacks. It is inevitable — pre-announced, arithmetic, published to the square kilometer. It is non-violent in application — no Palestinian dies in the execution of the penalty, which breaks the cycle where every retaliation manufactures the next generation of recruits. And it enlists Palestinian society itself: because the cost lands on the nation's territory and the nation's future rather than on the attacker's cell, every attack becomes a theft from every Palestinian — and the residents of the next sector in the published queue know exactly whose land the next attack takes. The would-be martyr becomes, in his own society's eyes, the man who gave away the land and burned the city that was coming.

This is also the plan's answer to the demand that Palestinians "deradicalize" before receiving a state. No people has ever changed its beliefs on command, as a precondition, under occupation — and expecting it is not serious. The plan requires nobody's beliefs to change. It changes what violence costs and what violence means, and lets conviction catch up with reality at whatever pace history allows. That is the order in which peace has actually arrived everywhere it has arrived — Egypt, Jordan, Northern Ireland.

One thing the plan is honest about: there are actors this cannot deter. The true nihilist — who would rather see the whole place burn than accept Israel's existence — is not deterrable by this or by anything else; not by airstrikes, not by occupation. What the mechanism does to him is slower: it drains his ecosystem — his recruits, his shelter, his society's patience — by making his project legible as theft. And even his "victory" is priced differently now. If a decade of his killing pushes the schedule all the way to its floor, the total cost of the mechanism's complete failure is still a small fraction of the dead of one conventional war. That is worth sitting with: even the worst case here is cheaper in lives than the best case of the doctrine it replaces.

When they resist

Every forfeiture will be resisted — expect denunciation, litigation, and crowds. The implementation doctrine is three lines, published in advance.

Fire meets fire. Armed attack on implementation crews is met with force, and is itself priced by the schedule. Shooting at the fence costs more land, publicly, arithmetically.

Crowds meet patience and geography. The barrier is never moved through a crowd — under any circumstances. The debit is already on the ledger from adjudication day; the schedule has no expiry date; the queue holds many sectors; and the fence moves where and when the crowd is not. A human chain can defend one field for one season. The schedule owes a quantity, not a coordinate.

Protest is never priced. Unarmed assembly — however large, however hostile — is not an attack and costs nothing, ever. The mechanism prices bullets, not speech. And no one is dragged from their home: grace periods, compensation with no expiry, and patience do the work that force must never do. The one image this plan refuses to produce is a Palestinian killed in the collection of the penalty.

An honest accounting

None of this should be described with enthusiasm, and this document will not pretend otherwise. A mechanism that answers murder with the forfeiture of villages is a severe instrument. It imposes costs on Palestinians who threw no stone, and it is imposed — like the state that comes with it — without asking. That is a heavy thing to write into a peace plan, and in a world that still contained a clean option, it would be disqualifying.

That world is gone. The Gaza war moved this conflict into a different category — a conflict that for decades killed in the hundreds now kills in the tens of thousands, and there is no reason to believe the next round would be smaller. Every path from here runs through moral hazard. Permanent occupation is a permanent regime of force over millions. A trust-based two-state process, attempted now, hands a state to a society in which armed factions openly promise to use it as a launchpad — it schedules the next war. The status quo is not a resting place; it is the corridor to the next Gaza. Against those alternatives, a deterrent that takes ground instead of lives — announced in advance, applied without violence, bounded by published limits, and designed never to be used — is the least bad instrument available. It has come to this. Nobody should be glad about it. But refusing to choose among imperfect options is also a choice, and its costs are counted in the casualty figures of the last two years.

What each side gets

Israel gets what no war has delivered: fixed, internationally recognized borders; the end of the occupation and its military, economic, and diplomatic bleed; a security doctrine that does not require sending soldiers into Palestinian cities; and a real answer to the question that has cornered it in every forum since 2023 — what is your endgame? The plan would be bundled with normalization across the region, on the architecture already being assembled for exactly that purpose.

For Palestinians, start with the state itself — the fastest route to one that exists in the real world, decades faster than anything negotiation could plausibly deliver, on more land than they hold today, with a funded future attached. Then count what changes in an ordinary life. The occupation ends: no checkpoints between cities, no night raids, no home demolitions, no permit regime for travel or building or farming, no foreign army anywhere in daily existence. Settler violence ends with it — with the deep settlements gone and every Israeli behind a fixed border, there are no more outposts on the hilltops, no raids on villages, no burned olive groves. That entire architecture of friction simply ceases to exist. A worker in Jenin boards a train and is in Rafah by lunch. Goods leave a Palestinian port on Palestinian manifests; travelers fly from a Palestinian airport. The development schedule means the skyline of New Gaza is not a promise but a published construction calendar. And refugee limbo ends in citizenship — a passport of a state that exists.

The plan also adds a provision no separation framework has offered. Vetted Palestinians would be eligible for short- and long-term visas to enter Israel — to visit ancestral villages and family homes, to pray, to see relatives among Israel's Arab citizens, to stand in the places their grandparents left. Not citizenship, and not a right of return; the demographic question is settled by the two-state architecture itself. But presence — the ability to visit the house, the village, the olive tree in the courtyard. The separation in this plan is between states and armies, not between people and their memory.

Finally, the state's political life belongs to its citizens alone: no imposed curriculum, no conditions on its government's character, no demand for gratitude or consent. The plan expects to be denounced, and is built to function anyway. It asks of Palestinians exactly one thing — the thing every sovereign state on earth is asked: do not attack your neighbor. Everything else, the whole of national life, is theirs.

Why now

Four conditions make this window unusual, and none of them is stable.

Israeli politics is open. An election must be held by late October, the incumbent is beatable, and every contender faces the same unanswered "what now?" Ideas injected now can shape platforms. Ideas injected in a year will find the concrete already set.

American support is eroding from both directions at once — a progressive movement increasingly hostile to Israel on the left, an inward-turning nationalism souring on it from the right. The American consensus that underwrites Israel's status quo is a depreciating asset. The opportunity to settle Israel's borders on favorable terms, with an American administration willing to champion the outcome, will not obviously come again.

The machinery already exists. A US-led board oversees Gaza's transition under a UN Security Council mandate; a regional normalization push is actively looking for a Palestinian resolution to unlock it. These structures are stalling for lack of a defined end state. This plan supplies one. Nothing needs to be built from scratch.

And Iran, whatever this week's headlines, has been materially degraded as a spoiler — its proxies battered, its capacity to bleed any Israeli-Palestinian arrangement at a historic low. The Iran file will consume the world's attention in oscillating crises for years. The Palestinian file is the one arena where Israel can impose an end state without Tehran's signature.

The strongest objection

The plan is accused, fairly, of collective punishment: territory belongs to all Palestinians, and the mechanism takes it in response to the acts of a few. The full document deals with this at length; the short answer is comparative. Israel's current doctrine already imposes collective consequences — it imposes them in airstrikes, and the collective that pays is measured in funerals. This mechanism imposes its consequences in ground and in cancelled construction, with six months' warning, with no one killed in the application, no one profiting from the loss, and a published path to restoration. If the objection is that innocents should bear no cost for the acts of militants, it is an objection to every deterrence regime that has ever existed, including the one operating today — and the one operating today has just finished showing us what its costs look like. The question is never whether this plan is costless. It is whether any surviving alternative costs less.

Further objections — legality, feasibility, sovereignty, Israeli politics, regional stability, the case for rewarding quiet with land instead, and the case for simply waiting — are answered in the full document.

What happens next

A working group of ten to twenty people — in security, law, diplomacy, cartography, and Palestinian and Israeli politics — is being assembled to pressure-test this framework, develop it into an implementable plan, and put it in front of decision-makers before Israel's election.

To join the working group, challenge the plan, or put it in front of someone who should see it: contact@tzabarplan.org