There is a grim irony in the fact that, in a year marking the sixtieth anniversary of Israel’s creation, mainstream media interest in the so-called “one state solution” - something that would signal Israel’s demise - has been unprecedented.

Back in May, I reported on a front page piece in the LA Times which portrayed the one-state idea as a creative, radical and democratic initiative by intellectuals thinking outside the box. More recently, Isabel Kershner filed a thoughtful article for the New York Times which examined how “the credo of a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is beginning to erode.” What these articles demonstrate, as do similar pieces in the North American and European press, is that the concept of a single state between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan is no longer taboo among opinion-shapers.

That is a critically important development. True, there have always been advocates of a single state - Arab nationalists, Islamists, left-wing anti-Zionists, even some ultraorthodox Jewish sects - but none of them has ever had any meaningful input into a negotiating process that has always assumed, once a settlement is delivered, there will be a state called Israel which continues to exist. And let’s not get carried away; just as we should recall that the PLO was only regarded as a responsible interlocutor after it had embraced the two-state formula, we should also remember that we are very far from a situation where a single state is on the diplomatic agenda.

Still, what was once unthinkable is increasingly thinkable and, some would add, doable too. In her Times piece, Kershner referred to two reports - one by the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), one by the EU-funded Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSS) - which seriously discussed the one state formula.

As with any discussion of the one state idea, we need to remind ourselves of the assumptions of those who posit it as a solution. Historically, advocates of one state have arrived at this position as a result of a particular reading of the conflict’s origins, not because they believed it to be the most workable or equitable answer.

One of the earliest codifications of a single state solution, in the form of the Palestine National Covenant of 1968, was uncomplicatedly clear: Zionism was an imperialist movement and the state it fostered had no legitimacy. Only Jews who had been resident in the country before 1917, the year in which the British Foreign Secretary issued the Balfour Declaration promising not a Jewish state but a Jewish “homeland,” would be considered Palestinians.

Subsequent Palestinian documents throughout the 1970s reiterated this core theme of Zionism as the original sin. And despite the arrival of the phrase “secular, democratic state,” close examination of these documents reveals that there was, amidst all the Arab nationalist hyperbole, precious little discussion of either secularism or democracy. It’s safe to say that, had it materialized, the PLO’s secular democratic state would have looked more like Ba’athist Syria than the United States of America.

One looks in vain for a Palestinian document which advances a single state formula while acknowledging, at the same time, a degree of culpability on the Arab leadership for the Palestinian tragedy of 1948 and the legitimacy of the Jewish presence in historic Palestine. It doesn’t exist and it can’t exist: it is impossible to separate the single state formula from the narrative of original sin. However much the focus might seem to be on the policy challenges of the present, such as demography or the contiguity of Palestinian land in the West Bank, it is the past (to be precise, an interpretation of the past that sees Zionism as illegitimate and unnatural) which casts the longest shadow. In that regard, the PSS report is no different.

Its opening paragraph effectively asserts that Israel exists because of the “Naqba,” and that the Palestinians have already made huge and unreciprocated concessions in recognizing its existence. If Israel “refuses to negotiate seriously for a genuine two state outcome,” then the options available to the Palestinians include rebranding the PA as a “Palestinian Resistance Authority” (a proposal strikingly similar to the PLO’s 1974 political program, which advanced the idea of a Palestinian authority on any part of “Palestinian land to be liberated” without conceding Israel’s legitimacy) and the abandonment of the commitment to two states in favor of one.

The report accepts that what it describes as a “unitary democratic state” is “the nightmare scenario for most Israelis.” At the same time, “it is the most logical scenario given basic Western ideas of individual freedom, rule of law and democracy.” What we have here is, rather, a leap of logic. Firstly, there is nothing within what are called western principles of governance to suggest that national self-determination is rendered obsolete because individual rights are respected. Indeed, insofar as individuals identify themselves as members of groups, then the rights which those groups demand have a vital bearing on the material and psychological conditions of those same individuals.

Secondly, these sorts of rights have to be guaranteed culturally as well as institutionally. Places like Gaza are excellent examples of what happens when you have electoral mechanisms in place, but not the accompanying social norms which guarantee, in what Franklin D. Roosevelt understood to be the essence of democracy, freedom from fear.

Here is one of the report’s many flaws. The unitary state is presumed to be democratic. Extrapolating from the current climate, it is far more likely to be a republic of fear. Dominated by Islamist and nationalist groups and militias, it would not even remotely resemble the rechtsstaat model in the west. Paradoxically, in noting that that this is a “nightmare scenario” for most Israelis, the report acknowledges that. That is why - thinking as a politician might - one can interpret the PSS report not as a call for a single state, but as a strategy for pushing Israelis into a two-state solution by confronting them with a vision they dread. As the IPCRI report observes, “…the call for one state could force the sides to contest issues of identity and power - ‘us’ versus ‘them’ - possibly leading to a much more entrenched and bloody conflict more prone to unilateralism.”

As I said in a recent post on the political crisis in Belgium (a crisis which continues and could yet result in the break-up of a country regarded as a prime example of two nations in one state), sovereignty can be pooled, borders can be open and trade can continue unfettered without resigning membership of the “society of states.” This term, coined by the pioneering International Relations theorist Hedley Bull, refers to what results “when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions.”

Israel and a future Palestinian state will have many reasons to cooperate. For that cooperation to work, and for a two state solution to survive the conflicts that may well remain entrenched even after this arrangement is agreed, we need to channel our energies into solutions which enable both peoples to escape the sense that they are locked into a zero-sum game and imprisoned by history. A federation of independent states offers one route out, perhaps. Some sort of economic community, another. But one state? For the reasons outlined above, and a host more, the door to that road should be shut tight, for all our sakes.