Fine. So what do you actually want? What does your side think the ending looks like?

The fuller answer

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Answer it. In your own words, at length, before you ask them anything, because this is the one question here that deserves a straight reply.

You need no title and no mandate to give one. What you need is to have decided, and most people arguing about this have not.

There is a second reason this page exists. A dozen entries on this site tell you to make the other person describe the day after: which strike, which border, who governs, what happens to the people already there. That is the right question. It is worth very little in the mouth of somebody with no answer of their own, and until this page there was none here.

What follows is what I want. It is nobody’s policy and it binds nobody. That is what makes it possible to write down. A person who is not holding a coalition together is free to answer a question.

Thirty seconds, in this order

Two states. A Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, joined by a corridor.

The border drawn from the 1967 line, with land swapped one for one. The blocs go to Israel, and Israeli land of the same size goes the other way. Arab East Jerusalem the Palestinian capital, Jewish Jerusalem Israeli. No Palestinian army, and arrangements Israel can verify from its own side of the line. Refugees to Palestine, with compensation, rather than into Israel.

Then the part people leave off, which is what the rest is for. An end of claims, in writing. Normalisation with the Arab states that offered it in 2002 and have restated it since, and which Saudi Arabia now prices at a clear and irreversible path to a Palestinian state.

That takes half a minute out loud.

Why that, and not something else

Not because it is likely. Because it is the only ending anybody has written down that both peoples could sign.

Take one state between the river and the sea, with everybody voting. It asks two peoples to share a parliament in the decade after October 7. One state without everybody voting is the thing most of the people proposing it say they are against.

And the single democratic state, the version handed to us most often, has close to no constituency where it would actually happen. The Institute for National Security Studies polled Israelis over six days in March 2025. Four per cent wanted one binational state. Among Jewish Israelis it was 1 per cent.

That is not proof they are wrong. It is a fact about what can be built.

The six items, and what each one costs

A vague answer is not an answer, so here is the list, including the parts that cost us.

The border. The 1967 line with swaps of equivalent size. Not a foreign imposition and not new. At Taba in 2001 Israel put 6 per cent on the table. In 2008 it was 6.3 per cent kept against 5.8 returned.

The settlements. The hard half, said out loud. The blocs stay and are paid for in land. The settlements east of them do not stay under Israeli sovereignty, and the people there move or live as a minority under a Palestinian government. Roughly 76 per cent of West Bank settlers live between the Green Line and the barrier. That is close to where every map anybody has drawn runs.

The other quarter is around 130,000 people. In 2005 Israel removed over 8,000 of its own citizens from 25 settlements, against ferocious opposition at home. This is roughly sixteen times that, and anybody presenting it as an administrative problem has not costed it.

Jerusalem. Arab neighbourhoods Palestinian, Jewish ones Israeli, two capitals in one city. That principle was American before it was anybody’s, read to both delegations in December 2000, and both accepted it at Taba four weeks later.

The holy basin is the piece nobody has solved. Clinton proposed effective Palestinian control of the Haram al-Sharif. Olmert proposed no sovereignty at all, administered by five parties. Geneva proposed Palestinian sovereignty with an international presence and the Western Wall under Israeli administration. Three texts, three answers.

Security. Demilitarised, and that word carries most of the weight on this page. Israel will not sign a border that Iran can arm from the far side, and no Palestinian will sign a state that cannot defend itself. Every serious text since 2000 has reached for an international force to bridge it. Abbas wrote to Macron in June 2025 that a Palestinian state would not be militarised, so the position has at least been stated.

Refugees. Return to the Palestinian state rather than into Israel, with compensation and a fund, and Israel deciding for itself how many it admits. Say it plainly, because the soft version is worse than none. This is the item on which the talks actually died, and the item where every serious text since 2000 has said roughly the same thing.

Who governs. One Palestinian authority over Gaza and the West Bank, elected. The last Palestinian legislative election was on 25 January 2006. Abbas was elected in January 2005 to a four-year term. A decree in June 2026 set legislative elections for 28 November 2026 and a presidential election for early 2027. Believe it when the count is published.

Three things nobody has solved

Name them yourself. An answer that admits its own holes beats one that does not, because the person asking has already heard the seamless version and discounted it.

The holy basin. Three good texts disagree and there is no agreed answer.

Enforcement. Demilitarisation needs a guarantor who stays for decades. The UN force in Sinai left in May 1967 when Egypt asked it to, three weeks before a war. The force in southern Lebanon has been there since 1978, and the resolution instructing it to help disarm the armed groups was adopted in August 2006. The honest counter-example is the observer force in Sinai, in place since April 1982, and it holds because both governments want it to. That restates the problem rather than solving it.

A partner. There is no Palestinian leadership today that can deliver Gaza and the West Bank at once, and no Israeli government that holds this position. That is a real objection to the timetable. It is not an objection to the destination.

The other honest answer, and many readers hold it

Name it properly, because it is a position and not an absence. No final settlement now. Security first, autonomy, economic development, and wait for a Palestinian leadership that can sign and deliver.

That has been the working policy of most Israeli governments for fifteen years. Many of the people reading this hold it, and it has a case. Israel left Gaza in 2005 and got the government that carried out October 7. Somebody who declines to run that experiment in the West Bank is not a warmonger, and treating them as one is how you lose them.

Here is where I come down, and you are free to land elsewhere. Managing a conflict is not an ending. It is the decision not to have one, and it has a price. Soldiers in somebody else’s cities indefinitely. A war every few years. And nothing to say when somebody asks you this question.

Now the concession that makes the rest credible. Given in 2005, this answer would have looked far more achievable than it does today. Settlement growth pushed it further away. So did October 7, and so did the state of Palestinian governance. A route that got longer is still a route, and no shorter one has appeared since.

If you hold the other position rather than mine, the rest of this page still works. The six items are the questions to put to anybody demanding an ending, and they land the same from where you are standing.

Then ask them the same six

Only now. Answer first, or this is the move everybody uses and nobody respects.

Border. Settlements. Jerusalem. Security. Refugees. Who governs. Item by item, the way you just did it.

Then the two questions almost nobody gets asked. What happens to the seven million Jews and the five and a half million Palestinians already living between the river and the sea. And who enforces whatever you have described, on the morning somebody breaks it.

The longer version of that demand, for the person arguing for a single state, is in why Israel exists. What was actually put on the table, with dates and percentages, is in the offers.

The lines

“Two states. Sixty-seven line, swaps, blocs to Israel, Arab Jerusalem their capital, no army, refugees to Palestine. That’s my answer. What’s yours?”

“I’ll give you the part my side finds hard. About a hundred and thirty thousand settlers sit on the wrong side of any line anybody has drawn. They move, or they live under a Palestinian government.”

“The whole thing was written out in Geneva in 2003. Fifty pages, by Israelis and Palestinians. Read it, then tell me nobody’s ever described the ending.”

“You’re right that no Israeli government is offering that. I didn’t elect them. You asked me what I want.”

“Managing it isn’t an ending. It’s deciding not to have one, and the bill turns up every few years.”

“One binational state polled at four per cent in Israel in March 2025, and one per cent among Jewish Israelis. Tell me how you get from there to a shared parliament.”

Where this backfires

Lead with this in a room arguing about Gaza this week and it reads as a change of subject. Answer what is in front of you first. This page is for the moment somebody asks.

A specific answer can be attacked and a vague one cannot. That is what the page costs you, and it is worth paying, because a vague answer is heard as no answer at all.

Do not present any of this as Israel’s offer. It is not on the table from anybody, and the first person in the room who knows that will say so.

And retire the phrase “two-state solution”. It has been said too often by too many people who wanted nothing to happen, and it now signals evasion. Say the six items instead.

Write your own six down

Action. “On Thursday evening before I go out, I will put my six on one card: border, settlements, Jerusalem, security, refugees, who governs, one line each, in my own words.”

Coping. “If somebody tells me my own government is not offering this, I will say they are right, that I did not elect it, and that the question was what I want.”