Challenge: Unified Israeli-Palestinian State

Your challenege is to create a unified Israeli-Palestinian state as part of a peace agreement with equal rights for everyone in both Israel and Palestine with a POD anytime between 1950 and 2012. Bonus points if Israestine is part of NATO. Extra bonus points if Israestine is part of the European Union by 2012.
 
equal rights for all? nope, not gonna happen, too many arabs/palestinians. the country gets renamed to palestine the next day.

something like apardheid southafrica? it's already there, more or less.
 
This premise is inherently unworkable. The founders of Israel had no connection to the Middle East beyond succeeding in war-waging and ethnic cleansing. There were too many Palestinians for Jewish immigration to lead to any Israeli identity without expelling and driving them out. IOTL the Arabs proposed just this kind of thing and the founders of Israel turned them down. They weren't interested in a supra-Palestine, only in an Israel.
 

Gwax23

Banned
equal rights for all? nope, not gonna happen, too many arabs/palestinians. the country gets renamed to palestine the next day.

something like apardheid southafrica? it's already there, more or less.

From the Jordan to the Med the population of Jews to Arabs is close to Half and Half. (Some counts favoring the Jewish population slightly due to gross miscalculation and over counts of the Arab population) Thats including all of gaza and the entirety of the west bank areas Israel no longer governs or claims.

Not to mention other minorities and the Druze and Bedouins who dont associate politically with the Wider Arab Muslim population. Plus you cant forget the Christians.

But Yea total apartheid....
 
Easy, just have the Jews assimilate themselves into an independent secular Palestine.

Except that:
a) there was no independent secular Palestine. There was a British mandate.
b) assimilation into anything whatsoever was more or less the last thing in the world the Jews wanted.
Heck, the whole POINT of Zionism was avoiding the apparently unescapable choice between assimilation and persecution that was the dilemma of being a Jew in a Europe where emancipation (and thus integration of the Jews into the national communities) had happened and at the same time Anti-Semitism went rampant.
Apparently the Zionist leaders estimated that the Europeans were incapable of living as equal citizens of the same state without persecuting unassimilated minorities. Sadly, it looks like they were right.
 
Avoiding WWII might do it.

There would still be a Zionist movement. But there were strands within the Zionist movement that actually had been in favor of a binational state for quite some time. And absent the Holocaust and the subsequent wave of emigration to Palestine, there would not have been such widespread support for Zionism from the West, nor the numbers to make it work.

It's possible the end result is just a small Jewish state, similar to the Peel Commission Plan. But you might also end up with a multiethnic Jewish state dominated by Leftists –*Mapam-types from the Zionists and secular (and in many cases Christian) Palestinians, aligned with the Soviet Union.

Now it's quite possible this state could devolve into a second Lebanon. But if you're lucky you may eventually have a state that has a multiethnic character – a large Jewish minority, Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze, Armenians, and Bedouins.
 
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