Is the Palestinian state still a viable political goal, or have some international powers quietly begun searching for alternatives for it?
Do the projects of confederation and regional arrangements represent an attempt to solve the Palestinian issue, or an attempt to manage the results of its stumbling resolution?
If the international legitimacy that Israel has historically relied upon was linked to specific commitments, what remains of those commitments after more than seven decades?
If Arab and Palestinian recognition of Israel is part of a process that is supposed to lead to ending the occupation and establishing the Palestinian state, does this recognition remain untouched by reviewing the outcomes of that process?
As Israel approaches the liquidation of the terms of establishing the Palestinian state, some international circles begin to search for alternatives to the Palestinian issue instead of looking for solutions for Palestine.
This statement may seem harsh at first, but it is the most accurate key to understanding the Russian statement issued on June 8, 2026. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova announced that Moscow had observed a push from Western-funded think tanks towards alternative formulations for the future of Palestine, foremost among them reviving the idea of linking Palestinian territories with neighboring Arab states, describing these proposals as an extension of a new colonial tendency proven by experience to be sterile and in conflict with the international legal basis for settlement.
Behind the Russian statement, a deeper shift quietly slips into the international discourse about the future of the entire issue.
Throughout the three decades that followed the Madrid Conference in 1991 and the Oslo Accords in 1993, the central question remained the same: How do we reach a Palestinian state? The negotiations stumbled, governments changed, mediators shifted, but the basic assumption held: there is a political process, albeit stumbling, theoretically moving towards a clear goal of ending the occupation and establishing the state.
Today, however, the same question has begun to change. Instead of searching for the path that leads to the Palestinian state, the same think tanks referred to by Moscow are now preoccupied with a question that until recently was considered marginal: What if this state is not established at all?
Here precisely begins the danger of the phase. The discourse is no longer about the state as much as it is about what comes after it.
In my estimation, the return of confederation projects, regional arrangements, economic peace, and functional regions to the forefront does not mean they have become more convincing; it means confidence in the existing project has collapsed.
The irony is that many of these projects are marketed under labels that do not reflect their true political nature. Confederation, as constitutional thought defined it, assumes two independent states, each enjoying full sovereignty, then voluntarily deciding to create a joint federal framework. What is being circulated today starts from a completely opposite reality: Israel retains borders, security, airspace, and strategic decision-making, and transfers demographic and administrative burdens to Jordan or other Arab parties.
Calling this a confederation is misleading. A more accurate term is con-federation: a hybrid formula that combines the confederal form with the concept of population federalism, separating people from sovereignty, and distributing responsibilities while monopolizing the decision. What appears on the surface as a project for role-sharing is, in essence, a project for redistributing the outcomes of conflict without addressing its causes.
The con-federation does not solve the Palestinian issue. It distributes its legacy as blood is divided among tribes, yet focusing solely on these projects obscures the most important question: why did they appear in the first place?
The emergence of con-federation ideas reflects the depth of the crisis more than it causes it. And what gives it momentum today is the continual erosion of the material conditions for the establishment of a state. For example, the number of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was about a quarter of a million at the signing of the Oslo Accords; today, it has exceeded three-quarters of a million. The difference between the two numbers is a structural transformation that has made returning to the original settlement map more difficult than it was three decades ago. Settlement, which has always been described as the major obstacle to the settlement, has transformed into a tool for reshaping the land upon which that settlement is supposed to be based, and the negotiations have shifted from a means to end the occupation to a framework for managing it.
The problem is no longer limited to Israel's refusal to implement the settlement: the realities it produced over the past decades have contributed to undermining the geographical, political, and legal foundations that made the settlement possible in the first place. From this point, the transition from searching for ways to revive the settlement to searching for alternatives to it begins.
The essence of the issue is that the accumulated policies have emptied the settlement itself of the foundations it was based on, and this was explicitly stated by the International Court of Justice in its advisory opinion issued on July 19, 2024, when it concluded that the Israeli presence in the occupied Palestinian territories is illegal and must be ended as soon as possible. This point shifts the debate to a completely different level. Instead of merely defending Palestinian rights within the existing framework, it becomes necessary to review the framework itself, to reopen the questions related to legitimacy, commitment, and the benchmarks that arose within it.
These questions have a basis that predates Oslo by half a century. When the United Nations accepted Israel's membership on May 11, 1949, under Resolution 273, the General Assembly in the same resolution text referred to Israel's commitments regarding the implementation of the partition resolution 181 and resolution 194 concerning the right of refugees to return. International legitimacy was thus granted alongside specific commitments, not as a blank cheque. Palestinians and Arabs have the right today to pose the same question they were asked to answer for decades: what remains of those commitments after seventy-seven years of debate about their implementation, while Palestinian rights remain pending? Therefore, it is completely legitimate to reopen the debate about the relationship between legitimacy and commitment and the relationship between membership, responsibility, and fulfillment of commitments.
It is also legitimate to pose another long-delayed question regarding whether the Palestinian recognition of Israel came within the framework of a settlement that is supposed to lead to ending the occupation and establishing the Palestinian state, what remains of the political basis for that recognition when these goals are systematically undermined. The recognition provided by the Palestine Liberation Organization in the mutual letters of September 1993 between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin was a tool within a complete concept based on ending the occupation and establishing the state through a transitional phase limited to five years. Thirty-three years have passed since that transitional phase. When the goal is systematically undermined, the debate about the future of recognition shifts from a closed taboo to a legitimate political issue, and the idea of suspending it — until Israel complies with the terms of the settlement and international legitimacy resolutions — becomes a natural part of reviewing the entire course, not an impulsive slogan.
The same applies to Arab peace agreements. The Camp David Accords in 1978 and the subsequent Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, then the Wadi Araba Treaty in 1994, came within an environment that assumed the region was moving towards a comprehensive historic settlement. When those assumptions erode, Arab states have the right to reassess the political environment upon which their commitments were based, to determine if the conditions that gave those agreements their strategic meaning still exist at all. States do not review their agreements out of a desire for crises; they review them because the assumptions they were signed on no longer exist.
Amid these transformations, condemnation and rejecting alternative projects or warning against them is not enough. What is required is to develop an approach that returns the Palestinian issue to its original framework as a matter of people, land, rights, and sovereignty: remobilizing the issue internationally, activating international law tools from the International Court of Justice to the International Criminal Court, shifting the center of gravity from negotiating rights to holding accountable the policies that impeded them, and pushing towards a new international framework that deals with the issue after the practical collapse of the Oslo assumptions.
This begins with a unified Arab stance, based on Jordanian-Palestinian-Egyptian coordination, as a front responsible for rejecting displacement, protecting Jerusalem, and preventing the imposition of alternative regional solutions. This urgent track parallels a longer legal track: an Arab-Palestinian-international committee of international law and international relations experts, studying the relationship between Israel's UN membership and its unimplemented commitments since 1949, compelled by a specific timeframe to provide practical recommendations for international institutions and concerned countries. What this committee concludes paves the way for a further step: a new international framework under the auspices of the United Nations that reevaluates the Palestinian issue since the partition resolution, and seeks solutions based on international law and the right of peoples to self-determination, not on an imbalance of power and the imposition of realities. And accompanying the两个路径 an ongoing pressure tool: a political, economic, and academic boycott of institutions and companies specifically involved in settlement and occupation according to United Nations categorizations, restricted by the international standard rather than the political estimate, to remain PRESSING and protected from misinterpretation.
The issue is no longer a con-federal project here or an administrative initiative there. What is forming before us is a historic moment where the debate shifts from searching for a settlement of the conflict to searching for alternatives to the settlement itself. The most dangerous revelation of the Russian warning is not the existence of new projects, as much as some international circles have begun to deal with the absence of a Palestinian state as a realistic assumption deserving planning. When the debate shifts from how to achieve a solution to how to adapt to its absence, reviewing the entire previous phase becomes a political necessity, not an intellectual luxury.
And when things reach this point, the question is no longer how to save the old course, but who has the right to define the political future of Palestine: the owners of the issue themselves, or the powers that have begun to search for alternatives for it. History teaches us that political vacuums do not remain vacuums for long, and that peoples who do not shape their vision for the future find themselves compelled to live within visions shaped by others on their behalf.
