Afrasianet - Eng. Firas Al-Samadi - Is the Palestinian state still a political achievable goal, or are some international powers quietly looking for alternatives?
Do the projects of the confederation and the regional arrangements represent an attempt to resolve the Palestinian issue, or an attempt to manage the consequences of its solution?
If the international legitimacy on which Israel has been based has historically been linked to specific obligations, what is left of those obligations more than seven decades later?
If Arab and Palestinian recognition of Israel is part of a process that is supposed to lead to an end to the occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state, does this recognition remain unavoidable from reviewing the results of that process?
As Israel gets closer to liquidating the conditions for the establishment of a Palestinian state, some international circles have begun to look for alternatives to the Palestinian issue instead of looking for solutions for Palestine.
This phrase may seem harsh at first glance, but it is the most accurate key to reading the Russian statement issued on June 8, 2026. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova announced that Moscow has observed a push from Western-funded think tanks towards alternative formulas for the future of Palestine, foremost of which is the revival of the idea of linking the Palestinian territories to neighboring Arab countries, describing these proposals as an extension of a neo-colonialist tendency that has proven to be sterile and contrary to the international legal basis for the settlement.
Behind the Russian statement a deeper shift has quietly crept into the international debate on the future of the entire issue.
Throughout the three decades following the Madrid Conference in 1991 and the Oslo Accords in 1993, the central question remained the same: How do we reach a Palestinian state? Negotiations have stalled, governments have changed, and mediators have changed, but the basic premise has persisted: there is a faltering political process, but it is theoretically moving toward a clear goal of ending the occupation and establishing a state.
Today, the same question is beginning to change. Instead of looking for a path to Palestinian statehood, the same think tanks referred to by Moscow have been preoccupied with a question that until recently was considered marginal: What if this state was never established?
This is precisely where the danger of the stage begins. The conversation is no longer about the state as much as about what will come next.
In my estimation, the return of the projects of the confederation, regional arrangements, economic peace and functional regions does not mean that they have become more convincing; it means that confidence in the existing project has collapsed.
The irony is that many of these projects are marketed under names that do not reflect their political reality. Confederation, as defined by constitutional thought, assumes two independent states that enjoy full sovereignty, each of which voluntarily decides to establish a common federal framework.
Today, however, is the exact opposite reality: Israel retains borders, security, airspace, and strategic decision-making, and transfers demographic and administrative burdens to Jordan or other Arab parties.Call this a confederacy of misinformation.
More precisely, it is called a confederation: a hybrid formula that combines the form of a confederation with the concept of a federalism of the population, separating the population from sovereignty, and distributing responsibilities while monopolizing decision-making. What appears to be a role-sharing project is in essence a project to redistribute the results of the conflict without addressing its causes.
Confederation does not solve the Palestinian issue. The Confederation distributes its legacy as blood is distributed among the tribes, but stopping at these projects alone hides the most important question: Why did they appear in the first place?
The emergence of ideas of confederation reflects the depth of the crisis more than it is the cause of it. What gives them momentum today is the continued erosion of the material conditions for statehood. For example, the number of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was about a quarter of a million when Oslo was signed; today it is more than three-quarters of a million.
The difference between the two numbers is a structural shift that has made a return to the original settlement map more difficult than it was three decades ago. Settlements, which have always been described as the greatest obstacle to settlement, have become a tool To reshape the territory on which this settlement is supposed to be based, negotiations have moved 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 has 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 onwards, the transition from the search for ways to revive the settlement to the search for alternatives to it begins.
The crux of the case is that the accumulated policies have emptied the settlement itself of the foundations on which it was based, as the International Court of Justice explicitly stated in its advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, when it concluded that the Israeli presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is illegal and must be ended as soon as possible.
This point takes the debate to a completely different level. Rather than simply defending Palestinian rights within the existing framework, it is necessary to review the framework itself, and to reopen questions of legitimacy and commitment and the references within which the entire political process was created.When the
United Nations accepted Israel as a member on May 11, 1949 by Resolution 273, the General Assembly referred in the text of the same resolution to Israel's commitments to implement Resolution 181 on Partition and Resolution 194 on the Right of Refugees. International legitimacy was granted with permission with specific obligations, not an open instrument. Palestinians and Arabs have the right to ask the same question they have been asked to answer for decades:
What is left of those commitments after seventy-seven years of controversy over their implementation, while Palestinian rights remain suspended? It is therefore perfectly legitimate to reopen the debate on the relationship between legitimacy and obligation, the relationship between membership and responsibility, and the relationship between recognition and fulfilment of pledges.
It is also legitimate to ask another long-overdue question as to whether Palestinian recognition of Israel is part of a settlement that is supposed to lead to an end to the occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state, and what remains of the political basis of such recognition when these goals are systematically undermined.
The recognition made by the PLO in the September 1993 letters exchanged between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin was a tool within a complete vision based on ending the occupation and establishing a state through a specific transitional period Its ceiling is five years. Thirty-three years have passed since that transitional period.
When the goal is systematically undermined, the debate over the future of recognition shifts from a closed taboo to a legitimate political issue, and the idea of suspending it — until Israel adheres to the terms of the settlement and the resolutions of international legitimacy — becomes a natural part of a full-track review, not an emotional slogan.
The same is true of the Arab peace agreements. The Camp David Accords of 1978 and the subsequent Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, and then the Wadi Araba Treaty in 1994, came within an environment that assumed that the region was moving towards a comprehensive historical settlement.
When those assumptions are eroded, Arab states have the right to reassess the political environment on which their commitments are based, to see if the conditions that gave those agreements their strategic meaning are still in place. States do not review their conventions out of a desire for crises; they review them because the assumptions they signed no longer exist.
In the midst of these transformations, it is not enough to denounce and condemn and reject or warn against alternative projects. What is required is to produce an approach that returns the Palestinian issue to its original framework as an issue of people, land, rights, and sovereignty: reinternationalizing the issue, activating the tools of international law from the Court of Justice to the International Criminal Court, shifting the center of gravity from negotiating rights to accountability for the policies that have disrupted it, and pushing for a new international framework to deal with the issue after the practical collapse of the Oslo hypotheses.
This starts with a unified Arab position 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 path parallels a longer legal path: an Arab-Palestinian-international committee of experts in international law and international relations, which examines the relationship between Israel's membership in the United Nations and its obligations that have not been implemented since 1949, and commits to a specific time frame to make practical recommendations to international institutions and the countries concerned.
The conclusion of this committee paves the way for the further step: a new international framework under the auspices of the United Nations that reassesses the Palestinian question since the partition resolution, and seeks solutions based on international law and the right of peoples to determination. Its fate, not to the imbalance of power and the imposition of facts.
Both tracks are accompanied by a permanent tool of pressure: a political, economic, and academic boycott of institutions and companies specifically involved in the settlement and occupation according to the United Nations classifications, constrained by international standards rather than political judgment, in order to remain pressurized and protected from misinterpretation.
The issue is no longer a confederation project here or an administrative initiative there. What is before us is a historic moment in which the debate moves from the search for a settlement of the conflict to the search for alternatives to the settlement itself.
The most dangerous thing that the Russian warning reveals is not the existence of new projects, as much as some international circles have begun to treat the absence of a Palestinian state as a realistic hypothesis worth planning.
When the debate moves from how to achieve a solution to how to adapt to its absence, a review of the entire previous stage becomes a political necessity It is not an intellectual luxury.
When things get to this point, the question is no longer how to save the old path, but who has the right to define the political future of Palestine: the owners of the issue themselves, or the forces that have begun to look for alternatives.
History teaches us that political vacuums do not remain for long, and that people who do not formulate their vision for the future find themselves forced to live within visions formulated by others on their behalf.
