What If: Would Israel and Iran Trade Peace for a Palestinian State? |
Call it inconceivable—if not unthinkable. In international politics, today’s impossibilities have a habit of becoming tomorrow’s realities.
If Donald Trump still harbors ambitions for a Nobel Peace Prize, he may be looking in the wrong direction. Even significant normalization agreements between Israel and Lebanon—or a historic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia—would fall short. The truly transformative, and politically unthinkable, breakthrough would lie elsewhere: an Israeli-Iranian peace agreement in exchange for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
At first glance, the idea borders on fantasy. Iran is not merely another adversary; it is widely perceived in Israel as an existential threat. Yet precisely because of that, peace with Iran would carry a strategic weight unlike any prior diplomatic initiative. And if such an offer came with a condition, Israeli agreement to the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, it would force Israel into a decision it has long managed to avoid. For Iran, the implications would be equally profound: a redefinition of a revolutionary identity in which opposition to Israel has long been central.
What is envisioned here is therefore not a conventional diplomatic breakthrough, but a dual ideological rupture, one that would challenge the foundational narratives of both states. Such transformations are rare in international politics. They tend to occur not through gradual diplomacy, but under the pressure of strategic exhaustion or systemic shock.
To see how such a shift might occur, it is worth recalling an earlier moment when Israeli public opinion seemed immovable, until it wasn’t. Before Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977, the idea that Israel would relinquish the Sinai Peninsula was deeply unpopular. Sinai was not just territory; it was a strategic........