About the Project

The concept of a “shared homeland” starts from the recognition of a fact: the land Palestinians call Palestine (فلسطين) and Israeli-Jews call the Land of Israel (ארץ ישראל) is the same place. Both peoples live across its valleys, hillsides, and coastlines, and both feel its length and breadth as home. Calling it a "shared homeland" is partly a recognition of that shared attachment. But it is also a normative and political claim: any just future for this land must be built for both peoples who call it home, not by separating them and not by erasing one or the other.

That recognition does not flatten history. The status quo in Palestine-Israel was shaped by settler-colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, cultural erasure, and the current genocide in Gaza. A shared homeland does not mean equal historical claims. It means that decolonisation cannot take the form of one people supplanting another and that justice for Palestinians and dignity for Israeli Jews are not in tension; both require dismantling the existing structures of domination that have precluded an equal shared life, and building new institutions that can sustain it. What those institutions and that reorganisation of space would actually look like is the work of the Shared Homeland Paradigm (SHP) project.

Based on our study and analysis of the current conditions, and similar to our partner organization A Land for All's vision, the SHP advocates a vision of “two states, one homeland”, an approach distinct from both conventional one-state and two-state solutions. We urge the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel, with borders based on the 1967 line. The two states, Palestine and Israel, would be linked together by joint institutions strong enough to protect the rights of all persons in the territory and to manage common interests.

We aim to offer a practical and compelling alternative to the moribund separation-based two-state solution that the international community has championed for several decades, and to one-state models that have yet to command broad-based support. The starting point is a recognition that both peoples share an aspiration to national self-determination, including the ability to govern themselves and shape their collective future. The SHP takes that aspiration seriously on both sides. Where it parts company with conventional two-state thinking is in rejecting the assumption that mutual self-determination requires separation, the idea that security, prosperity and self-determination are best secured by maximising physical distance between the two peoples. After three decades, that approach has deepened occupation, impoverished Palestinians, and left everyone less secure. The SHP starts from the opposite premise: that justice and security in a land both peoples claim as home can only be built through partnership and equal rights.

Like one-state proposals, the SHP embraces freedom of movement and residence across the whole land. At the same time, it provides robust protection for something that one-state models tend to neglect: both peoples' group identity and their ability to sustain their political, cultural, and institutional life as national communities.

The mechanism through which self-determination is reconciled with freedom of movement is the decoupling of two legal statuses: citizenship and residency. Citizens may participate in national-level politics, allowing each state to retain its own demos; residents may participate in local politics (e.g., in municipal elections), giving them voice in matters affecting their lives without changing the composition of the national polity.

Normalisation, according to one influential definition from the BDS movement, means dealing with or presenting something that is inherently abnormal, such as oppression and injustice, as if it were normal. Anti-normalisation is a serious framework that emerges from anti-colonial commitments the SHP project shares. Indeed, SHP was developed to challenge the status quo in Palestine-Israel, not to normalise it.

The project's substantive aims include ending Israel's occupation, dismantling the structures of inequality and supremacy that have constrained Palestinian citizens of Israel, and enabling Palestinian refugees to realise their right of return while respecting the rootedness of Israeli Jews in the places they now call home. These are not goals that can be achieved by treating the present as if it were normal; they require its radical transformation. We pursue them by developing practical and principled models that respond to an array of challenges that have impeded progress in the past, drawing on comparative experience from elsewhere and on deep familiarity with the distinctive features of Palestine-Israel.

The project engages both Palestinians and Israelis committed to these goals, ensuring that researchers from among both peoples shape its direction. The SHP team recognizes the lack of symmetry between Israeli and Palestinian history, power, and circumstances, and we strive to work in a way that mitigates the impact of structural inequalities.  Additionally, the project is structured to minimize normalisation concerns. It is hosted by two academic institutions outside the region, the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at University College London and the McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific, and it is neither affiliated with nor funded by Israeli state institutions in any way.

After decades of failed peace processes and now in the midst of a genocide, the very vocabulary of "solutions" and "visions" has come to feel suspect to many Palestinians and to others working in solidarity with them. The concern is understandable: when bodies are being pulled from rubble in Gaza, when settler violence is displacing communities in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Naqab/Negev, when the catastrophe is ongoing, what business does anyone have writing about some distant future?

We take that concern seriously. The SHP is not a substitute for the urgent work of stopping the violence, defending Palestinian lives and rights, prosecuting those responsible, and confronting the structures that have produced this moment. Those struggles are immediate and significant. But the question of what comes after is already being asked and requires convincing answers. The political imagination that gets to that question first will shape what is possible. If the dominant framework remains separation and domination, then the next chapter will not look meaningfully different from the present one. The point of working on the SHP now is to ensure that when the political opening comes, a substantively different vision is available: one grounded in equality, mutual self-determination, and decolonisation rather than in the management of permanent injustice.

Our work is done with the past and present in view. Any honest and sustainable vision for the future of Palestine-Israel must engage the wrongs of the past and the catastrophes of the present: the Nakba, the occupation, the genocide. These cannot be treated as background; they are the starting condition. A future that does not acknowledge what has been done cannot be a just one. The project's commitment to decolonisation is in part an insistence on this: that the structures producing today's violence cannot be carried into whatever comes next.

The right of return is a right, grounded in international law and in the moral claim of people who were displaced from their homes during the Nakba. The SHP takes it as such: not a symbolic gesture, not a negotiating chip, and not something to be set aside in the name of pragmatism, or for a “later stage” as suggested in the Oslo accord, but a right whose realisation is essential to any just future for Palestine-Israel. Under the SHP, Palestinian refugees and their descendants become citizens of the State of Palestine and may choose to become permanent residents of the State of Israel. They would enjoy rights in their place of residence inside Israel: schooling for their children, social services, recognition of their language and history, and participation in municipal elections as voters and candidates. They do not vote in Knesset elections; that level of political participation follows citizenship. This decoupling of citizenship from residency is what makes return possible while preserving meaningful national self-determination for both peoples.

This is one of the most challenging questions the project is addressing. The settlements in the West Bank were established and have been maintained and expanded in patent violation of international law. They are an Israeli state colonial project, built and sustained through decades of governmental policy, military protection and financial support, and designed explicitly to make Palestinian self-determination harder to achieve. They sit at the heart of the system of occupation and Jewish supremacy that the SHP directly challenges. At the same time, they are home to some 700,000 Israelis whose forced relocation would present formidable political, security, economic, and human costs. Forced relocation on that scale could also reinforce a logic of separation, reprising the catastrophic population transfers of the 20th century and deepening rather than diminishing ethnic conflict.

Under the SHP the West Bank becomes part of the sovereign territory of the State of Palestine. The occupation ends, and the state project of settlement ends with it. With those structures gone, the categories themselves change. Settlements cease to be settlements and become residential communities open to Palestinians and subject to Palestinian law. Settlers, in turn, cease to be settlers. Some Israelis who live in the West Bank may have a presumptive option to remain as permanent residents of the State of Palestine. Under this arrangement, they keep their Israeli citizenship and their national political rights inside Israel and gain local residency rights in Palestine, but do not vote in Palestinian national elections.

The project's principal challenge is to find arrangements that redress one set of injustices without producing new ones, delivering the structural redress owed to Palestinians dispossessed by the settlements while protecting the safety and dignity of both peoples. This is not vindication of the settlement enterprise. It is its dismantling. The legal, military, and demographic machinery of Jewish supremacy that produced settler status in the occupied territory ends. What comes next must address the injustice that system caused: through Palestinian refugees return, through restitution, through transitional justice.  Decolonisation, in this project, is not about replacing one people's dominance with another's, it is about ending domination as a relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.

Yes. The SHP is built on principles that international law has long affirmed, and in several important respects it gives those principles fuller effect than existing peace frameworks have managed.

The foundations are familiar. Two sovereign states on borders based on the 1967 line. The end of occupation, which the International Court of Justice ruled unlawful in its entirety in its July 2024 advisory opinion. The dismantling of the settlement enterprise, which that same opinion required Israel to cease and to undo. The right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, guaranteed by human rights law, affirmed in UN resolutions, and reaffirmed by the ICJ. The right of both peoples to national self-determination, foundational in the UN Charter and the major human rights treaties.  The SHP framework takes these commitments seriously enough to insist on their realisation.

Some elements of the framework are innovative but not unprecedented. The decoupling of citizenship from residency draws on regional arrangements like the Schengen Area and the EU citizenship regime. Joint institutions for transboundary governance have precedents across Europe and beyond.

Scholarly work on Palestine-Israel can struggle to reach beyond its primary readership due to the political reality on the ground. However, the SHP builds on a growing body of work by scholars and political thinkers, in Palestine-Israel and elsewhere, who have been developing the paradigm of partnership over recent years. What the project tries to add is reach: ensuring the work lands beyond academic circles and into the conversations and decisions that actually shape the region's future.

That starts with civil society. The SHP treats Palestinian and Israeli civil society organisations not as eventual audiences for the project's outputs but as partners whose input shapes the work as it develops. Their role is to bring the questions and concerns that fine-tune the project's recommendations and help address its blind spots, and to serve as a bridge to the wider publics whose lives the work is about.

The project also engages other audiences whose work shapes how the future of Palestine-Israel is imagined and decided. With policy and political audiences across the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and the Arab League, the aim is to shift their attachment to separation-based paradigms, which would itself alter the power dynamics in the region. With progressive media, think tanks, and content creators, the aim is to disrupt and shift the dominant discourse on Palestine-Israel. With academics and students, the aim is to carry the ideas forward across disciplines and into the next generation of scholarship.

At the same time, the SHP is neither a peace plan to be tabled at a summit nor a blueprint that any government will adopt wholesale. Its impact will be cumulative and contested, and will depend on the work of civil society, policymakers, scholars, and journalists who take up, contest, and build on what the project produces. That is the nature of work like this, and it is why the project is built as a partnership.

The SHP was conceived to develop the vision advocated by A Land for All (ALFA), our partner organisation. ALFA is a political initiative whose "two states, one homeland" vision is the starting point of the project, and one of the few popular movements in Palestine-Israel whose leadership and members are drawn from both Palestinian and Israeli societies.

The two are deliberately structured as independent entities, in close and constant communication, but with distinct roles. This gives the SHP the freedom to explore ideas and approaches that ALFA has not fully considered and may ultimately choose not to endorse. The SHP is not an alternative to ALFA, it is part of a research and policy development effort that includes a growing array of projects at a number of universities, with a view toward giving the vision ALFA has developed the kind of practical detail it will require to become real.

The project's research is hosted at two English-speaking institutions (the Bartlett DPU at University College London and the McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific) and involves researchers based in those countries as well as in the wider academic world. English is the working language because it is the lingua franca across the team, drawing collaborators from Palestine-Israel and from around the world.

That comes with a real limitation. Many amongst the two peoples for whom this project is intended for, Palestinian and Israeli publics, read Arabic and Hebrew rather than English. Producing research first in English risks holding it at one remove from those publics. The project's plan is to address this in stage three, the public outreach phase. The most important outputs, including policy briefs, key scenarios, and video summaries, will be translated and made accessible in Arabic and Hebrew, in formats designed for non-academic audiences. The web platform is intended to host materials in all three languages.

We do not pretend this fully closes the gap. Working in English can shape the questions that get asked and the frameworks that get used. However, it allows the team to work together and to create meaningful collaboration worldwide.