Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother, the man who probably has more maps of this city than the municipality.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. And you are not wrong, Corn. I was actually just looking at a survey from nineteen twenty-two this morning, trying to trace the old Ottoman property lines near the Damascus Gate. But today, we are looking at something a bit more contemporary, although it is rooted in those same lines and hills we see outside our window.
Yeah, our housemate Daniel sent us a really thoughtful prompt this morning. He wanted to steer away from the usual political shouting matches and really dig into the geographic and territorial nuts and bolts of a two-state solution.
It is a fascinating angle because so often the conversation is about the who and the why, but we rarely talk about the where and the how in a physical, engineering sense. Daniel is asking if a Palestinian state is even geographically feasible in twenty twenty-six, given how fragmented the territory is.
Right. Specifically, he is asking about contiguity. Does a state actually have to be one solid piece of land to function? And if not, how do you connect Gaza and the West Bank without literally cutting Israel in half?
It is the ultimate puzzle. I mean, we live in a city that has been divided and reunited and is still, in many ways, a series of overlapping realities. So, exploring the pragmatic side of this is right up our alley.
Let us start with that first big question. Contiguity. Herman, you are the history and geography buff. Is there a rule in international law or just in the general history of nation-states that says a country has to be one continuous landmass?
Not at all. In fact, if you look at the world map, non-contiguous states are more common than you might think. The most obvious example for our American listeners is the United States. You have the lower forty-eight states, and then you have Alaska and Hawaii. Alaska is a massive exclave. It is separated by Canada, yet it functions perfectly as part of the sovereign union.
Sure, but Alaska is a bit of a special case because of its scale and the fact that the United States and Canada have a very stable, friendly relationship. Is there a more relevant example where the territories are closer together but separated by a potentially hostile or at least competitive neighbor?
Excellent point. Look at Azerbaijan and its exclave, Nakhchivan. They are separated by Armenia. That has been a major point of conflict for decades, specifically regarding the Zangezur corridor, which Azerbaijan wants to connect the two parts. Then you have Kaliningrad, which is part of Russia but sits between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. During the Cold War, West Berlin was the ultimate non-contiguous entity, an island of democracy sitting deep inside East Germany, connected only by specific air, rail, and road corridors.
And historically, we have the big one that people often point to as a warning: Pakistan.
Exactly. When Pakistan was created in nineteen forty-seven, it consisted of West Pakistan and East Pakistan, separated by over one thousand six hundred kilometers of Indian territory. That lasted for about twenty-four years until East Pakistan became Bangladesh in nineteen seventy-one. That is often cited by skeptics of a two-state solution as proof that non-contiguous states are inherently unstable.
But wait, the distance there was massive. One thousand six hundred kilometers is a long way. The distance between Gaza and the West Bank at their closest points is only about forty kilometers. That is roughly the distance from here in Jerusalem to the outskirts of Tel Aviv. It is a completely different scale.
You are right, the scale changes the engineering possibilities. But the political hurdle remains the same. How do you move people and goods between those two points without compromising the sovereignty of the state in between? In this case, Israel.
This is where Daniel’s question about tunnels and bridges comes in. I remember reading about the Safe Passage negotiations back in the nineties and early two thousands. What were the actual pragmatic suggestions on the table back then?
Oh, there were some wild ones. During the Oslo years, specifically the nineteen ninety-nine Protocol on Safe Passage, negotiators were looking at a few models. One was a dedicated highway that would be under Palestinian sovereign control but would have overpasses or underpasses for Israeli traffic. The RAND Corporation even proposed something called The Arc, which was a massive infrastructure project involving a high-speed rail and a linear park connecting all the major Palestinian cities.
Like a trench?
Basically. A fenced-in, high-speed corridor. But the most futuristic one, and the one Daniel mentioned, is the tunnel. And honestly, from a twenty twenty-six perspective, it is not as crazy as it sounds. We have the technology. The Channel Tunnel connecting the United Kingdom and France is about fifty kilometers long. A tunnel between Gaza and the West Bank would be roughly forty to forty-five kilometers.
So it is technically possible. But who owns the tunnel? If it is a Palestinian tunnel under Israeli soil, who has jurisdiction if something goes wrong halfway through?
That is the million-dollar question. In international law, sovereignty usually extends from the center of the earth up into space. So, if Israel owns the land, they technically own the dirt the tunnel is bored through. Negotiators have discussed a concept of layered sovereignty. Palestine would have functional sovereignty inside the tube, meaning they control the traffic, the security, and the utilities, while Israel maintains sovereignty over the surface.
I can see the security hawks on both sides having a field day with that. From the Israeli side, you worry about what is being moved through that tunnel without inspection. From the Palestinian side, you worry that Israel could just flip a switch or pour concrete down a vent and cut your country in half.
Precisely. It requires a level of trust that simply does not exist right now. But proponents of the two-state solution argue that the tunnel is actually the most secure option. It is easier to monitor a single tube with sensors and cameras than it is to monitor a forty-kilometer surface road with multiple exit points.
What about the West Bank itself? Daniel mentioned the Swiss cheese problem. For those who do not know the map as well as you do, Herman, can you explain the Area A, B, and C situation and why it makes contiguity so hard even within the West Bank?
Right. So, under the Oslo Two Accord in nineteen ninety-five, the West Bank was divided. Area A is under full Palestinian civil and security control. These are the main cities like Ramallah, Nablus, and Hebron. Area B is Palestinian civil control but joint Israeli-Palestinian security control. And Area C, which is about sixty percent of the West Bank, is under full Israeli control.
And the problem is that Area A is not one big block. It is a series of islands.
Exactly. It is an archipelago. If you look at a map of Area A, it looks like someone spilled ink on a white tablecloth. There are over one hundred and sixty of these little islands. To get from Ramallah to Nablus, you often have to pass through Area C. This is why Palestinian negotiators have always insisted on territorial contiguity. They do not want a state that is just a collection of disconnected municipal enclaves.
Have they ever been willing to compromise on that? I mean, has there ever been a serious proposal for a non-contiguous state that the Palestinian Authority actually entertained?
In the past, the official stance has always been that contiguity is a red line. They argue that without it, you cannot have a viable economy. You cannot build a national power grid, a water system, or a cohesive police force if your officers have to ask permission from a neighbor to cross the street. However, in private negotiations, like the Olmert-Abbas talks in two thousand eight, there was talk of land swaps.
Land swaps are usually the answer to the settlement problem, right?
Right. The idea is that Israel keeps some of the large settlement blocks near the Green Line, and in exchange, Palestine gets an equivalent amount of land from within Israel proper. Some of those proposed swaps were designed specifically to create corridors that would link up those islands in the West Bank.
But even with land swaps, you still have the Gaza problem. Unless you are swapping a forty-kilometer-long strip of land through the Negev desert, you are never going to have surface contiguity between the West Bank and Gaza.
True. And that brings us to the political side of Daniel’s question. How do you unite Gaza and the West Bank when they have been governed by two different entities for nearly twenty years? Since the Hamas takeover in two thousand seven, we have had two separate Palestinian polities.
And as of today, in early twenty twenty-six, the situation in Gaza is still incredibly volatile. There is talk of a technocratic government or an international mandate involving the Arab League. How does that fit into a two-state map?
It complicates it immensely. To have a state, you need a monopoly on the use of force. You cannot have one half of the country run by a technocratic council supported by the United Nations and the other half run by the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, with different laws and different security forces. For a two-state solution to be geographically feasible, it first has to be politically unified.
You know, it is interesting. We talk about this as a binary choice between one state or two. But Daniel brought up a third option: the city-state model. He mentioned Mordechai Kedar, who is a well-known Israeli scholar. Kedar has this proposal called the Palestinian Emirates.
Ah, yes. The Eight Emirates. It is a very controversial proposal, but it is purely pragmatic in its geographic approach. Kedar argues that the whole concept of a Palestinian national identity is Western-imposed and that the real social structure in the region is tribal and city-based.
So, instead of one big state, you would have eight independent city-states?
Right. One in Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Jericho, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, the Arab part of Hebron, and of course, Gaza. He points to the United Arab Emirates as a successful model of this. Each city-state would be sovereign over its own affairs, and Israel would maintain control over the rural areas in between, essentially Area C.
From a geographic standpoint, that solves the contiguity problem because you just lean into the fragmentation. You say, okay, you are not one country, you are eight little ones. But does that actually satisfy anyone?
Most Palestinian leaders and the international community say no. They argue it is just a fancy way of describing permanent occupation or a series of bantustans. Sovereignty usually requires control over resources, borders, and airspace. A city-state surrounded on all sides by another country is not really sovereign in the traditional sense. It is more like a glorified municipality.
But look at Singapore or Monaco or even the Vatican. They are tiny, they are surrounded, and they are highly successful.
True, but they have unique economic niches and, more importantly, they are recognized and protected by the international system. A Palestinian city-state in Nablus would need a way to export its goods without being choked by its neighbor. It would need a functional airport or a dedicated port access.
This leads back to the idea of the confederation. I have heard more people talking about the Holy Land Confederation lately. It is a model where you have two sovereign states, but the borders are open. People can live in one and vote in the other. It is more like the European Union model.
That is the big shift in thinking lately. The group A Land for All has been pushing this. If the geography is too tangled to unbundle, maybe the answer is to stop trying to unbundle it. In a confederation, you would not need a tunnel or a bridge because a Palestinian from Gaza could simply drive across Israel to the West Bank, and an Israeli could drive through the West Bank to the Jordan Valley.
But that requires a level of security cooperation that feels light-years away. If we are being pragmatic, as Daniel asked, we have to look at what can be built with concrete and steel, not just what can be signed on a piece of paper.
Okay, let us get really pragmatic then. If you were the engineer tasked with connecting Gaza and the West Bank today, in twenty twenty-six, what is the first thing you do?
I think I would look at the railway. A high-speed rail link is much easier to secure and manage than a car tunnel. You have fixed tracks, you have controlled stations, and you can move thousands of people an hour. If you build a sunken rail line, you avoid a lot of the ventilation and exhaust issues of a car tunnel.
I like that. And you could run utilities along that same corridor. Fiber optic cables, water pipes, electricity. It becomes the umbilical cord of the state.
But here is the catch. Even if you build the world’s best tunnel, you still have the Jerusalem problem. Jerusalem is the heart of the West Bank geographically. If you have a Palestinian state, and East Jerusalem is its capital, how do you handle the movement within the city? We live here, Herman. We know how intertwined these neighborhoods are.
Jerusalem is the ultimate test of the two-state geography. In the Clinton Parameters, the idea was that Arab neighborhoods would be Palestinian and Jewish neighborhoods would be Israeli. But that creates a map that looks like a bowl of spaghetti. You would have streets where one side is one country and the other side is another.
We actually have that in some places already, just without the official border. But imagine the logistics. Trash collection, sewage, emergency services. If there is a fire on a border street, which fire truck shows up?
This is why some pragmatic planners have suggested a joint municipal authority. The city remains physically undivided, but the sovereignty is shared. You have two mayors, two councils, but one set of pipes and one power grid. It is called the scattered sovereignty model.
It sounds beautiful on paper, but in practice, it sounds like a nightmare for anyone trying to get a building permit.
Ha! Getting a building permit in Jerusalem is already a nightmare, Corn. I am not sure international sovereignty could make it much worse. But seriously, the pragmatic challenge is that for a two-state solution to work, you need either absolute separation, which requires massive engineering like tunnels and walls, or absolute cooperation, which requires a total change in political culture.
And right now, we are stuck in the middle. We have the walls, but we do not have the tunnels. We have the fragmentation, but we do not have the cooperation.
Exactly. And to Daniel’s question about whether Palestinian negotiators have considered non-contiguity, the answer is that they have explored functional substitutes for it. They know they will never have a single, unbroken block of land that includes Gaza. So they focus on what they call a territorial link. It is the idea that as long as the connection is guaranteed, permanent, and sovereign, it counts as contiguity.
It is like a virtual contiguity. If the tunnel is always open and you never have to show a passport to go from Gaza to Ramallah, then for all intents and purposes, you are in the same country.
Right. It is a legal fiction that allows the state to function. But that brings us to the second-order effects. If you have this forty-kilometer tunnel, what happens to the economy of the towns in between? Does this corridor become a dead zone? Or can you have transit points?
I imagine Israel would never allow transit points. It would be a point-to-point system. You enter in Gaza, you exit in the Hebron hills. No stops in the middle.
Which is a shame, because that is a lot of infrastructure that only serves one purpose. But that is the price of security.
Let us talk about the Gaza-West Bank unity from a different angle. We mentioned the political split, but what about the economic split? Gaza’s economy has been decimated. The West Bank, while struggling, has a completely different infrastructure. How do you integrate those two into a single sovereign state without the West Bank being dragged down by the massive reconstruction needs of Gaza?
That is where the international community comes in. Any two-state plan in twenty twenty-six involves a Marshall Plan for Gaza. You are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. But from a geographic perspective, Gaza has something the West Bank doesn't: a coastline.
Right. Gaza is the port for the West Bank.
Exactly. A sovereign Palestinian state would be landlocked without Gaza. The West Bank currently relies on Israeli ports like Haifa and Ashdod. If you have a unified state, you build a massive deep-water port in Gaza. Suddenly, the West Bank has a gateway to the Mediterranean. The tunnel we talked about becomes a trade artery. Palestinian goods from Nablus go through the tunnel and onto ships in Gaza.
That is a compelling vision. It turns the geographic challenge into an economic opportunity. But it all hinges on that forty-kilometer link. Without it, Gaza is just a tiny coastal enclave with no hinterland, and the West Bank is a landlocked archipelago with no exit.
It really is an all-or-nothing geographic proposition.
You know, we should probably take a second here. If you are listening to this and you are finding this deep dive into the maps and tunnels of the Middle East interesting, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your podcast app. We have been doing this for over five hundred episodes now, and those ratings really do help new people find the show.
Yeah, it is always great to see the community grow, especially when we are tackling these heavy, complex topics.
So, Herman, let us look at the alternative again. We talked about the city-states. We talked about the confederation. What about the one-state reality? If the geography is truly impossible, as some skeptics like Daniel suggest, does that mean we are inevitably heading toward a single state between the river and the sea?
That is the argument of the one-state proponents. They say the omelet has already been scrambled. There are over five hundred thousand Israeli settlers in the West Bank. There are nearly two million Palestinians in Gaza. There are millions more in the West Bank and inside Israel. They are so physically intermingled that any attempt to draw a line will only result in more conflict.
But a single state has its own geographic nightmares. How do you govern a territory where half the population wants a Jewish state and the other half wants a Palestinian state? You end up with Lebanon, or worse.
Right. The geographic feasibility of a one-state solution is actually harder than a two-state solution because it requires a level of social and political integration that is even more remote than the trust needed for a tunnel. In a two-state model, you are at least trying to give each group their own space. In a one-state model, you are forcing them into the same room and telling them to agree on everything from the school curriculum to the national anthem.
So, if we look at the pragmatic suggestions from two-state advocates today, what is the most realistic path forward geographically? Is it the land swaps?
Most experts agree that land swaps are the only way to make the West Bank contiguous enough to function. You would need to swap about four to five percent of the land. That would allow Israel to keep about eighty percent of its settlers in blocks near the border, while giving the Palestinians enough land to connect their major cities into a single, solid block.
And then you add the tunnel.
And then you add the tunnel. Or a bridge. Some architects have proposed a massive viaduct, a raised highway that would fly over the Israeli landscape. It would be less claustrophobic than a tunnel and maybe cheaper to build.
I can just imagine the sight of a thirty-meter-high highway cutting through the desert. It would be a monument to the conflict and the solution at the same time.
It would be a literal bridge between two worlds. But again, the security concerns would be massive. How do you prevent people from throwing things off the bridge? How do you secure the pillars?
It feels like every geographic solution just creates a new engineering problem, which in turn creates a new security problem.
Welcome to the Middle East, Corn. That has been the story here for the last hundred years. But I think Daniel’s point is well-taken. If we are going to talk about a two-state solution, we have to stop talking in slogans and start talking in blueprints. We need to know exactly where the road goes, who pays for the cement, and who holds the keys to the gate.
One thing we haven't touched on is the role of technology in twenty twenty-six. We have drones, we have advanced sensors, we have automated border crossings. Does that make a non-contiguous state easier to manage?
Absolutely. We are seeing smart borders all over the world now. You can have a virtual corridor where vehicles are tracked by satellite and sensors as they cross between territories. You don't necessarily need a physical fence or a tunnel if you can guarantee that a truck leaving Gaza will arrive in the West Bank without stopping or opening its doors.
That is the technological solution to the sovereignty problem. You use data to ensure security instead of concrete.
It is definitely part of the conversation. But at the end of the day, people want to feel the land under their feet. They want to know that they can walk from their house to their neighbor’s house without a drone watching them or a sensor logging their movement. Physical contiguity is as much about psychology as it is about logistics.
That is a great point. A state that is a series of islands connected by high-tech tunnels might function economically, but does it feel like a country? Does it foster a sense of national unity?
That is the challenge for the next generation of Palestinian and Israeli leaders. Can they build a state that is geographically fragmented but emotionally unified? Or is the land itself the only thing that can provide that unity?
It reminds me of what we discussed back in episode four hundred and twelve about the concept of digital nations. Maybe the future of sovereignty is less about the dirt and more about the network. But in this part of the world, the dirt still matters more than almost anything else.
It certainly does. Every time I walk through the Old City, I am reminded that there are layers of history in every stone. You cannot solve that with an app or a high-speed rail. You have to find a way for people to share the physical space in a way that feels just and sustainable.
So, to wrap up Daniel’s prompt, is a two-state solution geographically feasible?
My answer would be: yes, but it is the most complex engineering and planning project in human history. It requires rethinking what a border is, what sovereignty looks like in three dimensions, and how to build infrastructure that connects people without threatening them. It is not impossible, but it is incredibly, incredibly hard.
And it requires a level of pragmatism that often gets lost in the headlines. We need more people asking the where and how questions, like Daniel did.
Exactly. Because if you can't draw it on a map, you can't build it in reality.
Well, I think we have covered a lot of ground today, literally and figuratively. From the depths of the Channel Tunnel to the hills of Samaria.
It has been a journey. And for those of you who want to see some of the maps we were talking about, or if you want to send in your own weird prompt, you can always find us at myweirdprompts.com. We have a contact form there and the full archive of all our episodes.
We are also on Spotify and pretty much anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you have a topic you want us to dive into, whether it is about geography, technology, or some obscure bit of history Herman found in a nineteen twenty-two survey, let us know.
I will bring the maps, you bring the coffee.
Deal. Thanks for listening to My Weird Prompts. We really appreciate you spending your time with us today.
Stay curious, everyone. We will talk to you next time.
Goodbye!
