As the war between Hamas and Israel approaches its 20th week, the temptation to prognosticate continues unabated, with some commentators desperate to look into the future and concoct a solution to the seemingly intractable problem of violence in the Middle East.

But that doesn’t mean all solutions are viable, or even logical at all.

In his February 2 opinion column in The Globe & Mail, “One state is the only solution,” author Noah Richler expresses his skepticism of the two state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, calling it a “fatal illogic” that has never come to fruition precisely because it is so fraught with problems.

In that respect, Richler is hardly alone in his skepticism. But it is his cure which is worse than the disease, as Richler posits that his solution is a unitary state for all Israelis and Palestinians, living together under one government.

So why then is the one-state or bi-national solution unacceptable? At its most basic level, the one-state solution denies the right of Jews to self-determination in their historical homeland and calls into question the very legitimacy of Israel as a state. A bi-national state would have the same consequence as the “right of return”—the negation of Israel as a Jewish state. Palestinians, by virtue of a higher birthrate, would turn Jews into a minority before voting in favour of another Muslim Arab state in place of Israel.

Richler, not oblivious to the challenges of his one-state ‘solution,’ elaborates by saying that “a one-state solution might well need several decades to work, time in which to develop a framework, time for Palestinians and Israelis to learn about and not fear the other. Yet is it not better and more true to work toward a just end that is also sustainable, a society in which enmities can be eradicated, in which there is forgiveness, collaboration and even friendship?”

Richler continues selling his proposal by sharing other examples of two peoples in a shared land, initially hostile but who eventually lived together.

These words, conciliatory as they may be, are problematic for two reasons.

First, Israel’s existence, and legitimacy, is not based on being a safe haven for Jew. In fact, it is the Jewish People’sthree thousand years of uninterrupted history in their ancestral homeland, paired with their legal title to the land, which provides them legitimacy. A one state solution would disenfranchise the Jewish People collectively, and rob them from the right to self-determination in their ancient and historic lands.

Secondly, Richler’s supposed solution – a single state for Israelis and Palestinians alike – relies on the mutual acceptance by both groups that they both possess a right to live on the land together, with equal rights.

While this concept of equal rights has been aptly demonstrated in Israel, which is home to two million Arabs, primarily Muslims, who enjoy full and equal rights under the law, the same cannot be said of the Palestinians.

In territories ruled by both the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas, Israelis and Jews more broadly are demonized as colonizers, invaders, cancerous tumours, and more. School textbooks, mosques, official state media and other apparatuses dehumanize and delegitimize Israel and Jews in general.

Israel has offered the Palestinians a state before, during negotiations in 2008, famously in 2000, and in 1947, when Jewish delegates supported the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which was roundly rejected by Arab states.

The two state solution could have been a reality since 1948, if the Palestinians and their enablers around the world embraced Israel’s existence. But instead of doing so, they have held out, demanding ever more.

A one-state solution is no more a permanent fix than a two state solution, and for the same reason: as long as the Palestinians reject Israel’s very right to exist, based on spurious historical revisionism, they will never accept the legitimacy of any Israeli with equal rights in their midst.

In his column, Richler pleads that “if Germans and Jews can now live together,” surely Israelis and Palestinians can do likewise. But it took World War Two and Berlin’s self-reckoning for Germany to wholly reject Nazi philosophy. Until the Palestinians reject their own Nazi-like philosophy of rejecting the Jewish State in its entirety, the status quo will remain indefinitely.

Richler’s advocating for the “one-state solution” is being insidiously sold in the language of peace, but the one-state solution he advocates is a thinly veiled strategy for destroying the State of Israel, questioning its very right to exist and denying Jews the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.