For better or worse, the answer for what lies ahead for Israel and Palestine, and the question of how debates over the two-state solution will be resolved, may be in the hands of U.S. President Donald Trump. For now, Trump seems to have backed Israeli calls for reforms to the Palestinian Authority (PA) as the first step toward any kind of reconciliation.

But Palestinians see such reforms as simply an excuse to prolong and defer their quest for self-determination and equal rights.

Among the top reforms that the Israelis need the PA to carry out is an overhaul of its education curriculum. “It has to start with education,” Daniel Schwammenthal, editor of the Jewish Chronicles, told me last year as he sipped on coffee at a cafe under the shadow of the European Union building in Brussels. To make his point, he cited a study by the EU on Palestinian textbooks.

In 2021, the Georg Eckert Institute released a study based on its research of Palestinian textbooks. It concluded that while tolerance and human rights are advocated for, “the textbooks contain anti-Semitic narratives and glorifications of violence” against Israeli soldiers and civilians.

“Maps of the region do not show Israel and Israeli cities that were founded by Jews, such as Tel Aviv, are not marked,” the report added. “The region is depicted from the coast to the border with Jordan as a single All-Palestine.”

Marcus Sheff, CEO of the Israeli organization IMPACT-se, said that Palestinians are brainwashed at school to hate Israelis and that not only obstructs the path to reconciliation but also culminates in violence such as witnessed on Oct. 7, 2023.

“When you look at events of Oct. 7—-the murders, rapes, and abduction—and look at the PA’s school curriculum, you can see the link between indoctrination of young people and terrible actions they take,” Sheff said.

“We need to deradicalize Palestinian society, and it can be done,” he said. “The [United Arab Emirates] had a remarkable curriculum reform, where ideas of jihad and violence that were propagated by the Muslim Brotherhood were taken out and how to embrace the others, based on Quranic teachings and on the great Arab history, were brought in. It was remarkably successful.”

Israel has also repeatedly called for an end to the PA’s prisoner payment program, which offers financial assistance for the families of Palestinians arrested by Israeli authorities. In September, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar took on French President Emmanuel Macron via X and questioned his support for Palestinians while ignoring “rampant incitement in the Palestinian education system against Israel and Jews,” Saar posted on the social media platform.

He added that Macron “does not object to the payments transferred by the Palestinian Authority to terrorists and their families under the ‘pay for slay’ method. The more severe the act of terror – the higher the reward paid by the Palestinian Authority.”

But French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said Saar’s claims were “grossly unfair.” Barrot said that progress has already been made on Israel’s reform wishlist. “The pay for slay has ended on August 1, and an independent audit will verify this soon,” Barrot posted on X. “The review of the textbooks to prevent incitement is underway. We will hold the Palestinian Authority accountable for these commitments.”

The popular opinion in Palestine is that the prisoners are freedom fighters struggling for a free state. Despite that, Mahmoud Abbas, the PA’s leader, ended the payment program in February and made the stipends for families of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails dependent on financial needs, like other Palestinians in need of support, and not on length of prison terms. He has invited the United States to independently inquire and verify the claim.

And yet, Israelis aren’t satisfied with the scope and scale of reforms and say a fundamental shift is required. On top of that, they insist on controlling key areas for security purposes.

“There needs to be a very deep reform, a mutual recognition of our national lives. And parallel processes in Gaza—with a new generation of politicians taking over,” said Eran Lerman, Israel’s former deputy national security advisor. “If all this happens, then the option of a Palestinian state would be back on the table, but I would still call it a 1.8 or 1.9 state solution, not a two-state solution. There will be some limitations on Palestinian sovereignty. Given our geographies, security in some areas has to remain in Israeli hands.”

Jonathan Conricus, a former international spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that Oct. 7 “was a rude awakening” and has convinced Israelis more than ever before to “keep control” of strategic points in Palestinian territories.

Conricus backed a city-state model for a future Palestinian state, which is known as the Hebron model. In July, five sheikhs from Hebron expressed a desire to join the Abraham Accords in exchange for recognizing Israel. An idea based on the Emirati city-state model, known as the eight-state solution, has been circulating for a while. The plan envisages splitting the West Bank into eight city-states: Hebron, Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Jericho, Bethlehem, and Ramallah.

But that would Balkanize the territory, and some have said it is intended to weaken the PA and the Palestinian quest for statehood. Lerman called such ideas “fantasies” and “unrealistic.”

Hassan Jabareen, a Palestinian human rights lawyer and the founder of Adalah, a law firm practicing human rights law in Israel, was livid after there was more pressure on Palestinians to deliver if they wanted peace.

“All the time, Israel and the world put more conditions on the PA,” he said. “I think the Israeli education system is more terrible towards Palestinians than the Palestinian education system towards Israel. It supports occupation, it is against international law. Essentially, Israel wants Palestine to delete its history when it asks for such reforms, to delete the language of victims.”

Some Israeli and Palestinian thinkers have been arguing for a confederation—two states, one homeland. A Land for All is a joint movement that argues in favor of coexistence rather than separating the two.

Under this vision, Palestinians and Israelis would have their own representative governments, their own political leadership, and borders close to the 1967 line. But there would be freedom of movement for all and shared security. That means that Israeli settlers would be able to continue living in Palestine as residents but with Israeli citizenship, and Palestinian refugees would be able to claim their right of return and Palestinian citizenship and reside in Israel with permanent residency permits. Palestinians will vote in Palestine and Israelis will vote in Israel, and residents will vote in the local elections wherever they live.

This proposal solves many problems that have riddled the two-state solution, including the right of return for Palestinian refugees and concerns over changes in the demographic balance. It resolves both sides’ concerns over security via a defense treaty and commitments to cooperation. “Under this plan, Palestine and Israel will have independent security forces. Only Palestinian forces will operate in Palestinian territory, only Israeli forces will operate in Israel,” it says. “However, the two countries will cooperate closely on matters of security, intelligence and policing.”

But similar cooperation is already in place in the West Bank. “However, that model is today predicated on the political aim of controlling the Palestinian population, rather than serving both populations, as democratic governments are expected to do,” wrote Dahlia Scheindlin, a fellow at Century International

In any case, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be on an entirely different path, far from reconciliation or peace. In recent days, the Israeli parliament held the first of four votes that would pave the way for annexation of the West Bank. The measure passed, albeit by a narrow margin.