The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no closer to resolution than it was at the time of the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947. Yet even if a durable solution seems a long way off, it is more important than ever today to think beyond the current dramatic stalemate. This report was commissioned by the Arditi Foundation for Cultural Dialogue, and supported by the Geneva Graduate Institute. It explores an alternative approach to peace – a federal union as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Building from the inputs of academics and specialists, the report makes the case for a federation of Israeli and Palestinian territories and examines what this would involve, detailing advantages and limitations before exploring how the concept might be taken forward, emphasising the need for both parties to engage in dialogue and compromise.

Welcome Remarks and Introduction :

• Marie-Laure Salles, Director, Geneva Graduate Institute
• Metin Arditi, President, Arditi Foundation

Speakers :

• Riccardo Bocco, Emeritus Professor of Political Sociology, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Geneva Graduate Institute
• Nigel Roberts, Former World Bank Country Director for West Bank and Gaza
• Yael Berda, Associate Professor of Sociology & Anthropology, Hebrew University and Fellow, Middle East Initiative, Harvard University
• Ibrahim Saïd, Adjunct Professor, International Institute in Geneva, and Director, Think-ahead

Moderation :

• Grégoire Mallard, Director of Research and Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, Geneva Graduate Institute
  
   

biographies
 

Metin Arditi is President of the Arditi Foundation for Intercultural Dialogue. He holds a degree in physics and a graduate degree in nuclear engineering from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and an MBA from Stanford Business School. Over the years, he has taught physics, as a young assistant, then economics, as a lecturer, and then literature, as a Visiting professor, all at the same École Polytechnique. After a career in business, writing has been his main activity since 1995. He has created three foundations: Les Instruments de la Paix-Genève (2008), which he co-chairs with Palestinian writer and diplomat Elias Sanbar, and the Fondation Arditi pour le dialogue interculturel (2014), which are active in Israel-Palestine, and La Fondation Arditi (1988), active solely in Switzerland. Metin Arditi is UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Intercultural Dialogue since 2012. In 2018, he was named Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture.

Riccardo Bocco (co-author of the report) is Emeritus Professor of Political Sociology at the Anthropology and Sociology Department of the Geneva Graduate Institute. His main geographical area of fieldwork for the last 45 years has been the Near East with a particular focus on Jordan, Israel/Palestine and Lebanon. He has successively worked on issues of development policies and state-building; humanitarian aid and refugees; and monitoring the impact of international aid on civilian populations. He is currently preparing a collective book with Ibrahim Saïd titled De/colonising Palestine: Contemporary Debates about the enduring and dynamic nature of the Palestinian struggle set against a backdrop of intensified colonial domination.

Yael Berda is Lawyer and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem and Fellow at the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She teaches, researches and writes on the intersections of law, race and imperial rule. She has written numerous articles and three books, among them Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank (Stanford University Press, 2017) and Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship: Legacies of Race and Emergency in the Former British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She completed her PHD in Sociology at Princeton University and her postdoctoral work at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Formerly a human rights lawyer, she is highly engaged in political and social change. Among others, she is on the boards of A Land for All, Ir Amim and Academia for Equality.

Grégoire Mallard is Director of Research and Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. He is the author of Fallout: Nuclear Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Gift Exchange: The Transnational History of a Political Idea (Cambridge University Press, 2019). From 2017 until 2022, he has lead an ERC project titled “Bombs, Banks and Sanctions”, which focused on the evolution of unilateral sanctions, from which he created the Geneva Sanction and Sustainable Peace Hub. His other publications focus on prediction, the role of knowledge and ignorance in transnational lawmaking, and the study of harmonisation as a social process. In 2024, he founded the Centre on Digital Humanities and Multilateralism at the Institute with the goal of reviving the interest for the future of multilateralism through an innovative analysis of its past.

Nigel Roberts (co-author of the report) has worked in international development, as a political economist, for over fifty years, and has lived for extended periods in Thailand, Nepal, Ethiopia, Kenya, Myanmar, Palestine/Israel and Sydney (covering the Western Pacific). He spent 30 years as a World Bank staff member, latterly as a country director (including in Palestine/Israel between 2001-6) and a research director (co-managing the 2011 World Development report on Conflict, Security and Development). Since retiring from the World Bank in 2011, he has worked on Somalia (as the World Bank delegate to the National Financial Governance Committee), Afghanistan (heading up an Overseas Development Institute team) and Myanmar (as director of the Joint Peace Fund). From 2015-18, he was the Chair of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board for the UN Peace Building Fund, and from April to December 2020 was a senior adviser to the US Congressmandated Afghanistan Peace Process Study Group. His latest publication, with Ashley Jackson and Florian Weigand, is Armed Group Economic Policy: Towards a New Research Agenda (2025, Centre on Armed Groups).

Ibrahim Saïd is Adjunct Faculty Member at the International Institute in Geneva and the co-founder and Research Director of Think Ahead, a not-for-profit research organisation that specialises in the analysis of international aid policies and practice. Academically, he holds a PhD in Anthropology and Sociology of Development from the Geneva Graduate Institute, and a Master’s degree from the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford. His academic research interests span across the fields of legal and political anthropology, anthropology of human rights, settler colonial studies, (colonial) governmentality studies, and the sociology of translation, with a particular focus on the Middle East and the Israel-Palestine context.