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Description

[This is an alternate history scenario, not a proposal, and does not reflect my politics]

This is based on Plan B of the Woodhead Commission, which was in turn based on the Peel Commission, which called for the Mandate of Palestine to be partitioned into a Jewish state along the coast and in the lower Galilee, an Arab state to be united with Transjordan in the rest of Palestine, and for the upper Galilee (Arab majority, but surrounded by areas with a Jewish majority) and the area around Jerusalem (to avoid the question of which new country gets the greatest prize) to be kept under British mandate indefinitely. Alien space bats work their magic, a miracle occurs, and the proposal is accepted by both Jewish and Arab leadership.
A three-way civil war ensues when it comes time for the plan to be implemented, between the pro-partition forces of the British, the Haganah, and Transjordan, the anti-partition Jewish forces of the Irgun and Lehi, and the anti-partition Arab forces of the Holy War Army. The center holds, the Haganah and Hashemites win, and Palestine is partitioned. Israel becomes independent and, with the right wing of the Zionist movement defeated in and decimated by the civil war, tacks in an even more left-wing direction than its early years in OTL, soon becoming an officially socialist state. Meanwhile the Emirate of Transjordan becomes the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine and moves its capital to Jericho, chosen for its strategic proximity to the main bridge over the Jordan river (and to their desired future capital of Jerusalem).
The war reprised itself on a smaller scale two decades later in the Galilee Mandate, where the British had been hard at work trying to instill a separate national identity from the rest of Palestine, which worked quite well among the Druze and Christians but not among the Muslims. When Britain granted the Galilee its independence, Muslim Palestinian nationalists rose up against the new state, attempting instead to convert it into a base for the all-Palestine Arab republic they had tried unsuccessfully to create twenty years earlier, causing unrest throughout the reason. Israel and Palestine invaded the Galilee at the invitation of its new government, suppressing the rebellion and forcing out much of the Muslim population to Lebanon and Syria--who in turn forced much of their Druze population out into Galilee, hastening its conversion into an essentially Druze (and to a lesser extent Christian) state.
The biggest remaining flashpoint is Jerusalem, still under British control to this day for lack of a better option--with nearly even Arab and Jewish populations, it would be too unstable to grant independence in itself; Israel and Palestine agree in principle that it should be partitioned between them but the communities are so jumbled that there are no obvious borders to draw (and of course each wants the lion’s share, including the holy city, for itself). It’s the only place where extremism on either side continues to hold much purpose, and the only place where terrorism and ethnoreligious violence continue to be major issues. Still, the volatile security situation hasn’t prevented Jerusalem from becoming something of a Hong Kong of the Middle East, a laissez faire financial center for the region and a cultural center for both the Arabic world and world Jewry, if not on quite the same scale as its Far East counterpart. And so vested economic interests join security concerns and sheer inertia in propping up the British-ruled status quo...
Relations between Israel and Palestine, and indeed between Israel and most of the Arab world, are mostly normal by today, if at times somewhat tense; for the most part they’ve been allies in defending the status quo against their own and each other’s extremists rather than enemies. Calling for either state to take over the whole land between the river and the sea is a fringe position on both sides. The main tension between them has been Israel’s left-wing alignment with the Eastern Bloc and Palestine’s right-wing alignment with the Western Bloc, and even that has mostly diminished as a factor in relations as the Cold War has wound down and both countries have liberalized their political and economic systems - Palestine is now a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy, albeit one where the king continues to play an outsize role in politics, and Israel now allows multi-party elections, if only between rival socialist parties so far.
In other ways, however, Israel continues to look much as it did in its early days--majority Ashkenazi (the immigration of the Russian Jews occurred much earlier as the USSR “encouraged” them to leave once it became apparent that Israel was an ally, while with a much lesser Israeli-Arab conflict many Arab and Muslim countries did not expel their native Jews as in OTL; Yiddish is much more widespread), aggressively secular (in contrast to Jerusalem which has a much higher proportion of Orthodox Jews), and still prizing the kibbutz as the cornerstone of the national identity. Many Arabs were forced to leave their homes when Israel was established, but far fewer than in OTL, and they were quickly integrated into Hashemite Palestine rather than becoming a permanent refugee population--just one of any number of mid-century population exchanges rather than a disastrous scar on the Palestinian national psyche. More scarring is the legacy of the intra-Arab Hashemite-republican civil war, and even that conflict has largely been replaced by one between secularism and Islamism, with the large Christian minority caught uneasily in between.

Description

[This is an alternate history scenario, not a proposal, and does not reflect my politics]

This is based on Plan B of the Woodhead Commission, which was in turn based on the Peel Commission, which called for the Mandate of Palestine to be partitioned into a Jewish state along the coast and in the lower Galilee, an Arab state to be united with Transjordan in the rest of Palestine, and for the upper Galilee (Arab majority, but surrounded by areas with a Jewish majority) and the area around Jerusalem (to avoid the question of which new country gets the greatest prize) to be kept under British mandate indefinitely. Alien space bats work their magic, a miracle occurs, and the proposal is accepted by both Jewish and Arab leadership.
A three-way civil war ensues when it comes time for the plan to be implemented, between the pro-partition forces of the British, the Haganah, and Transjordan, the anti-partition Jewish forces of the Irgun and Lehi, and the anti-partition Arab forces of the Holy War Army. The center holds, the Haganah and Hashemites win, and Palestine is partitioned. Israel becomes independent and, with the right wing of the Zionist movement defeated in and decimated by the civil war, tacks in an even more left-wing direction than its early years in OTL, soon becoming an officially socialist state. Meanwhile the Emirate of Transjordan becomes the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine and moves its capital to Jericho, chosen for its strategic proximity to the main bridge over the Jordan river (and to their desired future capital of Jerusalem).
The war reprised itself on a smaller scale two decades later in the Galilee Mandate, where the British had been hard at work trying to instill a separate national identity from the rest of Palestine, which worked quite well among the Druze and Christians but not among the Muslims. When Britain granted the Galilee its independence, Muslim Palestinian nationalists rose up against the new state, attempting instead to convert it into a base for the all-Palestine Arab republic they had tried unsuccessfully to create twenty years earlier, causing unrest throughout the reason. Israel and Palestine invaded the Galilee at the invitation of its new government, suppressing the rebellion and forcing out much of the Muslim population to Lebanon and Syria--who in turn forced much of their Druze population out into Galilee, hastening its conversion into an essentially Druze (and to a lesser extent Christian) state.
The biggest remaining flashpoint is Jerusalem, still under British control to this day for lack of a better option--with nearly even Arab and Jewish populations, it would be too unstable to grant independence in itself; Israel and Palestine agree in principle that it should be partitioned between them but the communities are so jumbled that there are no obvious borders to draw (and of course each wants the lion’s share, including the holy city, for itself). It’s the only place where extremism on either side continues to hold much purpose, and the only place where terrorism and ethnoreligious violence continue to be major issues. Still, the volatile security situation hasn’t prevented Jerusalem from becoming something of a Hong Kong of the Middle East, a laissez faire financial center for the region and a cultural center for both the Arabic world and world Jewry, if not on quite the same scale as its Far East counterpart. And so vested economic interests join security concerns and sheer inertia in propping up the British-ruled status quo...
Relations between Israel and Palestine, and indeed between Israel and most of the Arab world, are mostly normal by today, if at times somewhat tense; for the most part they’ve been allies in defending the status quo against their own and each other’s extremists rather than enemies. Calling for either state to take over the whole land between the river and the sea is a fringe position on both sides. The main tension between them has been Israel’s left-wing alignment with the Eastern Bloc and Palestine’s right-wing alignment with the Western Bloc, and even that has mostly diminished as a factor in relations as the Cold War has wound down and both countries have liberalized their political and economic systems - Palestine is now a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy, albeit one where the king continues to play an outsize role in politics, and Israel now allows multi-party elections, if only between rival socialist parties so far.
In other ways, however, Israel continues to look much as it did in its early days--majority Ashkenazi (the immigration of the Russian Jews occurred much earlier as the USSR “encouraged” them to leave once it became apparent that Israel was an ally, while with a much lesser Israeli-Arab conflict many Arab and Muslim countries did not expel their native Jews as in OTL; Yiddish is much more widespread), aggressively secular (in contrast to Jerusalem which has a much higher proportion of Orthodox Jews), and still prizing the kibbutz as the cornerstone of the national identity. Many Arabs were forced to leave their homes when Israel was established, but far fewer than in OTL, and they were quickly integrated into Hashemite Palestine rather than becoming a permanent refugee population--just one of any number of mid-century population exchanges rather than a disastrous scar on the Palestinian national psyche. More scarring is the legacy of the intra-Arab Hashemite-republican civil war, and even that conflict has largely been replaced by one between secularism and Islamism, with the large Christian minority caught uneasily in between.