The NYT is ending 2014 with an editorial—“The Embattled Dream for Palestine” (December 19)—rehearsing the nightmarish political impasse and putting all the blame, as per usual, on Israel. This time the fall guys are Israeli “one state” rightwingers who want to extinguish the dream of Palestinian peoplehood. No mention that Palestinian “one staters” like Hamas have advocated extinguishing the Jewish state for generations. In truth, though I still cling desperately to some hope for the “two state” solution, the situation currently on the ground is that neither the “two state” nor “one state” solution displays much evidence of life as a way of successfully resolve history’s vesting of two different peoples with overlapping rights to the same piece of geography. In particular, the the “two-state” solution may never work because it is prescription for never-ending conflict between Israelis justifiably concerned over secure borders and Palestinians with irredentist designs on the Jewish state. Regarding the “one state” solution, it embodies a cure-all of single state sovereignty that is probably also a chimera. Given that peace appears to be going nowhere for the immediate and intermediate term future, why not use this opportunity for some out-of-the-envelope thinking? If it’s not possible to achieve a compromise between irreconcilable opposites, why not try to transcend the dilemma like the characters in Edwin Abbot’s “Flatland” who looked to the third dimension to escape their predicament? This is the argument of global satellite technology and biotech innovator, Martine Rothblatt, in her Two “Stars for Peace: The Case for Using U.S. Statehood to Achieve Last Peace in the Middle East” (2003) that points to American success in creating “a nation of minorities,” together with the breakthroughs in global transportation and communication technologies, as opening the door to the creation of an enlarged U.S. federal republic—with James Madison brokering a marriage between Theodore Herzl and Hanan Ashrawi!—that would involve the admission of Israel and Palestine, respectively, as the fifty-first and fifty-second states. A visionary with her feet firmly planted on the ground, Rothblatt–in the teeth of the conventional wisdom that the worship of “national sovereignty” made it impossible–led successful efforts in 1987 and 1992 to negotiate treaties involving almost 200 nations that agreed to allow “foreign” satellites to provide mobile communications services in their territories and to permit the transmission of digital radio across national borders. Not many people know that Saudi Prince Feisal, a luminary at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, met with American Zionist Felix Frankfurter, wishing his Jewish “cousins” a “hearty welcome home” to the Holy Land. Feisal also initially asked for an American mandate over Syria which would evolve, he predicted, into an Arab confederation modeled on the U.S. federal system. Of course, none of this came to pass, though the arc of increasing U.S. involvement in the region stretches back over 100 years. Whatever the merits of Rothblatt’s intriguing book, serious people not to rule out as a long-term solution for the Holy Land set federalism–whether on the American or Swiss of EU model–forging a multinational federation perhaps involving Israel, Jordan, and even Egypt.