The Yobitsugi Plan: A Palestine & Israel Confederation
There is a Japanese art for mending a broken bowl with a shard of a different one, fused along a seam of gold. It may also be the only realistic map left for Israel and Palestine.
by Lawrence Winnerman
More than four hundred years ago, in a country on the far side of the world, two warlords sat down to drink tea on the night before they meant to destroy each other.
Everything had already been decided. The armies were camped, the swords were sharpened, and by the grim courtesy of that age, men in their position met once before the killing—a last look at the face you intended to erase from the earth.
Between them on the low table sat a single tea bowl.
And the bowl was strange, because it was made of two bowls. Somewhere in its past, it had shattered, and someone had mended it not by hiding the wound but by gathering a shard from a different broken vessel entirely—another clay, another glaze, another hand’s work—and fusing that foreign piece into the empty place along a seam of gold. Two pots that had never been one, made by the breaking into a single thing that could hold water again.
The technique has a name: yobitsugi.
The generals drank. And in the morning, there was no battle. The story says the bowl did it—that two men with every reason to slaughter each other looked instead at the small gold-seamed thing in their hands, the proof that broken vessels of different origins can be made whole without being made the same, and chose, against the entire weight of their lives, to live.
I have been carrying an image in my mind for ages now, and I want to describe it to you, because it is the most hopeful thing I have thought in two years.
It is a bowl in the shape of a land.
The blue is the part you already know—swirling and restless, the blue of the sea that borders it and the storms that have crossed it, the blue and white of a certain flag. Running down through its center is the other clay, the woven one: cream and red and black in the cross-stitch a Palestinian grandmother could sew blind, the embroidery called tatreez that has outlived every government that has ever tried to end it.
Two patterns. Two histories that will not blend, and that should not have to.
Where the two meet, there is a seam of gold. And at the center, over the one city that three faiths and two peoples have killed and died for, there is a single pearl—because the heart of the thing cannot belong to either pattern, and the only honest color for it is the one that changes depending on who is looking.
That land is a broken vessel. We have all cut our hands on it.
How do you mend a thing like that?
People have asked some version of that question for as long as there have been broken things, but the two most beautiful answers I know arrived, strangely, in the very same century, on opposite sides of a world too wide to carry the news across.
In the sixteenth century, in the hills of Safed, in the Galilee—in the very land I am talking about—a kabbalist named Isaac Luria taught that creation itself had begun with a shattering.
God’s light, he said, had poured into vessels too fragile to hold it, and the vessels broke, scattering holy sparks into every dark corner of the world.
Luria taught this as an exile, in the long shadow of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and out of that grief, he built not despair but an assignment: that the work of a human life is to go looking for the scattered sparks, to find the shards one by one and lift them back toward the light.
He called the gathering tikkun. The repair of the world. Tikkun olam.
In the same century, an ocean and a continent away, in Japan, there were craftsmen who would not throw a broken bowl away. They gathered its pieces and rejoined them with lacquer and gold, and they refused to hide the seam—they made it the most beautiful thing about the vessel, the visible proof that it had survived.
Kintsugi, they called it. Golden joinery. Do not curse the break. Gather the pieces.
Let the mend become the glory.
Neither culture knew the other was alive. No ship passed between Safed and Kyoto, no letter, not one shared word. And both, in the same handful of years, looked at a broken world and said the same holy thing.
I have stopped believing that is a coincidence.
I think it is simply a truth about being human—that the people who have been broken arrive, everywhere and in every tongue, at the same knowledge: that the brokenness is not the end of the story, that the shards are not garbage, and that the repair can be lovelier than the unbroken thing had ever been.
But ordinary kintsugi mends a bowl with its own pieces. The bowl those two warlords passed between them was a rarer and harder thing—the art for shards that never came from the same vessel at all, two clays the breaking has thrown together that must somehow be made to hold water as one.
That is yobitsugi.
Some translate it as a calling: yobi, to call; tsugi, to mend—to call broken things into their mending.
And I am not the first to look at this land and see that word. Makoto Fujimura—a Japanese-American artist, a Christian, a man who walked out of the ash beneath the towers on September 11—has spent years practicing exactly this: taking ceramic shards from nations that have tried to annihilate each other, Korea and Japan, Japan and America, Israel and Palestine, and joining them by hand into single vessels. He calls it a grace.
The wounds themselves, he writes, become a bridge—two peoples “paired together, but with borderlines of our distinctions still intact,” joined “without abolishing our tribal identities.”
He has already done, on a tea bowl, the precise thing I am about to ask a region to do with its map.
The metaphor, in other words, is not mine. It was waiting in the clay, on both sides of the earth, for four and a half centuries.
I am not even the first dreamer to write this verse, calling the pieces to mend.
What follows is not a poem. It is a plan—a real one, drafted by people who have sat in the real rooms, with real treaties, and real maps.
But I needed you to see the bowl first.
I needed you to want it as much as I want it.
Because the argument I am about to make can only be finished by people who can still picture the whole vessel, mended and full, catching the light of the sun as it holds water.
For as long as anyone has tried to solve this, the cure has come in exactly two shapes, and both of them are bolted shut to us now.
The first is two states. Two flags, two armies, two anthems, a clean line drawn between them, each people sovereign at last on its own side of it. It is the answer the world has blessed for half a century, and it is the answer I have spent my own ink and pixels defending. But the line cannot be drawn anymore, and we should be honest about why. For decades—settlement by settlement, house by house, hilltop by stubborn hilltop—the Israeli right has planted Israelis across the West Bank precisely so that no continuous border could ever be inked between the two.
An engineering project dressed as a housing policy, built to make the map of two states physically impossible to draw. They succeeded. There is no clean line left, because someone made very sure of it.
The second shape is one state. One person, one vote, from the river to the sea—a single country in which Jew and Palestinian are equal citizens under one flag. On paper, it is the most just arrangement imaginable. In practice, it terrifies both peoples, and neither terror is irrational. To most Jews, one state means pouring the only guaranteed refuge they have ever had into a binational majority that could, in a single generation, simply vote it out of existence—the closing of the one door that has stood open since the ash of Europe.
And the demand, they cannot help but notice, is uniquely theirs: the world holds twenty-seven states with Islam as their official religion and thirteen with an established Christian church—Pakistan was carved from the same partition decade as a homeland for a faith, on the very same logic—and no one marches to dissolve a single one of them. Only the Jewish state has its right to exist filed as an open question.
To many Palestinians, it means surrendering a national home they have bled three generations for into a structure still shaped by the hand that occupied them. One state asks each people to pour its whole self into a single pot and trust that the firing will not crack it.
Both have looked at that pot. Both have said no.
So we stand in a room with two doors, and both are locked, and we have decided the room is a prison.
We are wrong. There is a third door. It has been there the whole time.
It is only shaped so strangely that most people have never recognized it as a door at all.
The third door is called confederation, and it is yobitsugi written into law.
Here is the move at the heart of it, and it is so simple it slips past the eye on first glance: you stop asking the border to do two jobs at once.
A border, as we usually draw it, settles two separate questions in a single stroke—who governs you, and where you are allowed to live. Pull those two apart, and the whole knot loosens.
Confederation gives each people a sovereign state of its own—two governments, two parliaments, two passports, two rights of return, each into its own country—and then lays those two states across one shared and open land. You vote where you are a citizen. You live where you choose.
Sovereignty is divided down the gold seam; the homeland is held in common.
I have confessed to you already to being a dreamer, and if that sounds like a daydream, look at who drew it.
The most detailed version on the table is called the Holy Land Confederation, and it was not sketched by stoned undergraduates on a quad. It was drafted between 2020 and 2022, and revised again in 2025, by Yossi Beilin and Hiba Husseini—he a former Israeli justice minister and one of the secret architects of the Oslo Accords, she a veteran Palestinian negotiator and legal counsel to her own side’s peace teams.
Two people who have sat across the real table, in the real rooms, under the real weight of their peoples, sat down together and wrote the treaty. It has draft articles. It has been carried to the United Nations. It is not naïve. It is the work of two old hands who have run out of patience for anything that isn’t real.
And the model they reach for is not exotic. It is sitting in plain sight across the Mediterranean: the European Union. France and Germany bled each other dry three times in seventy years—Sedan, Verdun, the Bulge, a century of corpses stacked along the same river—and today a Frenchwoman can wake in Paris, take a job in Munich, and cross the border that swallowed her grandfathers without so much as slowing the car. They did not erase their nations to do it. France is still France. Germany is still Germany.
They simply decided the seam between them would be drawn in commerce and movement instead of in blood.
Two pots. One bowl. And it has held for eighty years.
Now watch what the third door opens—because each thing it solves is a thing that has killed every plan before it.
Start with the settlers, the live wire of the whole conflict. Under a clean partition, the roughly 200,000 Israelis living deep inside the West Bank would have to be torn from their homes—a removal so vast and so violent that no Israeli government has ever dared it, and the mere prospect of which has sunk every negotiation it ever touched.
Confederation sets the wire down.
The settler who wishes to stay, stays—not as a conqueror, but as a permanent resident of the State of Palestine who remains a citizen of Israel, voting in Israeli elections the way any expatriate does. And in exact, deliberate symmetry, an equal number of Palestinians—the children and grandchildren of the displaced—may take up residence inside Israel on precisely the same terms. The thing that broke every map becomes the proof the model works: two peoples living among one another, each still belonging wholly to its own.
Then the refugees, the wound that never closed.
The Palestinian state may welcome home as many of the scattered as it can hold, and the plan offers refugees the same array of dignified choices earlier negotiators once drafted—including a narrow, numbered path to citizenship inside Israel itself, kept carefully apart from the resident swap so that no one’s deepest fear is tripped: Israel keeps its majority, and the refugee is offered something better than a grievance frozen for seventy-five years.
It is not everything.
It is the first serious thing in a very long time.
Then security, the fear beneath all the other fears. No one is asked to trust on faith. The plan builds the scaffolding in steel: a demilitarized Palestinian state; an international force, Israeli units among it, stationed along Palestine’s outer borders with Jordan and Egypt; joint command of the confederation’s perimeter; a mutual veto, so that neither state can sign a hostile alliance behind the other’s back. Open between themselves. Guarded toward the world.
And then the detail that makes the whole thing humanly possible: a way out.
After four years, either nation may walk away and dissolve the confederation back into two plain and separate states. No one is chained to the experiment forever.
And it is exactly that unlocked exit—the knowledge that you are not trapped—that can make frightened peoples brave enough to walk through the door in the first place.
And then there is Jerusalem.
For the whole of the last century, when we needed to picture a city two powers could not share, we pointed to Berlin: a wall down the spine of a living city, a death strip where the seam should be, families waving across concrete to relatives they could not touch, a gun in every gap.
Berlin was the twentieth century’s monument to a single conviction—that when two cannot agree, you build a wall, and you man it.
Confederation proposes the photographic negative of that image.
One Jerusalem, open and undivided, the capital of both nations at once—not split between them but shared by them. A single overarching council governs the city, drawn in equal measure from its eastern and western halves, each side holding a veto so that neither can ride roughshod over the other. The holy places, over which men have killed for three thousand years, pass into a shared keeping, watched together. And the Old City, where heaven is said to lean down and touch the earth, is administered not by one flag planted in triumph but by both hands, cupped around the same priceless jewel.
And I want you to imagine it here with me because in my mind, it is a thing of impossible beauty.
Dawn breaking over a peaceful and shared Jerusalem. The muezzin and the shofar and the church bells echo over the same gold-limned stone. Jewish children and Palestinian children laugh and play as they cross an open square heading to different schools.
The checkpoints are gone. The old separations are things that grandparents gossip about.
The light rises on a Jerusalem held in sacred reverence by three of the world’s greatest religions, cared for by everyone, polished until it shines bright by millions of hands from around the world who travel to this special, sacred place and find here peace and unity—and warm smiles from everyone that they encounter.
That is the pearl at the center of the bowl. Not blue, not woven—its own luminous thing.
Because the one city that belongs to everyone can be surrendered to no single pattern, and the only honest way to hold it is together, in the open, in the light.
I would be lying to you, and dishonoring the dead, if I told you this was easy. It is not easy. It may not even be likely. So let me lay the hardest truths on the table myself—because you deserve them, and because a hope that cannot survive the facts is not worth the breath it takes to offer.
First: you cannot confederate two states that do not yet exist. The plan still requires, as its precondition, the bare bones of a two-state agreement—and that agreement is the very thing thirty years of blood and bad faith have failed to reach. The Netanyahu government of this moment, and the ones most likely to follow it, are ruled by a right that rejects a Palestinian state on principle. The Palestinian side is split between a sclerotic authority that commands little trust and a Hamas that holds Gaza and rejects coexistence outright.
This door is real, but the hands that would open it are, right now, nowhere near the handle.
Second: those 200,000 settlers left inside Palestine are not a tidy abstraction. Among them are the most messianic and most violent actors in the entire drama—people who would read a peace that leaves them as foreigners in their own front yards as a betrayal worth burning the world down to stop, and who have both the will and the weapons to try. A confederation could be laying a match beside its own foundation. Yossi Alpher—a former Mossad officer who wants this to work—calls it a time bomb, and he is not wrong to.
Third: the soft, open border that makes the dream beautiful is the same soft border through which old wounds could come walking back. The longing to return to a village erased in 1948 is a force this plan may be underestimating—and longing, weaponized, has started wars before.
And fourth, quietly, the one that may matter most: right now, almost no one is listening.
None of this is the fault of a single man, or a single people, although you have heard me condemn certain men in charge in the harshest terms, deservedly. It is the accumulated weight of a hundred years of fear, doing precisely what fear always does. I am not naming these dangers to talk you out of hope.
I am naming them so that you know I have seen them—every one—and that I am still standing here, still holding this perfectly imperfect bowl out to you in hope, and asking you to love it as much as I do.
Because here is the truth about yobitsugi: it is the hardest join in the entire craft.
The masters will tell you that most attempts fail—that to fit the shard of one shattered bowl into the wound of another, to find two fragments whose broken edges happen to answer each other, is so rare and so painstaking that it almost never works.
That is not an argument against it. That is why the bowl that does survive is the one they treasure for four hundred years.
That is why, in the land where the art was born, a yobitsugi vessel was given as a wedding gift—because the odds against two broken things ever fitting together are so steep that when it happens, when it truly holds, the bond is reckoned unbreakable.
Not in spite of how hard it was.
Because of it.
So why believe?
Because the impossible thing has happened before—more than once, in this exact place, within living memory.
They told us the Arab world would never accept a Jewish state; that the hatred was eternal, the rejection total, that peace was a child’s fantasy and the only realism was the next war.
And then, in 1979, Egypt—Egypt, which had thrown three wars at Israel’s very existence—signed a peace over the return of the Sinai that has held, unbroken, for almost fifty years. The man who signed it for Israel was Menachem Begin, a hawk’s hawk, the founding father of its right. The eternal hatred turned out not to be eternal at all. It turned out to be a story people told until someone braver stood up and told a different one.
They told us a wall through the heart of a European city was simply the way of things, the permanent architecture of a divided world. And then, on an ordinary Thursday in November of 1989, the people walked up to it with hammers, and by morning it was rubble and souvenirs.
And four hundred years ago, two warlords who had every reason to kill each other reached for a bowl instead—a bowl made of two bowls, mended in gold—and chose to live.
Hope is not simply a feeling. I have said it before, and I will say it until I die: hope is a discipline. It is the stubborn refusal to hand the future over to the men drawing their lines in blood. The line drawn in blood has been tried for a hundred years, and it has produced a hundred years of funerals. We know exactly what it costs. We have the receipts.
The other thing—the seam drawn in gold—has not been tried. Not really. Not yet.
See it with me:
There is a bowl in the shape of a land. It is broken, and we have all cut our hands on it. But the shards are still here. Every one of them is still here. And there is an art older than the wound, practiced on opposite sides of the earth by people who never met and somehow agreed on the same impossible idea: that what is broken can be gathered, that what is gathered can be joined, and that what is joined along a seam of gold can be stronger, and lovelier, and harder to break, than it ever was before it broke.
Two pots. One bowl.
Let it hold.
My G-d, let it hold.
Allah, please let it hold.
A Personal Note
If you’ve read this far, you and I have been somewhere together, and I’m grateful for the company. This is the kind of thing I write—the essays, and the speculative fiction that comes from the same place—here at The Hinge & The Near Field. If it meant something to you, the most generous thing you can do costs nothing: restack it, forward it, hand it to the one person who needs to argue with it. That’s how the work finds its people.
The next most generous thing is to subscribe—free or paid. Paid subscribers are the reason I can keep sitting down to do this.
And if a subscription isn’t where you are, but you’d like to put something in the tip jar anyway, you can buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/lawrencewinnerman. It goes straight back into the writing.
However you found your way here—thank you. We keep each other going. That has always been the whole point.
All things are possible and with possibility and faith all things can come to fruition.
Beautifully said and masterfully woven into a reality that might not exit at this moment. However, thoughts we think and express have the sn uncanny way of becoming a reality.
I will hold that reality in a beautiful dawning of cooperation and peace. For I don’t just hope. I believe.
There has to remain that hope!