The idea of a bi-national Israeli-Palestinian state embodies the dangerous illusion that two peoples who are utterly different in their language, religion, culture, and history, who are divided by a deep economic chasm and connected to their own external worlds – the Palestinians to the Arab world and Israelis to the rest of world Jewry – can be combined in the framework of a single state. Moreover, these are two peoples that have been intensely engaged in a bloody and intractable conflict for the last century.