Most Israelis favour 'three classes solution' with Israeli Jews on top, Israeli historian says

Most Israelis have embraced a multi-tiered state with Israeli Jews at the top of the hierarchy, prominent Israeli intellectual Yoval Noah Hariri said earlier this week.

In an interview with CNN aired on Wednesday, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem history professor said that this gradual acceptance of an unequal race-based system has come as Israelis abandon the two-state solution.

"A lot in the Israeli public has gradually switched from a belief in the TSS to an implicit belief in the '3 Classes Solution' that you have just one country between the Jordan and Med, with three classes of people," Hariri said.

This includes “Jews, who have all the rights; some Arabs, who have some rights; and other Arabs, who have very little or no rights,” he added.

“And this is increasingly the situation on the ground. And this is increasingly also the aspiration or the mindset of even people in government and this is extremely worrying but this is what is happening,”

A two-state solution has long been touted as the internationally-endorsed solution to end Israel's occupation of the West Bank, allowing for Palestinians to achieve statehood.

Israel illegally occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza - areas that Palestinians seek for an independent state - during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian peace talks began in 1991 and went on fruitlessly for decades before finally collapsing in 2014, amid constant Israeli refusals to allow the Palestinians to establish a viable state with full sovereignty or to withdraw from East Jerusalem and large swathes of the West Bank.

Now, with Israel about to see the installation of its most right-wing government in history, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, hopes for a negotiations to bring about a two-state solution look bleak.

A recent poll by the Israeli Democracy Institute showed that only 31 percent of Israeli Jews believe that the incoming government should pursue a two-state settlement, contradicting Prime Minister Yair Lapid's claim at the UN in September that most Israelis favour it. The poll showed that 60 percent of Israeli Jews are opposed to a two-state solution.

Efforts to reach a two-state Israeli-Palestinian deal have long been stalled.

Israel has entrenched its control of the occupied Palestinian territories through its military rule over millions of Palestinians and persistent settlement construction.