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Following its sweeping military triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel held a vast swath of Arab territory three times its original size. It eventually gave back the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in return for a peace accord and annexed Arab East Jerusalem and the sparsely populated Golan Heights.

But when it came to the West Bank and Gaza Strip it faced an existential dilemma that went to the heart of its national character: whether to retain control over these lands and their 1 million Palestinian inhabitants, or accede to a separate and independent Palestinian state.

Each choice was fraught with peril. Keeping the territories while giving Palestinians citizenship would inevitably erode the Jewish character of the state. But allowing an unstable Palestinian state next door could pose a threat to Israel’s survival.

Frozen by these unappetizing prospects, successive Israeli governments chose not to choose, instead maintaining a military occupation that ruled with limited accountability over its disenfranchised Palestinian subjects — whose numbers swelled over time to several million — while allowing Jewish settlers to erect numerous communities and outposts on Palestinian land.

In the early 1980s, Meron Benvenisti, an outspoken and passionate Israeli historian, social scientist and author, became one of the first researchers to conclude that the occupation and the growing settlement movement had effectively destroyed the prospects for a two-state solution.

But Mr. Benvenisti, who died Sept. 20 at age 86, went one major step further: He declared that a two-state solution could never succeed because Arabs and Jews would never surrender their claims to all of their homeland. He embraced a third alternative: a binational state where Israelis and Palestinians would share power while maintaining their cultural and religious traditions and communities.

It was a bold and controversial stance that won Mr. Benvenisti enemies on both sides of Israel’s harsh political divide. But he never relented, skewering Israeli governments led by both major parties for their repressive policies and human rights violations of Palestinians, and various U.S. administrations for clinging to a two-state solution long after its chances of viability had vanished.

He was a prophet without honor in his own land, yet one whose dire predictions largely came to pass. “Prophets only need to be right about <i>some </i>things to be remembered for their prophecy,” <a href="https://www.972mag.com/meron-benvenisti-obit/" title="www.972mag.com">wrote Ian S. Lustick</a>, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist who knew Mr. Benvenisti personally.

Writing for +972, an Israeli-Palestinian magazine, Lustick added, “Meron was right about one big thing: that the future of Palestine, the future of the Land of Israel, will grow out of a one-state reality from the river to the sea — a reality he identified as such earlier than almost any Jewish Israeli.”

Mr. Benvenisti was born in Jerusalem on April 21, 1934, in the time of British mandatory rule. His mother was a nurse from Lithuania, and his father was a distinguished geographer from Greece who took him on field trips throughout the Holy Land to map Jewish history in the region, and instilled in him a lifelong love for the parched land and its enduring history.

Mr. Benvenisti initially followed a typical career path as a member of the Israeli elite, doing his compulsory military service on a kibbutz in northern Israel and becoming head of the National Union of Israeli Students as an undergraduate at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

In the 1960s he entered politics, helping direct <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2007/01/03/teddy-kollek/226a1fb7-b396-43d8-8b2c-2fe7297afef0/" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Teddy Kollek’s</a> first campaign for mayor of Jerusalem, a post Kollek would hold for 28 years.

After the Six-Day War, Kollek put him in charge of Arab East Jerusalem. It was in that position and later as a deputy mayor that Mr. Benvenisti said he began to see how Palestinians were consistently shortchanged in public welfare, education and economic development. He recalled participating in the bulldozing of dozens of Palestinian homes to create an open plaza for Jewish worshipers and tourists in front of the Western Wall in the Old City, which left him with a bitter taste.

“I was a go-getter. I did not understand the meaning of what I was doing,” he recalled in <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-zionism-was-not-born-in-sin-but-in-illusion-1.5179945" title="www.haaretz.com">a 2012 interview</a> with the newspaper Haaretz. “But when I started to deal with the Arabs of East Jerusalem, I began to understand. . . . I decided that I was no longer going to take part in that fraud.”

He quit city government, left Israel to study intercommunal conflicts at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, and returned to his native land with a doctorate and a determination to influence the debate over Israel’s future.

In 1982, he founded the West Bank Data Base Project, funded by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, which gathered data from official documents, population surveys and court cases, and issued authoritative reports that cut through the fog of government propaganda to trace the growth of Jewish settlement and the state of demographic, legal, economic and political conditions in the occupied territories.

Journalists and academics beat a path to his small, relentlessly cluttered office in West Jerusalem to hear his scathing pronouncements on the state of the occupied territories.

“The political partition of Palestine today is, unfortunately, not possible,” he told The Washington Post’s Edward Walsh <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/02/24/number-of-settlers-on-west-bank-doubles/312770e4-3baf-4d3d-9eb4-fcc83f541ec4/" title="www.washingtonpost.com">in 1985</a>. “People are trying very hard, struggling with new peace formulas,” he added, “but you can say the whole process will end up nowhere.”

When young Palestinians rose up in December 1987, protesting the occupation with stones, molotov cocktails, strikes, economic boycotts and public protests in what became known as the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, Mr. Benvenisti saw the conflict reverting to its original contours of Arab vs. Jew, with two warring and deeply wounded strands of nationalism in what he called their “primordial brawl.”

“I don’t think Israel is holding Gaza anymore,” he told The Post in 1988. “I think Gaza is holding Israel.”

Exhausted physically and spiritually by the conflict, Mr. Benvenisti closed down his research group after a decade and devoted himself to writing columns for Haaretz and 10 books, ranging from history to archaeology to memoir.

Mr. Benvenisti ladled out his contempt for leaders on both the Israeli right and left. He criticized <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/twenty-years-later-as-rabin-is-remembered-little-hope-for-peace/2015/11/01/f7b6e862-80b2-11e5-9afb-0c971f713d0c_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin</a> for building a separation wall between the West Bank and Israel proper on seized Palestinian land. He was equally critical of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ariel-sharon-dies-at-85-former-israeli-prime-minister-epitomized-countrys-warrior-past/2014/01/11/8da0ce6c-ffd3-11df-b0ed-379d1148ca53_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Ariel Sharon</a> for unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza, leaving behind a crippled economy under the thumb of Palestinian militants, and of the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for policies that Mr. Benvenisti said further institutionalized Palestinian subjugation.

He insisted he was a Zionist patriot, expressing a romantic love of the land and its Arab inhabitants and a nativist’s scorn for the politics of the Jewish migrant communities that came to Israel after its independence in 1948. And he was fuzzy on the specifics of how a binational state could work, given the towering amount of hatred, fear and mistrust on both sides.

“I am not proposing solutions,” he told Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-zionism-was-not-born-in-sin-but-in-illusion-1.5179945" title="www.haaretz.com">in 2012</a>. “That is not my job.”

Still, his personal affection for and commitment to his homeland remained unabated. “I love his volcanic temperament and I love his authenticity,” Shavit wrote then. He added, “Meron Benvenisti contains within him all the contradictions and all the vicissitudes and all the irreconcilables of the land with which he is engaged in a relentless wrestling match.”

Mr. Benvenisti died of renal failure at a hospital in Jerusalem, his son Eyal Benvenisti said by email. Survivors include three children and six grandchildren.

Mr. Benvenisti was buried next to his parents in a plot dedicated to Worthy Citizens of Jerusalem, an honor both he and his father had achieved. At the moment of interment, as the Jewish prayer for the dead was being chanted, the muezzin from a nearby Palestinian village began the Muslim call to prayer for believers.

“It was as if the land was praying for his soul,” Eyal said.

Glenn Frankel is the former Jerusalem bureau chief of The Washington Post.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/netanyahu-set-aside-west-bank-annexation-to-do-the-uae-deal-but-will-the-plan-revive/2020/08/17/a6f99a70-e07d-11ea-82d8-5e55d47e90ca_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Netanyahu set aside West Bank annexation to do the UAE deal. But will the plan revive?</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/netanyahus-plan-for-west-bank-annexation-faces-unexpected-opposition-from-settlers/2020/06/10/9db6c694-a744-11ea-898e-b21b9a83f792_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Netanyahu’s plan for West Bank annexation faces unexpected opposition from settlers</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/as-middle-east-tensions-mount-he-may-the-last-one-left-with-any-shot-at-brokering-peace/2020/06/02/583008da-a0e9-11ea-be06-af5514ee0385_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">As Middle East tensions mount, he may be the last one left with any shot at brokering peace</a>

Glenn Frankel’s most recent book is “Shooting ‘Midnight Cowboy’: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation and the Making of a Dark Classic.”

Glenn Frankel

The Washington Post

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