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I’m Thomas Friedman, and I’m the Foreign Affairs columnist of The New York Times. And I’ve been here since 1981.
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I’ve just spent nine days in Israel and traveling through part of the West Bank, just to try to understand what’s been the political and strategic impact of Hamas’s onslaught on Israeli settlements on October 7. On the last night I was there, I was watching the news basically through my phone and saw that Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant were giving a press conference.
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[SPEAKING NON-ENGLISH]:
And the headline that came out of the press conference was that Netanyahu was saying Israel will control Gaza after this war and that there’ll be no room for the Palestinian Authority, which has been Israel’s partner in controlling the West Bank since the Oslo Accords were signed.
- archived recording (benjamin netanyahu)
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[SPEAKING NON-ENGLISH]:
What Netanyahu is saying, if you strip it away, is that 7 million Israeli Jews will control 5 million Palestinians, 3 million in the West Bank roughly and 2 million in Gaza, in perpetuity. And that is not sustainable, except under political conditions that would rhyme with apartheid. So I thought, wow. It only took a couple of days for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to completely reject Secretary of State Blinken and the American vision.
Earlier that week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to reporters in a news conference in New Delhi, India, and laid out, really, for the first time, some kind of political horizon that the United States feels has to be part and parcel of the conclusion of this conflict whenever it will come.
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No forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, no use of Gaza as a platform for launching terrorism or other attacks against Israel, no diminution of the territory of Gaza, and a commitment to Palestinian led governance for Gaza and for the West Bank and in a unified way.
And so this was a pretty big, titanic clash between the United States vision and the Israeli vision. And as I stood in line at El Al to fly home, that was all I was thinking about. How is this story going to end?
I was relieved when President Biden laid out an American vision for two states, for two people, putting a political horizon out there in an essay in the Washington Post. And President Biden understood that for America to continue its support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza, the United States has to be articulating its own vision and encouraging Israel to have a vision for the morning after that gets us back to the idea of two states for two people.
Now, no one thinks this is going to happen overnight or in one giant leap. There’s going to have to be a process where the Palestinian Authority does have to be upgraded in its military, its policing capacity, its institutional capacity.
And there has to be a framework based on 1967 boundaries for Israel and Palestinians negotiating how this two-state solution would come about where Palestinians are able to assume greater and greater self-rule consistent with Israel’s security and consistent with what surely will have to be land swaps where the block of Israeli settlements already existing in the West Bank will be transferred to Israel ultimately in return for Israeli territory of equal size being transferred to Palestinians.
So I just think it’s time for the United States to be saying to Israel, we’re going to help you militarily, but we do not want to see another nail, another piece of lumber, another yard of cement being poured for a new settlement in the West Bank. And if there’s part of that sentence you don’t understand, come back to us and we’ll clear it up.
We are tired of you, with one hand, asking for our security assistance and, with the other, building settlements that are designed to basically make it impossible for the very two-state solution that we think you need that we certainly need as your ally and your Arab partners need. Netanyahu is on record supporting an American concept of a two-state solution, and also a vision of Gaza that says if Hamas is gone, Israel would actually expand Gaza by giving it land in the Israeli Negev Desert.
A lot of this was laid out in former President Donald Trump’s own peace plan back in 2020.
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I delivered to Prime Minister Netanyahu my vision for peace, prosperity, and a brighter future for the Israelis and Palestinians.
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Mr. President, I believe your peace plan strikes the right balance where other plans have failed. I’ve agreed to negotiate peace with the Palestinians on the basis of your peace plan.
So I simply wanted to remind people of that. America is not without its rights. We will say to Netanyahu, hey, you accepted it. It could be a basis, at least, to start with. Now, many Palestinians will say it’s not a basis. It’s not even close to what we want. Nevertheless, they could get a second chance.
Everybody needs the Palestinian Authority today. Israel needs some kind of Palestinian power structure to take over legitimate authority in Gaza one day. And it needs a much more effective Palestinian Authority at the same time in the West Bank. America needs it because we want to be seen as helping Israel to construct a Gaza that will be part of a Palestinian state that lives in peace with Israel, not a future part of Israel. And our Arab allies and Israel’s Arab allies in the Abraham Accords all need it.
So for the Palestinians, this train called the PA, which is, really, a very frail organization now, at best, and rife with corruption, is the last train because of all the people who need an effective PA today to solve some aspect of their problem in this crisis.
So if we hope to see anything good out of this war, this terrible, vicious war, it would have to be a historic opportunity, that it leads to a Palestinian governing authority, whatever they choose to call it, that can represent both Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and do so in a way that is corruption-free, effective, and actually deliver for them as a people as well.
Lately, I’m reminded of that joke in inverted commas where Indians and Pakistanis go to God and say, God, when will there be peace between the two of us? And God says, well, not in your lifetime. And Sunnis and Shiites go to God and say, God, when will there be peace between us? He says, sorry, not in your lifetime. Israelis and Palestinians go see God and say, God, when will there be peace between us? And he says, not in my lifetime. Well, I hope that isn’t the end of the story. I’ve been covering this since 1978. I’m now 70, and I do hope and pray that in my lifetime, that’s a story I’ll get to cover.