Two years after Hamas’s attack on Israel, delegates from Hamas, Israel and the United States are in Egypt this week to see if President Trump’s cease-fire proposal can lead to an end to the war. In this episode of “The Opinions,” the columnist Thomas L. Friedman explains why this round of peace talks could be different and what obstacles still stand in the way of making lasting peace a reality.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Thomas L. Friedman: I’m Thomas Friedman. I’ve been following the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since I was 15. I cover foreign affairs for The New York Times, with a particular emphasis on this conflict.
On this second anniversary of the war, how am I feeling? This has been the longest Israeli-Palestinian war. It’s also been the first war that, despite its length — two years now — it actually has no name. The 1948 War, the War of Independence, the Nakba War from the Palestinian point of view, the ’67 War, the Six-Day War, the Sinai War, the October War.
This war, two years later, still has no name. I have a name for it. It’s the Worst War. This is absolutely the worst war ever between Israelis and Palestinians. It comes after a failed attempted peace. It’s a war that was launched by Hamas with complete viciousness aimed to kill as many Israeli soldiers and civilians as Hamas soldiers could encounter. And it triggered an Israeli response against Hamas that has devastated Gaza, inflicted tens of thousands of Palestinian casualties — both soldiers and civilians — and has done so without Israel offering any political horizon for the morning after. It’s left both communities more devastated physically, more traumatized than ever, and farther than ever from what is the only solution: two states for two people.
So now, thanks to an initiative by President Trump, the two sides, Hamas and Israel, are trying to forge a cease-fire that will involve a return of all the Israeli hostages, both living and dead; the release of Palestinian prisoners, hundreds of them in Israeli jails; and an Israeli withdrawal from at least most of Gaza to some border region. Basically, paving the way for an international peacekeeping force to come into Gaza and secure the areas where Israel is evacuated. And a Palestinian technocratic cabinet to basically run Gaza. And over and above that cabinet, a kind of international body chaired by President Trump to supervise the reconstruction of Gaza. It’s an extremely complicated plan in an extremely broken place.
There have been a lot of optimistic noises about whether or not this will be achieved. I certainly pray that it will be, but I think it’s going to be very difficult. Hamas is going to want to retain at least some arms for its people for self-protection so it can still play a political role in a postwar Gaza. And Israel is going to be very careful about how far and wide it withdraws from Gaza and what kind of security arrangement will fill in its wake.
I hope this cease-fire that President Trump has initiated will come to fruition. I’m watching every day, but it’s not going to be easy.
What intrigues me about this plan is that it contains the seeds of what I think is the only possible solution now to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is sometimes credited with saying, when you have a difficult problem, enlarge it. And in effect, that’s what we’re doing.
I think the thing that people need to understand most about the peace talks going on right now is the sheer number of actors involved. The underlying logic of this plan is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now so broken, the two sides are so traumatized, that this problem can no longer be solved with the traditional tools and at the traditional level that it was resolved before: the two sides negotiating with each other and an international mediator in between them.
I believe if we are ever going to get to two states for two people, it’s actually going to require some kind of international body to oversee both Gaza and the West Bank to assure Israelis that no threat can ever come from those areas, that they don’t have to rely on Palestinian promises to demilitarize. And to assure Palestinians that Israelis will be gone and enable Palestinians to develop their own noncorrupt governing authority.
Basically, if we want to solve this problem now, I think we have to go back to a kind of agreed-upon Arab international mandate to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza and to oversee the rebuilding of Palestinian governance in the West Bank. Only that kind of international structure that would assure both decent Palestinian governance and real demilitarization of both Gaza and the West Bank, supervised by international troops that would almost surely have to have an American component — I think that’s the only way to solve this problem now.
Let’s step back for a second and ask: How did we get to this point where we can even have these kinds of talks that are going on in Egypt this week? It’s for several reasons. One is that Iran and its threat network — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the Shia militias in Iraq — Iran was dealt a devastating blow by Israel with the help of the United States in what was called the 12-Day War. So Iran’s ability to meddle and destroy peace talks has been severely set back.
Israel under Prime Minister Netanyahu finds itself not only more isolated than ever internationally, but it also has a very different diplomatic and political problem with the Trump administration. Whenever U.S. presidents, particularly Democrats, tried to press Prime Minister Netanyahu to enter into peace negotiations, Netanyahu could always run to evangelical Christians, to Republicans, basically, and use them as a lever to neutralize the White House and to deflate any pressure on Israel. But under Trump, that’s not possible because he completely controls his party now. And so Netanyahu found himself forced to enter into these negotiations very grudgingly. But his old levers that he used to pull in order to diffuse American pressure, they weren’t available under Trump.
For Palestinians, you have an analogous situation. For decades, basically, Palestinians were able to have enormous influence over the core of Arab leadership in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq by threatening them. If they didn’t support the Palestinian cause, which their people did, the Palestinian movement would attack and delegitimize those leaders. And because those leaders in most cases were illegitimate, they were very vulnerable to that sort of political blackmail from Palestinians.
But what’s happened in the last 10, 15 years is that leadership of the Arab world has moved from republics like Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq to the gulf. To Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. in particular. And these monarchies have a lot more legitimacy, and therefore they’re actually not so vulnerable to the traditional Palestinian blandishments. And they have made it very clear that they’re ready to participate in a cease-fire in Gaza and in a new transition for a different kind of Palestinian governance.
One thing we know about the Palestinians living in Gaza — many of whom have been uprooted four, five, six times from their homes — is that they’re exhausted. They’re traumatized. They’ve lost their homes in many, many cases and have lost family and relatives. They want this over. And I think that’s another pressure on Hamas. Hamas knows that it does not have the Mandate of Heaven anymore to perpetuate this war indefinitely. So for all these reasons, the parties have found it very difficult to avoid this negotiation.
This is a hugely complicated process. Certainly, one of the key actors has been the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu was finally cornered by Trump and forced to accept this deal. Let’s remember last January, December, President Biden had a very similar deal on the table and Netanyahu rejected it. He walked away from it after the first stage of hostage release.
And Netanyahu has managed to survive this war because of the cultlike devotion of the core of his support. He has done everything to divide Israel in order to stay in power. He’s given basically a permission slip to the ultra-Orthodox to not fight in one of the most vital wars of Israel’s history in order to keep them in his coalition. He’s done a whole series of what I find really disgusting things, but has managed to survive politically and avoid a commission of inquiry.
Bibi Netanyahu never wanted this war to end. He did everything he could to perpetuate it because he knew that the morning after the morning after, there will be a reckoning for him. I think he deserves to be called to account. And I believe there will be a reckoning for Bibi Netanyahu if this cease-fire comes through and the hostages are released.
The biggest loss maybe for Israel is that it lost its moral halo among people who were predisposed toward Israel. Israel has lost something deeply important, albeit intangible, because of the way it fought this war. The way Netanyahu fought this war was to go after Hamas with little, often not zero, but little regard for Palestinian civilian casualties along the way.
When you fight a war that’s going to necessarily involve so many civilian casualties but you offer no political horizon whatsoever, which is what Netanyahu did, it starts to just look to people around the world, especially if you’re viewing it in 15-second bites on TikTok, as just killing. Killing for killing’s sake. And that’s how it was perceived by many people around the world and particularly many young people. And as a result, Israel’s credibility, standing, moral support among lots of young people around the world in particular, not to mention old people, has been so badly damaged that Israelis are not welcome in a lot of places now around the world. Whether it’s their soccer teams or their singers or their academics. And that’s been a huge price to pay.
So what about Hamas and its leadership? Well, I certainly hope there’ll be a reckoning for them, too. I wrote a while back when Yahya Sinwar — who was the leader of Hamas, who planned and launched this war — was still alive, that if there was a cease-fire and he held a press conference, I wanted to be in the first row.
I wanted to be able to ask the first question: Mr. Sinwar, you just achieved what you called a great victory. An Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a restoration of the cease-fire. What did you have on Oct. 6, 2023? You had Israel out of Gaza and a cease-fire. You launched this war to get yourself exactly where you were the day before. Shame on you. Yes, you drew attention to the Palestinian cause. But that attention will only be translated into something positive if it actually leads to exactly the solution you didn’t want, which was two states for two people. So you will go down in infamy.
Donald Trump has been saying for a while that what he really wants is the Nobel Peace Prize. He already thinks he deserves it. Well, if Donald Trump is able to secure a cease-fire, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, return of Israeli hostages, and it holds and paves the way for negotiations on the only solution of two states for two people — to quote my Israeli friend Nahum Barnea, the columnist from Yedioth, Trump will not only deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, he’ll deserve the Nobel Prize in Physics and Chemistry as well. Because that would be quite an achievement.
It’s like he’s trying to put together a Rubik’s Cube while people are still shooting at each other and at him, metaphorically speaking, and the pieces themselves are sort of crumbling. And so to try to get them all arranged, all the same color on one side, all going the same way, and to sustain it the morning after the morning after? Sustaining this would require the full work of a single U.S. secretary of state for the rest of his career. My question is: Will the Trump administration have the attention, the energy and the focus that’ll be required every day to keep such a complicated solution on track? I hope so.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
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