Dear President Trump,
There are very few initiatives that you’ve undertaken since coming to office that I agree with — except in the Middle East. The fact that you are traveling there next week and meeting the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar — and that you have no plans to see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel — suggests to me that you are starting to understand a vital truth: that this Israeli government is behaving in ways that threaten hard-core U.S. interests in the region. Netanyahu is not our friend.
He did think he could make you his chump, though. Which is why I am impressed by how you have signaled to him through your independent negotiations with Hamas, Iran and the Houthis that he has no purchase on you — that you will not be his patsy. It clearly has him in a panic.
I have no doubt that, generally speaking, the Israeli people continue to see themselves as steadfast allies of the American people — and vice versa. But this ultranationalist, messianic Israeli government is not America’s ally. Because this is the first government in Israel’s history whose priority is not peace with more of its Arab neighbors and the benefits that greater security and coexistence would bring. Its priority is the annexation of the West Bank, the expulsion of the Palestinians of Gaza and the re-establishment there of Israeli settlements.
The notion that Israel has a government that is no longer behaving as an American ally, and should not be considered as such, is a shocking and bitter pill for Israel’s friends in Washington to swallow — but swallow it they must.
Because in pursuit of its extremist agenda this Netanyahu government is undermining our interests. The fact that you are not letting Netanyahu run over you the way he has other U.S. presidents is a credit to you. It is also vital to defend the U.S. security architecture your predecessors have built in the region.
The structure of the current U.S.-Arab-Israel alliance was established by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger after the 1973 October War, to push out Russia and make America the dominant global power in the region, which has served our geopolitical and economic interests ever since. The Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy forged the 1974 disengagement agreements between Israel, Syria and Egypt. Those laid the foundations for the Camp David peace treaty. Camp David laid the groundwork for the Oslo Peace Accords. The result was a region dominated by America, its Arab allies and Israel.
But this whole structure depended to a large degree on a U.S.-Israeli commitment to a two-state solution of some kind — a commitment that you yourself tried to advance in your first term with your own plan for a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank next to Israel — on the condition that the Palestinians agreed to recognize Israel and accept that their state would be demilitarized.
This Netanyahu government, however, made annexation of the West Bank its priority when it came to power in late 2022 — well before Hamas’s vicious invasion on Oct. 7, 2023 — rather than the U.S. security-peace architecture for the region.
For almost a year, the Biden administration beseeched Netanyahu to do one thing for America and for Israel: agree to open a dialogue with the Palestinian Authority about a two-state solution one day with a reformed authority — in return for Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel. That would then pave the way for passage in Congress of a U.S.-Saudi security treaty to counterbalance Iran and freeze out China.
Netanyahu refused to do it, because the Jewish supremacists in his cabinet said if he did so they would topple his government — and with Netanyahu on trial on multiple charges of corruption, he could not afford to give up the protection of being prime minister to drag out his trial and forestall a possible jail term.
So, Netanyahu put his personal interests ahead of Israel’s and America’s. Normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the most important Muslim power — built on an effort to forge a two-state solution with moderate Palestinians — would have opened the whole Muslim world to Israeli tourists, investors and innovators, eased tensions between Jews and Muslims the world over and consolidated U.S. advantages in the Middle East set in motion by Nixon and Kissinger for another decade or more.
After Netanyahu’s spinning everyone for two years, both the Americans and Saudis have reportedly decided to give up on Israel’s involvement in the deal — a true loss for both Israelis and the Jewish people. Reuters reported Thursday that “the United States is no longer demanding Saudi Arabia normalize ties with Israel as a condition for progress on civil nuclear cooperation talks.”
And now it may get worse. Netanyahu is preparing to re-invade Gaza with a plan to herd the Palestinian population there into a tiny corner, with the Mediterranean Sea one side and the Egyptian border on the other — while also advancing de facto annexation at ever greater speed and breadth in the West Bank. In doing so it will be courting more war crimes charges against Israel (and particularly against its new army chief of staff, Eyal Zamir) that Bibi will expect your administration to protect him from.
I have zero sympathy for Hamas. I think it is a sick organization that has done enormous damage to the Palestinian cause. It is hugely responsible for the human tragedy that is Gaza today. Hamas’s leadership should have released its hostages and left Gaza a long time ago, removing any excuse for Israel to resume the fighting. But Netanyahu’s plan to reinvade Gaza is not to stand up a moderate alternative to Hamas, led by the Palestinian Authority. It is for a permanent Israeli military occupation, whose unstated goal will be to pressure all Palestinians to leave. That is a prescription for a permanent insurgency — Vietnam on the Mediterranean.
Addressing a conference on May 5 sponsored by the religious Zionist newspaper B’Sheva, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far right finance minister, spoke like a man who couldn’t care less what you think: “We’re occupying Gaza to stay,” he said. “There will be no more entering and leaving.” The local population will be squeezed into a less than a quarter of the Gaza Strip.
As the Haaretz military expert Amos Harel noted: “Since the army will try to minimize casualties, analysts expect it to use particularly aggressive force that will lead to extensive damage to Gaza’s remaining civilian infrastructure. The displacement of the population to the areas of the humanitarian camps, combined with the ongoing shortage of food and medicine, could lead to further mass deaths of civilians. … More Israeli leaders and officers could face personal legal proceedings against them.”
Indeed, this strategy, if executed, may not only trigger more war crime accusations against Israel, but will also inevitably threaten the stability of Jordan and the stability of Egypt. Those two pillars of America’s Middle East alliance structure both fear that Netanyahu aims to drive Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank into their countries, which would surely foment instability that would spill over their borders even if Palestinians themselves did not.
This hurts us in other ways. As Hans Wechsel, a former senior policy adviser to U.S. Central Command, put it to me: “The more hopeless things seem for Palestinian aspirations, the less readiness there will be in the region to expand the U.S.-Arab-Israeli security integration that could have nailed down long-term advantages over Iran and China — and without requiring nearly as many U.S. military resources in the region to sustain.”
On the Middle East, you have some good independent instincts, Mr. President. Follow them. Otherwise you need to prepare yourself for this looming reality: Your Jewish grandchildren will be the first generation of Jewish children who will grow up in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state.
I will leave you with the words of the May 7 Haaretz editorial:
“On Tuesday, the Israel Air Force killed nine children, between the ages of 3 and 14. …The Israeli military said that the target was a ‘Hamas command and control center’ and that ‘steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming uninvolved civilians.’… We can continue to ignore the number of Palestinians in the Strip who have been killed — more than 52,000, including around 18,000 children; to question the credibility of the figures, to use all of the mechanisms of repression, denial, apathy, distancing, normalization and justification. None of this will change the bitter fact: Israel killed them. Our hands did this. We must not avert our eyes. We must wake up and cry out loudly: Stop the war.”
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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