This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his third official visit to Washington since U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January—the most of any world leader. The two discussed the contours of a potential cease-fire in Gaza, as well as their recent decision to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Beyond the here and now, however, major questions about the future of the Middle East are worth examining. What happens after a cease-fire in Gaza, and who runs the decimated enclave? How do Israel and the United States grapple with the changing power dynamics in the Middle East—as well as their own diminished soft power?
On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with a commentator who is long used to mulling these bigger-picture questions: Thomas Friedman, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the New York Times. Subscribers can watch the full discussion in the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: Does Netanyahu even want a cease-fire deal?
Thomas Friedman: He wants his cease-fire deal. That would be a cease-fire for 60 days. It would return about half of the hostages, and unfortunately corpses of Israeli hostages, in return for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. After the 60-day cease-fire, though, he wants the right to resume the war, just as he did with the last cease-fire, because his domestic political needs require it. The two far-right members of his cabinet, or I should say the two farthest-right members of his cabinet, [Finance Minister] Bezalel Smotrich and [National Security Minister] Itamar Ben-Gvir, both insist that the war continue until what Bibi called “total victory.” And so the reason that the meetings with Trump are so private, so intense, is that they’re talking not only leader to leader, but politician to politician.
Bibi is explaining his political needs to Trump and insisting they operate within them for a cease-fire. Now, what Trump is saying on the other side, I don’t know. But I covered Jim Baker, and he would be saying that any political needs are subordinate to America’s interests. America’s interests require a cease-fire right now. We want this war over. He would tell Bibi to figure out the politics of it and not come back until he has.
RA: Where do other regional players fit into this? There’s Saudi Arabia, of course, but also Qatar, which is trying to mediate this round.
TF: There really is a two-ring circus going on, and it’s interconnected. So there’s the question of the cease-fire in Gaza. How do you get that consolidated? Because Hamas wants an end to the war. They want to be sure that at the end of 60 days, Israel will not resume the war and expel Hamas. So that drama is going on in one circle. In the other circle, there’s the question of harvesting the military achievements of the 12-day war against Iran to put together a long-term security alliance. The United States, starting with the Biden administration, has been trying to forge a U.S.-Saudi security treaty that the U.S. Congress would then endorse in return for Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel.
I would suggest that another reason the talks are so secret is because they’re trying to see if they can fill the gap between what I would call [Saudi Crown Prince] [Mohammed bin Salman’s] MBS’s bottom line, in terms of Israeli commitments toward Palestinian statehood, and Bibi’s top line, in terms of what’s consistent with his politics. I’m very dubious that gap can be closed. MBS has been really isolated since the murder of [journalist Jamal] Khashoggi by his government, but he’s finally worked his way out of that isolation. Do you really think he’s going to give away the Palestinian store right now? Remember, also domestically, he’s gored many oxen with his religious and governmental reforms. And so his bottom line will be very close to some firm, time-defined Israeli commitment to pursue the project of Palestinian statehood, provided the Palestinians also get their act together. On Bibi’s side, do you really think he’s going to turn to the settlers who have been the foundation of his politics now for almost 17 years as prime minister, and say, “Sorry, guys. It’s over. We’re not doing those settlements anymore. We’re now going to pursue a Palestinian state, whether it’s in one, two, or three steps.”? That could be not only politically dangerous for him, but physically dangerous. And so Trump’s going to find it very difficult to close that gap between MBS’s bottom line and Bibi’s top line.
RA: Let’s discuss the domestic situation in Israel more. Tom, you’ve described what’s happening in Gaza as a moral stain. What is the longer-term damage to Israel’s reputation and soft power? How much does that politically matter at home?
TF: I’ve been saying for a long time now that this Israeli government, not Israel as a state or the Zionist project, but this Israeli government is the biggest threat to the Jewish people right now because its actions in Gaza make no sense at all. Every day you’re seeing 20 or 30 or more Palestinians killed just lining up for food. That’s a travesty. That cannot and should not be happening.
Secondly, if you follow the Israeli press right now, you will see a huge fight going on between Eyal Zamir, the chief of staff of the military, and the political echelon, particularly Netanyahu’s right-wing colleagues who are basically saying, “Where are we going here?” We are 21 months into this war, and Bibi’s still never defined what its political objective is. And so because of that, from the world’s point of view, there’s a sense that people are being killed for no particular political end, let alone one that could say, “This was a war of necessity, but we fought this war, so there will be no more wars. So we will be able to nurture, cooperate with, and facilitate a legitimate Palestinian partner to bring all this to an end.” And when you don’t have that as your stated goal, your only goal is “total victory” because that’s the only way to hold your coalition together.
Many people in the world, especially a young generation, are only getting their news through images of Palestinians killed and injured in Gaza. You have only to look at who won the Democratic primary election in New York City, and what platform he won on, to know that there are young and older American Jews who are just not good with this. At all. I have been warning Israel that one day, the Gaza war will be over. And when it is, people will really see the devastation there. That will be a bad day for Israel and a bad day for the Jewish people. My great fear is my grandchildren will grow up in a world very different from the one I grew up in, that they will know what it is to be Jewish in a word where the Jewish state is a pariah state. That would be a real tragedy for Israel and the Jewish people.
This is not to, in any way, relieve what Hamas did. What Hamas did was basically a strategy. First of all, it was the single stupidest war I’ve ever seen. What is Hamas negotiating for right now? What are their two demands? Israel out of Gaza, and a permanent cease-fire. What did Hamas have on Oct. 6, 2023? Israel out of Gaza and the permanent cease-fire. They sacrificed the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, fighting from their tunnels, which they allowed no Palestinian civilians to hide in, to get back to exactly where they were the day before the war started.
RA: One could argue that in the sinister, evil view of Yahya Sinwar, this is exactly what he wanted. He wanted the global mood to be very angry at what Israel is doing in Gaza. He wanted to hurt Jewish support of this particular government and therefore hurt Israel’s reputation longer term. And in that sense, he’s met some success.
TF: I totally agree with you and have written as such. Sinwar sacrificed the lives of thousands of Palestinians, and the physical structures of Gaza, to win the next generation on TikTok. And it was a huge success.
RA: What is the United States getting out of supporting Netanyahu? What is in America’s strategic interest?
TF: Let’s start at 30,000 feet, with what’s been going on in the world since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The view of the Biden team, which I happen to agree with, is that the great post-Cold War struggle today is between the forces of inclusion and the forces of resistance. The forces of inclusion include both democracies and what I would call “decent countries,” countries where governments are committed to the betterment and education of their people, even if they aren’t democracies. They see a world of inclusion and want to be part of it, of trade, of commerce, of meetings, of investment. On the other side are forces of resistance: countries led by dictators who need the resistance in order to justify the militarization of their regime, the crackdown on their people, and their theft of the state’s assets. That includes both Iran and Russia. So, going back three years ago before the Ukraine war started, Ukraine was trying to join the West, the European Union and NATO. And Israel was trying to join the East under the supervision of the Biden administration by getting normalized relations with Saudi Arabia. The world dominated by the forces of inclusion is an overwhelming U.S. interest. Therefore, [then-President Joe] Biden was pressing Netanyahu constantly, both before the war and after the war, to come up with a proposal to begin working very strategically toward a Palestinian state, which is the keystone of the world of inclusion in the Middle East. And, of course, Ukraine winning is the keystone of the world of inclusion in Europe. If Ukraine were able to resist Russia’s invasion and join the European Union, we’d be 90 percent, 95 percent toward a whole and free Europe. If Israel were to normalize with Saudi Arabia, it would be the biggest expansion of the world of inclusions in the Middle East since Camp David. So something very big is at stake in both of these wars.
I pray that Donald Trump has finally woken up to the fact that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and Iran are on the same side. The idea of boasting about taking out Iran’s military threat and then be coddling Putin is crazy, not only because Iran feeds Putin’s war machine, but because they are both central to the world of resistance.
RA: In this dichotomy of inclusion and resistance, where does China fit in?
TF: China has a foot in each camp, which has been one of my consistent criticisms of China. I’ve been to China twice now this year, and every time, I ask people, “Why are you hanging around with Putin? He’s a loser.” Of course, this is part of their problematic reflex, that if America’s on one side, they need to be on the other.
RA: And staying in the Middle East, what happens next in Iran?
TF: What you’re seeing in Iran right now is a real struggle between the forces of Persian nationalism—which does not like to see their country stripped of its military power and therefore its dignity—and the forces of Islamic clergy and Revolutionary Guard that want to use this war to consolidate their power. Normally, the public would be saying to them, “You got us into a total mess. We spent billions and billions of dollars on a crazy project to try to control four Arab states: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Shame on you.” But the way the Israelis played this war has really triggered a lot of Persian nationalism. So my first question is, where does that net out at home? We don’t know. The struggle in the leadership now is whether this war proves why they need a bomb, or does this war prove why going for a bomb and for regional imperialism was such a disaster? And I don’t know where that’s going to net out.
RA: Me neither. Every dictator around the world is pondering exactly that question. Do we want to be North Korea or do we want to be Ukraine?
But let’s flip that. I’m curious about how Israelis are thinking about this. Do they emerge from the last few weeks thinking that they should double down because after the war with Iran, they are now stronger? Or is their reading that they have lost a lot of soft power? You brought up Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayoral candidate in New York. Is Israel’s reading that in America, they are losing a lot of people who want to support them, but who feel a sense of revulsion by what’s going on in Gaza, which isn’t good longer term? Which of those two factions is winning out?
TF: Ravi, we cannot say until the hostages are returned and the war is over. The hostage issue, in a very small country where everyone is one or two relationships away from a hostage family, continues to truly traumatize Israelis. They are not thinking straight as a result. They can’t look at the civilian casualties in Gaza. They can’t think about Mamdani. The country is still on Oct. 8, when it comes to the hostages. I can’t emphasize that enough, which is why it’s so important to see a permanent cease-fire and the hostages returned. I believe that will unlock Israeli politics.
Just to step back to 30,000 feet again, if we want to harvest anything positive from this 12-day war and everything that’s happened in the last two years, we actually need regime change in three places. You need regime changes among Palestinians. You need a reformed Palestinian Authority that can be a credible institution builder and partner. You need regime change in Israel. I don’t care if Netanyahu is prime minister again; that is a choice for the Israeli people. But it can’t be with this coalition, because this coalition is filled with crazy people. These are Jewish Proud Boys. They walk right out of the Second Temple, and they are dangerous. They will never be a partner for peace. And third, you need regime change in Iran, by and for the Iranian people, and in their own time. Because I do not believe this government in Iran is a partner for anything positive in the region.
Before the Gaza war started, hundreds of thousands of Israelis had, for nine months, dedicated every Saturday night to protesting against Netanyahu’s effort to basically suppress the Israeli Supreme Court. He was trying to deprive it of its oversight of the government, a judicial coup in effect, in order to carry out the project of settlement in the West Bank. Many of those protesting were the air force pilots, the Mossad agents, the cyber warriors. The tip of the Israeli military spear was designed and manned by the very same people who led the fight against judicial reform. As I wrote in my column, I don’t think these same people who in effect won the war for Israel will now let Bibi reap what they sowed by leveraging this victory into a new lease on life for this crazy, shameful government. That is why Bibi doesn’t want the war to end. Because he does not want an election.
RA: I want to ask you about how China is seeing all of this. You wrote a column about how they’re probably laughing when they look at the Big, Beautiful Bill. Why?
TF: I want to start with one of the most maligned actors in the Trump administration, Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Before this big, beautiful, insane bill, Wright was pushing to get rid of subsidies for clean energy, for solar, for wind, for electric vehicles for what I call “right-wing woke” reasons. Basically that they’re liberal projects. He justified it by saying that solar and wind are intermittent, so you can’t rely on them. That was true in 2010 but is no longer true today. Every American needs to understand this. Why is Texas the biggest solar and wind state in the country? Because Texas solar developers have combined wind, solar, and batteries, often with a little gas turbine backup, to completely eliminate the intermittency problem. That trifecta—solar, wind, and batteries—is the most efficient, fast, and cost-effective form of energy growth right now to add to our grid. Last year, 80 percent of added generation on our grid came from that trifecta. There’s no greater proof of its popularity than the fact that the state of Texas is the leader on this. Chris Wright knows that but fed Trump that they’re intermittent.
Now, of course, China knows all of this. China’s building massive solar and wind projects, backed by batteries, in addition to coal, oil, and natural gas because we’re on the edge of the era of AI, which is going to be an era of electricity.
RA: And you need non-intermittent electricity for power centers.
TF: Electricity in the AI era is downstream from economic growth and military power. He who has the most AI will have the most economic and military power, and he who has the most AI will be the country with the most consistent, cost-effective supply of energy. That’s where we should be. So when Trump passes a big, beautiful, nonsense bill, by testimony from his energy secretary that he knows is not true, the Chinese laugh. They can’t believe we are so stupid that for right-wing woke reasons, we would actually unilaterally disarm on the eve of AI. And that’s why there were two parties who celebrated the passage of that bill, Trump’s Republican cult party and the Chinese Communist Party.
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