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Thomas L. Friedman
How Trump Can Earn a Place in History That He Did Not Expect
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Abu Dhabi
Does Donald Trump’s return to the presidency herald the end of U.S. pressure on Israelis and Palestinians for a two-state solution? Not necessarily: It depends on which Donald Trump occupies the White House.
Will it be the Trump who just appointed Mike Huckabee, a supporter of Israeli annexation of the West Bank, as his new ambassador in Jerusalem? Or will it be the Trump who, with his son-in-law Jared Kushner, crafted and released the most detailed plan for a two-state solution since Bill Clinton’s administration?
You read that right: Trump was the rare American president who actually put out a detailed plan for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. If that Trump revives that initiative in 2025, he could be remembered as the president who preserved Israel as a Jewish democracy and helped to securely birth a Palestinian state alongside it. But if he continues along the path signaled by the Huckabee nomination, he will most likely be remembered as the president who oversaw the end of Israel as a Jewish democracy and buried any hope of a Palestinian state. Either way, Trump may not be interested in Jewish or Palestinian history, but Jewish and Palestinian history will be interested in him.
The last time I spoke with Trump, four years ago, he called to thank me for endorsing the Abraham Accords, which paved the way for a historic peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. Say what you will about Trump (and there is a lot to say), but he’s drawn to striking big deals that can have profound and even history-shaping consequences. I’ve just spent a week in Israel and the U.A.E. talking to political, military and business leaders, Jews and Palestinians and Arabs about what Trump might do in their region this time around. There is enormous opportunity and appetite for a game-changing deal — if Trump wants to reach for it and only if he does it right.
Trump has a starting point: the plan for a two-state solution that he put out in January 2020, titled “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People.” Neither side will embrace it as it is currently written, and the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza will complicate any deal enormously. But the “vision” in the title of Trump’s plan is a kick-starter for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations post-Gaza. It’s still the only detailed peace map that any president has publicly presented to create two states since the Clinton parameters, set out by Clinton 24 years ago.
The plan offered Israel the right to annex roughly 30 percent of the West Bank where a majority of Jewish settlers reside, with the remainder going for a demilitarized Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Trump proposed that Gaza would be expanded with land from Israel’s Negev Desert to compensate Palestinians for part of the territory they would relinquish from the West Bank. It was not a one-to-one land swap, as the Palestinians have demanded — more like one to two. It’s not the plan I would’ve put out, and it involved zero Palestinian input, but it was a starting point.
And Trump proposed that Gaza and the West Bank be connected by a combination of aboveground roads and tunnels — but only after Hamas is removed from leadership in Gaza, as he insisted back then. The Palestinian capital would be on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
I repeat: Trump’s plan would have to change because of the fallout from Oct. 7. It has zero possibility of being accepted as is from either side. But that is not the point. The point is that it has all the key ingredients to start talks. The plan tells both sides that the only stable solution has to involve two states for two indigenous peoples — with land swaps and mutually agreed-upon security arrangements that they would negotiate.
And never forget: Trump’s 2020 plan has some important fingerprints on it. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ron Dermer, then his ambassador to the U.S. and now his closest adviser, embraced it at the time, but Bibi never formally presented it to his cabinet. Instead, as Trump knows, Netanyahu tried to just annex parts of the territory Trump had designated for Israel, but Trump stopped him. Then the U.A.E. stepped in and said it would normalize relations with Israel if Netanyahu just promised not to unilaterally annex the West Bank.
That is how the Abraham Accords came about. But it was only a consolation prize — a valuable one, to be sure — not the deal of the century, to which Trump aspired.
So if and when a cease-fire and hostage exchange happens in Gaza, I hope Trump will consider taking advantage of this second chance that history is affording him by inviting both sides to Camp David for a peace summit, with the buy-in to attend being the acceptance of the Trump plan as the floor for negotiations — not the ceiling but the floor — and they can negotiate from there. Is he up to it? I don’t know.
I do know that taking the initiative would tell both parties that Trump is not going to wait for their politics to get around to discussing it, because stemming this conflict is a vital U.S. interest before it drags us deeper into a Middle East war than we already are. And we know Trump doesn’t like Middle East wars.
It would also signal that Trump is the one setting and driving policy, not the right-wing, pro-Israeli-settlement partisans he has appointed so far to Middle East positions. Because if they — not the Trump peace plan — reflect where the coming Trump administration intends to proceed, good luck even holding the Abraham Accords together, let alone expanding them to Saudi Arabia. Trump will isolate America in the Middle East and in the world. And it will fill his days.
Have no illusions: The far-right Christians and Jews who want to annex the West Bank and Gaza will love Israel to death — by asking about seven million Jews to control some seven million Arabs in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza forever.
President Biden is a good man who stuck his neck out to arm and diplomatically support Israel after Hamas launched its murderous attack on Oct. 7, backed up by Iran and its proxies. But Biden made a big mistake in terms of U.S. interests.
He never put out to the world the comprehensive peace plan he was working on behind the scenes, in which the U.S. would provide security guarantees for Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia would open diplomatic relations with Israel and Netanyahu’s government would negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, which has embraced the Oslo Accords, on a two-state solution.
Biden let Netanyahu just string him along, keeping such a deal out of public view, because Bibi knew he would either have to accept it — and have Israel’s ruling coalition brought down by the fanatical Jewish supremacists in the government — or publicly snub Biden and his plan. As he has done since the start of this war, Netanyahu temporized and prioritized his own political survival over the interests of Israel.
But America and the Jewish people in and outside Israel have paid a huge price for Biden’s failing to put any plan out in public. How so? The Gaza war was always going to involve a considerable number of civilian casualties because Hamas deliberately embedded rockets and fighters in homes, mosques and hospitals — no matter how careful Israel was, and Israel was not always so careful. There have been tens of thousands of Gazan deaths since Hamas started this war by attacking Israeli civilians and army posts on Oct. 7.
But now, 14 months into this war — without any Israeli or U.S. plan for the morning after and with images of Gaza’s casualties and destruction being broadcast hourly on social media all over the world every day — many young people around the world have turned against Israel and America. Gaza looks to them as though Israel is just killing for killing’s sake. And I can’t imagine what the world reaction will be when the international press is allowed to go into Gaza unescorted by the Israeli army and see the damage close up.
In short: Israel has never been stronger militarily since this war started, but it has also never been more globally isolated.
We know from polling that the Gaza war hurt Kamala Harris with many young voters in Michigan because she could never adequately explain that the Biden-Harris administration was sending weapons to Israel to defeat Hamas in order to put in place a U.S. plan for two states for two indigenous peoples. No plan, no listeners. No listeners, no voters.
If Trump were to revive his plan, it would make clear to the world that Israel does not have a blank check from us to fight forever in Gaza with no credible plan of its own for the morning after. It would signal that Palestinians need to get their negotiating act together and not just complain, and it would signal to Iran that Trump intends to isolate Tehran militarily — and diplomatically — by, as he put it in his plan, helping realize the “Palestinians’ legitimate desire for self-determination” if they make a secure peace with Israel.
This past week in Israel, I saw and heard one common denominator among the Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs and West Bank Palestinians I spoke with: They are all exhausted by this war — and the best on both sides are thinking about leaving. As Hani Alami, a Jerusalem Palestinian telecommunications entrepreneur, remarked to me: “The ones who want to leave, on both sides, are the ones who want to live in peace, and the ones who want to stay are the ones who most want to keep fighting.”
Surprise them, President-elect Trump. At a minimum, you will be amazed by how much of a debate you trigger within and between Palestinians and Israelis. At maximum, you might find a place in the history books that you did not expect.
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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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