Supported by
Thomas L. Friedman
President Trump, You Can Remake the Middle East if You Dare
Opinion Columnist
Dear President Trump:
You may not be interested in Jewish or Arab history, but they are both very interested in you today. This is one of those rare moments — like after World War I, World War II and the Cold War — when everything in the Middle East is in play and everything is possible. And right now, everyone is waiting for you.
No exaggeration: You have a chance to reshape this region in ways that could fundamentally enhance the peace and prosperity of Israelis, Palestinians and all the region’s people, as well as the national security interests of America.
Be advised, though, while the wages of success will be enormous, the consequences of failure will be utterly hellish. It’s the Nobel Prize or the booby prize. Yet there is no escaping this mission. The Middle East is either going to be reborn as a strong region where normalized relations, trade and cooperation are defining objectives or disintegrate into a few solid nation-states surrounded by vast zones of disorder, warlordism and terrorists who are chillingly expert at using drones.
On every train schedule there is something known as the last train. Well, when it comes to peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians, before Israeli West Bank settlements totally choke off any possibility of a two-state deal; to ending Lebanon’s 50-year civil war, while there is still a shred of hope; to giving Syria a chance to reintegrate after 14 years of strife; and to neutralizing Iran before it gets a nuclear bomb, this really feels like a last train.
On Sunday, for the first time since Oct. 7, 2023, one could see a scintilla of hope that this war could wind down, as Israelis embraced loved ones who had been hostages for more than a year and Gazans left shelters and returned to their homes — where they are still standing. Haaretz quoted Ahmed Mattar in Gaza City, one of many displaced Palestinians walking north with belongings on carts and donkeys, as saying something that I am sure spoke for most Israelis and Palestinians (and certainly did for me): “People just want this madness to stop.”
No one will have a bigger say in that than you, President Trump. So let’s survey the challenge.
I’m confident you now understand from your recent involvement with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — pressing him to accept the cease-fire and hostage-prisoner exchange that Biden set up and Bibi had consistently opposed — that your political and diplomatic aspirations are in fundamental contradiction to his.
Your aspirations and America’s interests, in fact, are the fuse that would probably blow up Bibi’s cabinet and potentially end his political career. An aging Joe Biden, whom Bibi could outfox, was his dream. You are his nightmare. Monday’s headline in Haaretz — “Netanyahu Is Lying to Trump and Preparing to Sabotage the Gaza Cease-Fire Deal” — did not come out of thin air.
Your interest is to bring Israel and Saudi Arabia into a U.S.-led alliance with our other Arab partners, and that will require Israel to open talks on a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu’s political survival — what will keep his coalition in power and forestall any national inquiry commission over who was at fault for the Hamas surprise attack on his watch — depends on the Gaza war resuming after this cease-fire and Bibi never opening time-bound negotiations with the Palestinian Authority on two states for two peoples.
That is why, in response to the vicious Hamas onslaught in 2023, Netanyahu launched a war to root out Hamas from Gaza, but it had two contradictory goals — plus no stated vision for peace with Palestinians after it ended.
Netanyahu’s goals were “total victory” over Hamas and a return of the hostages. But total military victory over Hamas, even if it were possible, would have surely meant the deaths of most if not all the hostages.
Unfortunately and remarkably, the Jewish supremacists in Netanyahu’s cabinet, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, forced Netanyahu to pursue a war to destroy much of Gaza, even at the cost of Israel being accused of war crimes, in hopes this would lead to total displacement of Palestinians and the Israeli annexation of part of Gaza — the hostages be damned. Bibi went along with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, until you forced him to choose.
Yes, Hamas is an Islamo-fascist organization that has been a curse on the Palestinian people. But as a movement, it can be eliminated only by other, more moderate Palestinians. Netanyahu never wanted or tried to help build an alternative to Hamas in the form of an upgraded and reformed West Bank Palestinian Authority. He just kept sending his army in and out of Gaza, triggering exactly what this column predicted: a permanent insurgency just like what we triggered in Iraq before we moved to the strategy of clear, hold and build a decent alternative. Have you seen how many Israeli soldiers have been killed lately in Gaza by Iraqi-style I.E.D.s made out of unexploded Israeli ordnance?
Here is how then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it last week in his eloquent farewell to Middle East diplomacy: “Each time Israel completes its military operations and pulls back Hamas, militants regroup and re-emerge because there’s nothing else to fill the void. Indeed, we assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost. That is a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war.”
U.S. policy must be to ensure that all three stages of this cease-fire agreement are carried out and followed by a real diplomatic process for a wider settlement. I agree with the argument of the Israeli strategist Gidi Grinstein that only a reformed and upgraded Palestinian Authority can replace Hamas in Gaza, but it needs the support of an international or Arab force, invited in by the P.A. to help with security and reconstruction.
Then Gaza, like the West Bank under the Oslo agreement, should be divided into Areas A and B for a four-year transition period. Eighty percent would be Area A (under the international force/Palestinian control), and 20 percent (basically the perimeter) would remain under Israeli military control until Israel’s security is assured.
After the four-year transition, the two sides would agree on a permanent status in tandem with the West Bank, where, hopefully by then, the Palestinian Authority would be led by an incorruptible institution builder, like former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. This approach would lock in the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli-Palestinian security deal.
Meanwhile, in Lebanon we have an enormous opportunity to truly end the civil war there and put the country back together. The new president, Joseph Aoun, and his newly named prime minister, Nawaf Salam, are widely respected, moderate, Lebanese patriots — which is why so many Lebanese took to the streets to celebrate their taking office.
The most important thing U.S. diplomats should do, besides offer Lebanon economic aid to recover and military aid to strengthen its army, is to finally draw a mutually agreed-on, U.N.-recognized border between Lebanon and Israel.
Why? Because for decades Hezbollah justified holding arms by claiming it was necessary for recovering Israeli-occupied parts of southern Lebanon. The whole thing was bogus, involving a few disputed meters and half-kilometer sections along the border.
It is critical for the U.S. and Israel to take that oxygen of a border dispute away from Hezbollah. But we also need to make clear to the Shiites of Lebanon that America wants them — and will help make them — equal citizens of the Lebanese state, without their having to rely on an armed Hezbollah.
After speaking to a senior Israeli official the other day, I am convinced that Bibi understands that and that by significantly weakening Hezbollah and Iran, he has helped set in motion the possibility for Lebanon and Syria to restore their sovereignty and unity. I think he is ready to complete Israel’s withdrawal and finalize the border — provided the Lebanese government produces the military force to ensure that Hezbollah cannot embed itself in southern Lebanon again.
(Side note, Mr. President: You really should retain Amos Hochstein, Biden’s special Lebanon negotiator, to handle this job. He is widely respected there, even by Hezbollah.)
A stable, pluralistic Lebanon is the best steppingstone for fixing Syria. In Syria, we need to forge a kind of contact group among the U.S., Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Israel as an engine for helping solidify a coalition government there that balances the Islamists — whose fighters toppled the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad — and the secular, multiconfessional Syrian majority.
This is not going to be easy, but we have to try. I believe the new de facto Syrian leader, Ahmad al-Shara, has the potential to be a decent, unifying national leader for the country, but we have to be in there with both hands encouraging and enticing and pressuring him to do the right things — even if we fail. The worst thing you could do is wash your hands of Syria at this key time or just turn it over to Turkey.
Finally, on Iran, Israel has done the world a huge favor in stripping this awful, corrupt, repressive regime of much of its ability to project power around the region through failing states and proxy militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen while hiding behind Tehran’s nuclear program.
That nuclear program and Iran’s malign regional strategy need to be eliminated. I hope you can do it through peaceful negotiations; otherwise, it needs to be done kinetically. The more credibly we threaten the second, the more likely we will get the first.
Good luck, Mr. Trump. History has its eyes on you.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads.
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
Advertisement
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment