David Friedman

David Friedman served as the U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2017 to 2021, under President Trump. In that role, he was instrumental in orchestrating the move of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. 

Following his service in the Trump administration, he launched the Friedman Center for Peace through Strength. He is also the author of Sledgehammer: How Breaking with the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East, published in 2022. 

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE journalist James Jacoby on Nov. 16, 2023. It has been edited for clarity and length. 

Read more interviews from Netanyahu, America & the Road to War in Gaza.

If you could just set the scene as you do in your book, of a new administration coming in and what the new approach would be, how you saw the new approach and what the president [Donald Trump] was telling you the priorities would be for the administration vis-à-vis Israel.

Sure. I had worked with the president during his campaign on Israel, on how to think about the U.S.-Israel relationship and how to advance it. I think we agreed very robustly that the prior administration had made some significant mistakes, primarily in what we thought they were empowering the Islamic Republic of Iran, which we both thought was wreaking real havoc on the Middle East, Israel included.

Then as it related to Israel, at the very tail end of the Obama administration, there had been a U.N. resolution, U.N. 2334, which had concluded that essentially all of Judea and Samaria, including Jerusalem, was illegally occupied territory; stated more simply, basically, that even a place like the Western Wall, which is one of the holiest places in Judaism, was not something to which the Jewish people had any entitlement. The failure of the Obama administration to veto that struck us as not just inappropriate but really as a betrayal of the relationship that the United States had with Israel for so long.

So as we headed into office—and I had been nominated even before Jan. 20; I was nominated a month earlier. As we headed into office, my agenda, which is obviously limited to this U.S.-Israel relationship, was to strengthen it, to reverse what we thought were the mistakes of the Obama administration: get a lot tougher on Iran; hold the Palestinians accountable for malign behavior, which we thought that they hadn’t been held accountable for for many, many years; and for them to recognize some of the things that the country had already agreed to recognize, like Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, to move forward with that. It had been U.S. law since 1995 that Jerusalem was recognized as the capital of Israel, but no president had acted upon it. So these were some of the things that we talked about as being on the agenda early on in the administration.

Was there a sense that President Trump would be the first president to broker a peace deal? Was that part of the priority coming in?

It was certainly his priority. He was anxious to see if there could be a peace deal reached between Israel and the Palestinians. I will tell you candidly, I was skeptical of that from the beginning. He had been told by some people he knew well, and I think they were well-meaning, that there was an opportunity for peace with Israel and the Palestinians, that the Palestinians were willing to give up some of their intractable demands, including to Jerusalem, including a demand to repatriate refugees.

I was very skeptical. I didn’t think that’s really what their position was, but it was something he wanted to pursue.

In my case, I was the first ambassador that was ever assigned a dual role of being a peace envoy to the Palestinians. I shared that role with Jason Greenblatt and with Jared Kushner, but I was heavily involved in it. And I will tell you, I never thought it could really get done, but it was something that we were certainly working on for at least a couple of years.

And what was the root of your skepticism?

I just don’t think the Palestinians are willing to accept a Jewish state, period, on any borders. I never thought this was a matter of land. I didn’t think this was a real estate dispute. I didn’t think this was an issue of diplomacy or politics. I thought it was just a recognition on the part of the so-called moderate Palestinians—I really say “so-called”; I don’t think they’re anywhere near as moderate as they claim to be—but I think their recognition that if they were ever to accept the permanent presence of Israel as a Jewish state, they would follow in the path of Anwar Sadat and others who courageously tried to lead their people to peace. That was their view. I think we saw that over and over again over the last 50 years, including with [Yasser] Arafat at Camp David with Bill Clinton, where I think [Ehud] Barak offered him essentially anything that could have ever been offered, and he rejected it.

And again, there’s the diplomatic hypothesizing about what if we do this, and what if we do that? Can we move people this way if we move other people in a different way? And that’s what diplomacy is, thinking about all these alternatives. And then there’s just the kind of realpolitik, hardcore issue of what do people feel in their hearts. Are people really ready to embrace each other and make peace and live with each other? And I don’t think the Palestinians were ready. I don’t think they’ve ever been ready, and I think they’re proving themselves today not to be ready either.

Your book is called Sledgehammer. Why the term “sledgehammer”? What does that mean?

It’s sort of a play on words. Sledgehammer, on the one hand, was actually a sledgehammer. We had this incredible ceremony at the City of David where we opened up a newly discovered tunnel that led from the Pool of Siloam up to the Temple Mount. The Pool of Siloam was where, in ancient times, Jews would purify themselves before they ascended to the temple on the three major holidays, and that was below the Temple Mount.

Then between the pool and up to the Temple Mount, there was a discovery of a completely intact set of steps that were built by Pontius Pilate around the year 30, which connected the pool to the Temple Mount. So it wasn’t just like a shard of glass or a piece of parchment, but you could actually immerse yourself in ancient times and walk the path that was walked by people who were coming to the temple in the year 30. That would include Jesus, among others.

The City of David discovered this. And we had a ceremony. We had a ceremonial wall that was placed, and we kind of broke the wall with a sledgehammer. I took the sledgehammer and broke the wall, and all of a sudden, The New York Times decided to adopt that metaphor for me, that I was literally or figuratively a sledgehammer in terms of breaking existing conventional wisdom on U.S.-Israel policy. That was the real sledgehammer. And then I used that as the title of my book because I do think that during the course of my four years in office, I was fairly iconoclastic when it came to most of the conventional wisdom. We broke a lot of molds; we changed a lot of paradigms. And I’m proud of those changes.

Bring me back to Feb. 14, 2017. [Benjamin] Bibi Netanyahu arrives in Washington for his first meeting with Trump at the White House. … Are you able to tell me a little bit about that meeting and the sort of reset in the relationship that happened post-Obama in that meeting with President Trump?

I probably was not there because I wasn’t sworn in as ambassador until March. I do remember it, and I’ll tell you why I remember it: because the one takeaway was they were both standing at podiums, and I think President Trump said to Bibi, “Try to lighten up a little bit on the settlements,” and I think that surprised a lot of people.

It wasn’t scripted. These meetings are usually heavily scripted, although with Trump, there is no script, right? He goes off script a lot. A lot of times, I think he comes across as being candid and sincere, but he does go off script, and this was not anticipated that he would say that. So there was this period afterwards where we tried to figure out what that meant, what he meant by it. And again, I wasn’t in office yet, so there’s not much I could do about it.

But it caused me to realize that the issue of settlements was one as to which the president had some preconceived notions, and which I think I understood where they were coming from, and it was something we’d have to have further discussions about. It was something that concerned you, though?

It did. It did at the time because … I think that one of the things that Obama continuously got wrong was to create a moral equivalency between terrorism and settlements. You can be against settlements, but settlements are never an excuse for terrorism. Now, President Trump didn’t say they were. He brought up settlements just in a vacuum: “Bibi, can you lighten up a little bit on the settlements?” But I really did not think that the settlements—and I continue not to feel this way—I never thought the settlements were enough of an issue that [they] should be brought up independent of an overall resolution. If you’re going to talk about a resolution that Israel can abide by, that they can live with, that makes sense for the world, sure, then settlements is an issue that should be reflected. But to set it up as an independent issue that has this deep significance, separate and apart from the totality of a resolution, I thought was a mistake.

So yeah, I did think that there would need to be some further discussions. Obviously, I’m an ambassador; he’s the president. He’s going to decide these issues, but I did want to have more follow-up with him on it.

I know there’s been an evolution to the relationship between President Trump and Netanyahu, but how did it get off at the beginning? Tell me a bit about how the two men got along and what the relationship was like, and also the fact that you were brought in as ambassador—there was Jared Kushner; there were others that the president had as top advisers—and that must have ingratiated him to Netanyahu to some extent.

I thought the relationship was great. I was very proud of the relationship. I really jumped into it in May when I got on the ground in Israel and the president came to visit. But I thought the relationship was good, and it had been good. Look, I met with Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu in 2004 at Trump Tower. They’ve known each other a while, and that meeting had nothing to do with anything that we’ll talk about today. But they had a good relationship. I think they have some things in common. They’re both really strong retail politicians. They understand how the game of politics is played. They understand the importance of projecting strength. There’s some basic similarities and of course some huge differences as well, but there were some basic similarities. I think that from the very beginning, and this was even before Trump took office, during that period of time when there was talk about a U.N. resolution in December of 2016, even then you could tell that Trump had a very, very different view of the relationship with Israel, and I think Bibi appreciated that, and he appreciated the fact that in Donald Trump was somebody who was strong and decisive and could make a decision and wasn’t afraid to live with the consequences of his decisions. I think that appealed to him. So I always saw the relationship as being good.

My first experience seeing them together as a prime minister and a president was in May of 2017 at Israel. I thought it was terrific.

I want to get to that visit in one second, but I just also wanted to talk—you mentioned kind of your iconoclastic approach to the job. Many have written that you had a rather unique relationship with Netanyahu in that you had a close relationship; there was almost an open-door policy. Tell me a little bit about your relationship once you got on the ground.

Look, I think that the relationship primarily was a function of the fact that I think the prime minister saw in me someone who could speak for the president. It wasn’t that we got along well. We had a good social relationship; it wasn’t that. It was, does this guy have the ability to speak for the president, to call the president, to potentially influence the president? Because otherwise I think everything else with Bibi—and this is just secondary. I mean, he’s running a country. It’s a very complicated job. It takes up his time 24-7. So I think the relationship primarily was a function of the fact that he saw in me somebody who was potentially influential and important to the relationship.

Yeah, I would say we were very close. I think that he trusted me. I think he understood that I worked for America and my loyalties were for America, but fundamentally, in my heart, I also wanted to make sure that Israel was strong and protected and that the relationship between Israel and America would always endure. I always felt that that was important for Israel. I also felt it was essential for America. So as people would look at me and say, “Well, are your loyalties to Israel or to America?,” I would say my loyalties are to both because their interests are completely aligned. My job requires that I be loyal exclusively to America. I’m going to discharge that job. But at the same time, my view of that job is that I need to be in a place where I’m helping Israel and America strengthen that relationship.

Talking about a break with the past, it must have been kind of, I’d imagine, refreshing from Netanyahu’s point of view to have a much more sympathetic ear in you than perhaps in previous administrations.

I have no doubt that he saw me, I think, as a huge improvement over my predecessors, again, ultimately because of President Trump’s policies and because I was close with President Trump on these issues, but I have no doubt he felt that way.

And as a Jewish American as well. I’d imagine that that was also something that meant something, that was significant.

Significant to who?

To President Netanyahu, in order to foster this relationship.

There’s really no correlation at all between being Jewish and being a good ambassador to Israel. I have a lot of Jewish predecessors, and I would let Netanyahu speak for himself, but I’m pretty sure that the approaches taken by Martin Indyk, Daniel Kurtzer and Dan Shapiro were very much not appreciated by Netanyahu, and they’re all Jewish. … So I don’t think that those things correlate to each other.

OK, so let’s get to that first visit. The president flies to Israel. I believe it was his first trip abroad. Set the scene for me in terms of why it was significant and unique and what happened upon arrival.

Well, President Trump’s visit to the Middle East set the stage for, I think, all the successes that we had over the course of his administration. He flew first to Saudi Arabia, and he met there with around 50 Arab leaders, and I think he made a couple of really important points.

The first important point was, when it comes to radical Islamic extremism, don’t leave it to the United States to deal with it across the Atlantic. Your job is to control it in your countries. And then if you’re able to do that, if you become a good partner with us in combating radical Islamism, you’ll find that the relationship with the U.S. can be much stronger than it is today. That was, I think, a very important point he made, and people really listened.

And then the second thing he said, which I think was really important, “End this fantasy about Israel going away. It’s not going to happen; Israel’s not going away. We’re going to stand with Israel. By the way, so should you. You guys have a lot more in common than you think. You have a lot of common enemies, and you should really think about Israel differently.” And that was in 2017. It took years for that to actually mature into something tangible, but I think he planted those seeds very early on in his administration.

And then obviously after that trip, he goes to Israel, correct?

Yes. So he flew up. President Trump flies to Israel. He flies directly from Riyadh to Tel Aviv. … Then the meetings we had, I was able to sit in on the meetings between President Trump and the prime minister, and I thought that what I was watching were two friends sitting around talking about the problems that they’re encountering: How do we deal with it? What’s the best way? The conversation was warm, plenty of humor, plenty of time for sidebars on less important issues. It gave me a very good feeling. Now, there was this moment, which I speak about in my book, that one of President Trump’s friends had convinced him that Mahmoud Abbas was ready to make peace, and the guy that was standing in the way was Bibi Netanyahu and that Trump needs to come to Israel and tell Bibi he’s got to make peace. That was, at least in my view, bad information that the president had received.

Hearing of this, I sat with the prime minister, and we talked about it. And I said, “Look, I just think it’s important that the president understand the true character of Mahmoud Abbas,” because he met with him in Washington a couple of months earlier. Abbas can be very charming. He’s in his mid-80s, comes across as very grandfatherly, very statesmanlike, wants peace, speaks about peace. But then you catch him on another day, and you’ll see that he’s a Holocaust denier. He is someone who praises the jihadis. He claims that every drop of blood spilled in the terrorization and the murder of Jewish people is holy blood. I said, “Look, I don’t think the president really has seen that side of him, so maybe you want to be prepared to show it to him.”

So I suggest that he put together a video, a couple of minutes, just showing the way Abbas has acted in other contexts, make sure it’s not out of context, make sure it’s completely defensible. And so they put together a video, and I actually kind of prompted the president to look at that video. And it had an impact as you would expect, because here this guy that comes to you and tells you he just wants to make peace is in front of an angry mob, egging on people to hate Israelis, hate Jews, and to consider murder of Jews a holy act. I’m really glad I did that, because the next day, President Trump went to Bethlehem to meet with Abbas, and the president asked me to come. And Abbas said, “If Friedman comes, there’s no meeting,” and I tried to find out why. His stated view is, he’s the ambassador to Israel; I’m in Bethlehem; that’s not part of Israel. So he can’t come; he’s out of his jurisdiction.

So I don’t come to the meeting. The president does come. I got a report from Jason Greenblatt, who went, and he comes there, and apparently he just absolutely wipes the floor with Abbas, partly because he saw the video, partly because he was infuriated that I was disinvited by Abbas from the meeting. And I think he began to understand the challenges of the Palestinians and that they’re probably not quite as peaceloving as his friends in New York had suggested that they were.

One of the conversations that was relayed to me there, I think, was very telling. After he finished yelling at Abbas, Abbas said, “Well, you know, you can’t blame me for saying these things, because it’s all about the occupation.” And Trump said, “Well, what do you mean by the occupation?” He says, “Wherever I go, anywhere in this land, there are Israeli soldiers.” And Trump said, “Well, how much are they charging you to provide security?,” to which Abbas said, “They’re not charging me anything. I don’t want them there.” And Trump said, “Well, it’s great that you don’t want them there, but if they left, you’d be taken over by Hamas or Al Qaeda or ISIS or Hezbollah. Who do you think you’re kidding? You’re not in a position to fend off all these states. You’re going to create a terrorist state, and it’s going to attack Jordan, attack Israel, attack everybody.” And when I heard that, I was really very gratified, because that, to me, just told me in a nutshell, this guy gets it. Trump really got it. He understood the dynamics on the ground, and the dynamics on the ground are like nothing like the hypothesization of outcomes that occurs in the State Department.

It’s been reported that Netanyahu’s staff was urging the president not to talk about a two-state solution during that trip. Is that true? Is that something that was part of the discussion? That Netanyahu’s staff was urging Trump not to talk about a two-state solution?

That’s correct—that behind the scenes that Netanyahu’s staff was sort of requesting that the president not use the words “Palestinian state.”

I don’t remember that happening. And I don’t think Trump really cared about a two-state solution. There are these people in the State Department who are absolutely religious two-staters. They think that’s the only way for Israel to remain Jewish and democratic, and they believe this strongly. A lot of Jewish people believe that strongly. I don’t believe it at all, but I don’t think Trump cared. I mean, Trump was not of the conviction that there needed to be a two-state solution. He thought that there could be any number of ways where this conflict could be resolved, and a two-state solution was one of them, but he was certainly not pushing it. I don’t recall any time when he was pushing that over any other potential outcome.

There’s a sense in some ways that I believe President Trump was the first president to actually talk about the idea of a one-state solution.

I don’t think he spoke about it seriously. I think at one point he said, “Two states, one state—I don’t really care what it is as long as everybody agrees.” And I think that’s as much as he got into depth about a one-state solution. It shocked a lot of people, but I didn’t see that as a serious endorsement of one state. I think what he really was saying is, “Look, guys, work this out. I’ve done lots of deals in my time. There’s always lots of different ways to do a deal, and just figure out one that works for both of you.” So I didn’t consider that to be an endorsement of any particular outcome.

And in terms of those discussions that you were talking about that you were privy to between these two leaders meeting, what were the top priorities? What were the top things discussed? I’d imagine Iran was one of them, eliminating the Iran deal. Tell me a little bit about that briefly, please.

It was always Iran. It was always Iran from day one. It was Iran qua Iran, and it was Iran as the sponsor of terrorist proxies from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis in Yemen. It was about the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action]. It was about the fact that the Iranians were in all likelihood violating the JCPOA as we spoke, and that even if the Iranians were not violating the JCPOA, the terms of it were so weak and ineffective that it would not just permit but essentially guarantee that the Iranians would end up with a nuclear weapon. The one issue that I think came up the most was the fact that inspections were not allowed to be conducted on military facilities. So if you’re afraid about a nuclear bomb and you can’t inspect military facilities, what in the world do you have? But that conversation took place often. There was a recognition of the fact that Hezbollah was getting more and more dangerous, getting more and more precision-guided missiles, all of which were funded by Iran; that Iran was moving weaponry across Iraq, into Syria, into Lebanon; that Iran had proxies in Syria, had proxies in Iraq. It was always about Iran from the beginning.

And what was the sense? You said that the president was saying at the time, “You guys have to figure this out,” right? This is in terms of the Palestinians and the Israelis. Was there a sense that there was a growing divide, that tensions on both sides were mounting at that point in time, or was there an appetite for something else?

I think the reason why tensions were mounting was because the use of violence is a tool that the Palestinians turn on and off depending upon the circumstances. Abbas has his finger on the switch at all times. My recollection was that somewhere in the summer of 2017, there was an attack on two Israeli police officers in the Old City of Jerusalem. They were murdered, and the weapons came out of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. So the mosque, for the first time maybe ever, was shut down for a day and a half as the Israelis searched for more weapons. And then we had this whole issue about whether or not there ought to be metal detectors for people coming into the mosque. There’s metal detectors all over the world, all kinds of things—football games, all kind of large groups these days.

The Palestinians, not only did they oppose it, but because they opposed it so much, they turned on a whole wave of violence. And I think that was the time when I was convinced, because I spoke with a number of Palestinian counterparts at the time—not Abbas, but others—I became convinced that this whole violence was a game towards a political outcome, that whenever the Palestinians didn’t get their way, we would see more violence, and somehow the violence would be used as an excuse for sympathy rather than for condemnation.

I really concluded—you know, I had suspected this for many, many years, but I concluded from that event that Abbas just wasn’t serious. He wasn’t for real. He wasn’t looking to get to a solution. He was looking to find ways to enflame the street at the right time, to maintain power, to just kind of die with his boots on for as long as he lives. That would be his outcome.

So yeah, look, I don’t think that there’s ever been a strategy on the part of Israel, either inside the government or even among a civilian population, to enflame the Arabs to create conflict. It’s just not a strategy. Now, there have been things that have been done that have been potentially provocative that have caused a conflict, but they were done not to cause a conflict. They were done because there were certain either political or religious imperatives at stake. But in the case of the Palestinians, I mean, violence is a political tool that is turned on and off for strategic purposes.

As I saw that, and I saw people dying, and I saw just the ability to turn it off and turn it on so quickly, I realized that really there is no Palestinian leadership with whom one can make a deal. …

I want to get to the embassy move. … You saw it as a vital move. Bring me into the story of how that decision was made and why it was so significant to you, and also, as I understand it, that you had to convince the president to endorse that idea.

Moving the embassy to Jerusalem was something that the president was very interested in, I think, well before he was elected. I think he made that promise on numerous occasions, made the campaign promise. And I think he understood that the move of the embassy to Jerusalem was entirely within the province of the president, that Congress had already acted on this and had decided that it should be moved. And for some reason, prior presidents lacked the conviction to get it done.

So this is something I think the president was interested in. A lot of people that supported him, that voted for him, cared about it deeply, including me. Once he was elected, I think we came upon the first time—you know, the move had to be affirmatively waived every six months, or else the law went into effect. So in May of 2017 came the first waiver period, and I could see that everybody in the White House, at least most of them, I would say, were telling the president, “Now’s not the time to recognize Jerusalem or move the embassy.” That was the view of [then-Secretary of State] Rex Tillerson, the view of [then-Secretary of Defense] Gen. [James] Mattis; it was the view of Gen. [H. R.] McMaster, who was the national security adviser. So you have basically the three kind of senior people within the national security echelon saying, “Don’t do it.” I’d been on the ground in Israel for like, two weeks.

I was told, “You’re not going to get him there this time around.” We drafted a press release that said, “I’m signing the waiver, but we’re going to move the embassy to Jerusalem. The issue is not if but when.” And then it was taken to the president for signature, and he crossed out the last line, and I got a call saying, “Well, the president crossed out the last line.” And I said, “Well, that’s not good. You’ve got to get it back in.” And nobody wanted to talk to him about it.

So I called him, and I said, “Look, I understand why you took it out. I think you should put it back in.” And he said, “Why should I tip my hand? I can do it whenever I want. Why do I need to tip my hand that I’m going to do it?” And I said, “Because this isn’t something that will get done in an hour or a day. I mean, it requires preparation, requires really kind of getting the State Department and the Defense Department and the national security adviser’s office—we’ve got to get them ready. I need time to put this together, and your steer that this is going to happen is very important.” And we went back and forth and back and forth. And finally he just said to me, “Look, if I put it back in, will you stop yelling at me?” And I said, “I didn’t think I was yelling at you, but if you think I’d be yelling at you, I promise I’ll stop if you put it back in.” He was gracious enough to put that language back in, which was very important, because it gave me at that point the authority to start figuring out how to get this thing done. And so we started really working on this in the aftermath.

I would try to figure out what needs to get done, how it’s to get done, what are the security ramifications, who needs to sign off, who’s going to be against it, who’s going to be for it. I just started working it and working it for the next six months or so.

Now, by November of 2017, I’m back in the Oval Office. I’m stationed in Israel, but I’m back every six weeks or so to speak with the president. Now I’m back in the Oval Office in mid-November of 2017, and the president says, “All right, look, I don’t want to go through another one of these waivers. I want to make a decision one way or the other. Now, I’m getting a lot of people telling me they’d like it to be done. I’m getting a lot of people telling me that it shouldn’t be done. Let’s just get to a decision, OK? I’ve got other things to do as well. Got a lot of issues in the world. This isn’t the only issue. Let’s get to a decision.” And so John Kelly—Gen. Kelly was the chief of staff—said to me, “When are you going back to Israel?” I said, “Well, I was going to go back tomorrow.” And he said, “We’d better not go, because if you want this done—and I’m rooting for you—but if you want this done, you’d better stick around, because there’s a lot of people here that are going to undercut you as soon as you’re not around.” So I stayed in town for a while, and I got a lot of people telling me I’m not going to go back to Israel.

So I stayed on for three weeks, and I met with everybody I could meet with. We had all kinds of meetings, from diplomatic meetings to political meetings to lots and lots of meetings on national security. We had lots of calls with, you know, on a TV with 24 boxes. On the TV, each box was a different office, a different embassy, a different agency, going through all these issues, and we tried to get to a decision, and the president said, “Look, we’re going to make a final decision.” I think it was November 27 of 2017, and he summoned a few of us to the Situation Room.

… We go into the Situation Room, and there may have been a couple other people there. But the main protagonists are the president and the vice president, Secretary Mattis, Secretary Tillerson, Gen. McMaster. And I think Mike Pompeo was there, who was the head of the CIA at the time, and [then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations] Nikki Haley. … But basically, the way the meeting ran was the president said, “Look, let’s have people voice their objections. After each objection, David will respond. I’ll listen to the response. We’ll move on to the next issue. We’ll take it one issue at a time.”

So we went through the issues. I don’t know how much you want me to explain. They’re in my book. But we went through a lot of the issues. Then the president said to me, “OK, what’s the closing argument here?” And I said to the president, “Look, the world is watching, and your decision will really dictate whether you are who you say you are. You say you’re not a traditional politician. You say that you’re not going to run American policy on the basis of rogue actors or threats from rogue nations, that you’re going to stand for what you believe in; you’re going to keep your promises. Obviously, you made this promise during your campaign. So the question is, what kind of a politician are you? Are you going to keep your promises? Are you going to stand with Israel? Are you going to flinch? Flinch from who? Flinch from the Palestinians? Flinch from the Jordanians? Flinch from Hamas? I mean, this is really going to be who you are. And it’s not just going to resonate in Israel and America, although obviously a lot of people will be happy in America, and even more people will be happy in Israel. But it will resonate in Moscow; it will resonate in Tehran; it will resonate in Pyongyang, because people will see that you keep your promises and you do what you say you’re going to do.”

And his response was, “Well, that really has to be the right answer. That has to be the right answer.” And we walked out of there with a decision.

Then I had a hope that between then and the execution of that decision, 40 people wouldn’t get in front of him and try to convince him otherwise. And 40 people did. But fortunately, he held his ground.

And tell me just briefly, why is the move so significant? Why is it significant to you, and why is it so significant historically to move the embassy? Look, I think that it’s been a huge point of disappointment, even insecurity, among American Jews that the United States can’t recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. I mean, Jerusalem is the heart and soul of the Jewish people. It’s the last word of the Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem.

We go back 3,000-plus years to Jerusalem. It’s where Abraham received God’s covenant. It’s where David created his kingship. It’s where Solomon built the temple. If you look at a Jewish prayer book, not just an Orthodox Jewish prayer book, if you look at any Jewish prayer book, Reform, Conservative, even the most left-wing Jewish prayer books contain a prayer that God will restore the Jewish people to Jerusalem.

And here we have been restored to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is part of Israel, and yet no nation in the world is willing to recognize the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish people. So for the most important country in the world, the most powerful country in the world, the country whose Congress, which reflects the will of its people, voted overwhelmingly to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the fact that that hadn’t been done for so long was just an open wound for Jews, and to see that that wound closed meant so much to me, to be maybe the tip of the spear, and getting that done by far [was] the most important thing I’ve ever accomplished in my life.

Where I got the greatest joy was speaking to Holocaust survivors who came to me and said, “You know what? We left Germany; we left Poland. The world was upside down. It never really got right side up until now. This is really what righted the world when America recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.”

You’ve obviously explained the significance, but [explain] what the day was like, the day of the announcement. Well, that must have been an incredibly significant day, not just for you, but also Christian evangelicals in this country care so much about this issue as well. So just set the scene for that day of the announcement, please.

Well, we worked on the ceremony for a few weeks. I became to a certain extent a TV producer, because it was very important to me that this look and get produced and feel exactly right. So a lot of work went into it. We were told that we were going to be broadcasting live to over 100 million people, so this was important just in terms of the execution of the event.

Look, what I understood over the course of the weeks that ensued as we were planning this was just how important this was to so many people—of course the Jewish people, of course the Christians as well, evangelical Christians. I made it a point of making sure that the ceremony included speeches by both evangelical Christians and rabbis. I mean, we wanted both represented because they both had so much to do with creating the groundswell of support for this decision.

We had some friction 60 miles south in Gaza, and we knew that the Gazan uprising would be of equal stature to the media. Especially those who were not great fans of the president would want to show side by side the activity in Gaza with the ceremony in Jerusalem. Nothing we could do about it. I mean, there was just nothing we could do about it. A whole long history to that Gazan uprising. It began when Mahmoud Abbas decided to withhold funding from them, and they began to kind of act out in that way. Of course when they act out, they act out against Israel, not against the PA [Palestinian Authority]. But there had already been a lot of energy created before the embassy opening to create some violent activity.

And unfortunately, it was violent activity that day. But we knew that that was going to happen, and we hoped it would be as nonlethal as possible, and it ran its course. So we didn’t focus on that; we focused on our ceremony. And look, we had about 11 members of Congress, I think five U.S. senators. We had a couple of governors. We had people who had spent years and years working on this issue. Joe Lieberman was one of the senators who worked so hard on it. He’s retired, but I made sure that he was there. So we had this incredible group of people, about 1,000 people who just, I mean, I’ve spoken to them in the aftermath. Many of them have come up to me and said it was one of the greatest days of their lives. We had this uplifting ceremony that I think spoke to a lot of people. And certainly to me and my family that attended, it was one of our great days.

And briefly, what about to Bibi Netanyahu?

Prime Minister Netanyahu attended the ceremony, as did President [Reuven] Rivlin, as did, I think, almost all the ministers of the government. The prime minister spoke. He said something which I’ve taken with me. Since then, he was very kind to me, spoke about how I would be the first United States ambassador serving my country from Jerusalem, which was a distinction that I would have forever. I certainly appreciated the sentiments. But his speech was great. And even more interesting, I think, was when we spent some time privately, he talked about how he grew up just a couple of blocks from the location of the embassy, and he showed a few of us where he used to go, play with his brothers, and where they used to go on hikes. So for him, moving the embassy to this particular location, where he grew up, I think was very meaningful to him.

Now, we talked earlier a little bit about provocation. The move of the embassy was seen by various Palestinians as a provocation. Is there any way in which you see the move of the embassy as setting the stage for conflict to come?

No. As I now have the benefit of six years of hindsight, no, I don’t think any of the conflicts that arose in the aftermath were conflicts driven off of the move of the embassy. Look, I think that it was essential to send the following message to the Palestinians: You do not have a veto over American policy as it relates to Israel. You don’t.

If your view is that the embassy can never move to Jerusalem until you say it’s OK, OK, well, that’s just unacceptable to the United States. The world will move on with or without you. In this particular instance, it was about the embassy, but I think the message is important. The Palestinians have an interest in representing their people and achieving for them a better quality of life, human dignity, prosperity, better health care, education. That’s what leaders do for their people. If their goal is to cause their people to suffer and hold them and put them in a holding pattern until they get everything they want, then the Palestinians should pick better leaders. We wanted to send that message, and I think it was not well received by the Palestinian leadership. …

Now, speaking of which, Abbas delivered a speech soon after the move of the embassy and basically declared that he would no longer agree to U.S. mediation in the peace process and echoed an Arab epithet, and he bade the U.S. president, “May your house come to ruin.” Do you remember the speech, and can you tell me a little bit about it, how it was received?

Yeah. Abbas gave a speech, and he said, “Yekhreb beitak,” which means “Your house will be destroyed.” I think shortly afterwards he called me the son of a dog, … and I think he said he was going to throw his shoe at Nikki Haley. None of these things had any impact whatsoever. We weren’t shocked; we weren’t offended. Our expectations were so low for Abbas and his ability to deliver anything that we viewed this as the rantings of a depraved mind. You know, what did he say today? Who cares? It’s unfortunate, but that’s what the Palestinian leadership looks like.

Can you contextualize that moment, though, in terms of what the thinking was inside the administration when it came to brokering … any sort of peace plan at that point?

Look, the thinking was that we have established significant credibility with Israel, which is something that no government had done in a long time. We actually burnished that credibility even further when in 2019 we recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and I think even further when we recognized that Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria is not illegal. We, in a sense, recognized all these aspects of the Israeli claims, which we thought we were on the right side of all those issues. We felt that as part of that, we would be in a position to work with Israel to at least identify the maximalist position that Israel could achieve vis-à-vis the Palestinians.

Remember that for 50 years, no Israeli leader, including the ones on the left, had ever identified the geographic parameters with which they’d be willing to live alongside a state of Palestine. Yitzhak Rabin didn’t agree to that, even though he signed Oslo. Ehud Barak didn’t agree to that. These are associated with the left. So we did think that our relationship with Israel would at least enable us to have their trust and to garner from them what they could live with, what actually made sense for Israel, what they could live with.

And we were right, because as a result of all of this, in 2020, the president and the prime minister agreed on at least the contours of a peace plan that for the first time in history had the geographic parameters of two states. Now, it wasn’t the full state for the Palestinians. It had whatever limitations it had on it, but it was way beyond what any other Israeli administration had ever agreed to.

I don’t want to jump too far ahead, but it was the fulcrum that launched the Abraham Accords. So on the one hand, siding with Israel, people said, “You’re giving them too much; you’re giving them too much. They have to give you something back in return.” And my position, and I think others’, was number one, we’re not giving them anything. We’re agreeing with them on certain core issues where we think they’re right, so it’s not like we’re giving them anything. But number two, by doing that, we’re establishing a level of trust that will enable us to move forward in ways that no other American government has ever been able to do. And we were right about that.

I do want to understand that point in more depth when we do get to the Abraham Accords and everything like that. But I do want to get back to this period of time around 2018 or so, it seems as though Abbas makes this speech. The Palestinians are upset about the move to Jerusalem. They’re saying that there’s going to be no more talk, right? In some ways, there was then a decision made to close the Palestinian mission in Washington, D.C., and I want to understand why that decision was made. You were part of that decision. What was your aim there?

We had no choice. I was actually not pushing it. It happened just before the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and I didn’t want to spend any political capital closing the Palestinian mission. That to me was item number 30 on my list, and Jerusalem was number one. Did not want to confuse the two. The problem is that there is a federal statute that says that the secretary of state must certify every year that the Palestinian leadership is not doing a bunch of things, and that’s the predicate for maintaining this mission. Now, one of the things they’re not allowed to do is to urge the prosecution of Israelis at the International Criminal Court. Now, what did Abbas do? He gets up at the United Nations General Assembly, just like a month earlier, the biggest audience in the world, and he urges the prosecution of Israelis at the International Criminal Court. So now a month later, Rex Tillerson is being told, “You’ve got to certify that none of these things are happening,” and Tillerson says, “Look, I don’t want to close the office, but I can’t certify this. It’s demonstrably false.” Once we fail to certify that, the mission closes. So this is the Palestinians—really, this is a problem of their own making. Again, it’s a failure on their part to be accountable to the laws of our country or to whatever other applicable laws there are. They should have realized this. I mean, they know our laws. They know the rules about keeping up on their mission. … That’s how it closed. It was not part of our game plan.

One thing that may have been part of your game plan—I want you to speak to it—is that the aid had been cut back. The U.S. had been through various organizations; USAID and others had been giving, I think, about $200 million in aid a year to the Palestinians. Tell me about why aid was cut back at that point in time.

Well, we had no confidence that the money was being put to any use that benefited the United States. I mean, the money was being—they were paying terrorists. They had a so-called pension system where if somebody died in the commission of a terrorist act, they got a certain amount of money. If somebody went to jail committing an act of terrorism, they got a certain amount of money. Now, if they went to jail for assaulting an Israeli, they got X. If they went to jail for killing an Israeli, they got 4X.

So the pension system was designed specifically, calibrated based upon how much harm they committed. We’re not going to give them money if they have that kind of system, whether our money is specifically going to it or not. … So we cut out the money because it just wasn’t going to any valuable purpose. On top of that, the Palestinians were calling us all names, were refusing to meet with us. I mean, there has to be some consequence, and we weren’t going to—certainly not going to pay for it, pay for that insult.

So fair to say I guess at this point in time that the relationship between President Trump and Mahmoud Abbas was pretty much over?

Yeah. Again, I don’t think there was much of a relationship to start with. I think the relationship between America and the Palestinians was largely between surrogates. It was between—it was Jared; it was Jason, less; less me. And it was Abbas and his people. So I don’t think it rose to the president’s level from that point forward. I think he recognized that the Palestinians were in a dark place and didn’t see a lot of upside in continuing that conversation.

The ambassador Zomlot, who had been the Palestinian ambassador to the U.S. at the time, wrote that the Trump administration was working “to execute the wish list of the Netanyahu-led [Israeli] government” at that point in time. How do you respond to that?

It’s not true. It’s not true at all. Look, let’s just take these things one at a time. The embassy, very much an American-driven initiative. As I said, the president campaigned on it, and we did a lot of work on our own before we did that. We found the place to put the embassy. Obviously, Israel was delighted and supported it, but it’s very much an American initiative. Shutting down the mission, entirely American.

The decision we made with regard to the legality of settlements, we spent over a year on it, doing a lot of legal research, speaking with experts. I worked with Pompeo on this extensively. I think these are all items which Netanyahu clearly supported, but these are all things we came up with on our own, by ourselves, for ourselves, because we thought this was the right policy vis-à-vis Israel.

We would have done this for any prime minister. We did this because of our support for Israel and our agreement with the righteousness of many of their causes and arguments.

Were there concerns at that point in time that violence could worsen in part because the relationship had soured so much?

Look, we certainly checked in. I would check in regularly with the head of the Shin Bet, which is really the internal Israeli security agency. They keep an eye more than anyone on what’s going on internally inside the country, and we didn’t see the American policies as likely to drive violence.

Not having any fuel in Gaza, the Palestinians [Palestinian Authority] cutting off the funding, problems with electricity, problems with the occasional settlement that gets built that would offend people, those were the things that could create, I think, real friction. We never really saw our policies as driving that kind of friction.

Look, at the end of the day, there’s no deal with the Palestinians and the Israelis that doesn’t come with U.S. support and involvement. So while the Palestinians would like to show their displeasure by not meeting with us from time to time—and over time, I need to tell you, those meetings resumed at pretty high levels—the Palestinians know that without America, there is zero chance that there will be any resolution of the conflict that they might like.

So they’re stuck with us. They may not be happy about it. They may not be happy that we side with Israel, but I think they also respect us because we act on principle. We keep our promises. We can be trusted. … So I don’t think anything we did really resulted in any incremental Palestinian violence.

… I want to just jump back in time to basically 2017 or so. Hamas in 2017, it changed its charter and ostensibly softens its stance on Israel, saying it’s willing to acknowledge the ’67 borders. … How is their change of charter viewed by you and the administration?

The actions of Hamas bore no relationship whatsoever to that document, and to this day I’m not convinced it was anything other than a publicity stunt. They shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian populations within Israel. They can’t control the rockets. They could go anywhere, and they have gone everywhere. Throughout the period that I was ambassador, there would be these skirmishes, and the leaders would get up and vow to destroy the Zionist entity, wipe it off the face of the earth. So it didn’t change our view, and it was never actualized as far as I can tell.

Was Hamas viewed by the administration—I mean, there was this policy in Israel at the time; it’s been called “mowing the lawn” or “mowing the grass.” What did that mean to you? What did that mean, and what was the American view on the policy of essentially this problem could be contained, there would be occasional skirmishes, and then Israel would bomb to try to get at some of the military installations? What was the American view of that policy?

Look, I think we were loath to tell the Israelis that their policies were wrong, given the enormous security challenges that they faced both in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria. This was what they thought they needed to do to keep a lid on things. We weren’t encouraging them to have full-out war with anybody.

We didn’t want that to happen. So the only way to manage the conflict without going to war is to go in from time to time and reduce the capacity of the terrorists, which means these kind of fowl-like raids that will identify the most malign actors and arrest them and take away their weapons. I think we all recognized, and I think the Israelis recognized, it’s a Band-Aid.

It’s a Band-Aid with regard to a wound that is not going to heal from this Band-Aid, so it really doesn’t get you very far. And I think we all expected that one day, mowing the lawn is not going to be enough, and there will be more battles, and I think we all lamented that. Nobody had a better idea, was really the problem. The only better idea is what we’re living through now, which is a war, which nobody really wanted, but it presents the opportunity for a different and more permanent outcome than what we’ve had over the last 15 years.

You said there wasn’t explicit American encouragement of it, but was there any discouragement of it as a policy? Was there anything that the United States saw that, thinking it might be counterproductive, seeing that Hamas used this policy as a rallying cry and that was maybe emboldening for Hamas in some way?

Look, if you have the choice of eliminating a physical threat at the price of potentially creating some rallying cry, you’re still going to eliminate the physical threat. There’s a cost to every benefit, and that was the cost. But our view was that Israel should do whatever it can to defend itself, even if that meant creating some resentment. Obviously protecting your citizens from physical harm is the most important thing. Look, if we saw—and we were always looking for a diplomatic breakthrough. I can tell you that there were times when we had some pretty high-level meetings with some pretty unsavory people, just with a view towards trying to find a breakthrough. These were meetings with people that I won’t talk about and I didn’t write about, but to this day, I can’t believe I actually met with these people at these kind of off–the-path places. And we were really looking for a breakthrough, looking for something to demonstrate to the Israelis that Hamas was willing to become a political force rather than a terrorist force. Couldn’t find it. Just could not find it. Never were able to get even close.

So the U.S. government was meeting with Hamas during this period?

No, no, no. Listen, I—no, we weren’t meeting with Hamas, but I don’t want to say who we met with. But I’m just telling you that these are meetings that I certainly would not have supported in any way other than because we were so anxious to find some ray of hope, some way to find some opportunity to move in a more peaceful path, but it wasn’t there.

There was no chance of negotiation.

No, no. …

But I’m curious again, when violence would erupt and the Israeli IDF would shoot on protesters at the border with Gaza, in your role, were you in any ways trying to convince the Israelis to deescalate at any of these points and say, “Look, this may not be the best idea”?

I worked a lot with the Israelis to try to see if there was a less lethal or kinetic approach. I found the Israelis were working on the same thing. It wasn’t like I was trying to convince them to hold back. I remember that there were a lot of reporters that were saying at the time, “Why do you need to use guns? Use water cannons.” I’m no military expert. I would say, “Hey, guys, can you use a water cannon?” They said, “You don’t know what the range of a water cannon is?” I said, “No.” They said, “It’s about 100 feet, not to mention the fact that we’re in one of the driest places in the world. It’s not like we’re flush with water. It’s 100 feet. If we can’t get to one of these guys rushing the fence until he’s within 100 feet, he throws a grenade over the fence, and we’re all dead.” A lot of people thought they knew better about what Israel could do. I actually sat with them. I wanted to understand. I think we all agreed that Israel should kill as few people as possible. The Israelis, again, I never got any pushback from them. I think they felt the same way. But rushing this fence, if it’s not interdicted at the right place, can result in an absolute calamity, again, which we just saw in October.

One other question about that period of time is that the Netanyahu government was imposing these punitive measures on the movement of people and goods to and from Gaza on the basis of it being a security threat. Obviously there was a deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and there’s many, many different causes for that, we know, but I’m just curious whether there were any concerns that you had at that point in time and may have discussed with Prime Minister Netanyahu about this growing humanitarian crisis begetting violence.

Yeah, look, we talked about it. We talked about it a lot. I think that there were a whole number of issues that came into play, one of which was there were people in Gaza who were used to working and getting paid, and the Palestinians cut off the money. So what happened? The Qataris come in with a suitcase full of cash they handed out to the Palestinians there, and that quieted things down a little bit. I think that it’s a ridiculous way to maintain order, but it’s a ridiculous part of the world, right? So that was one of the things.

Look, we had huge issues with products, so-called dual-use products, right? So you say, well, they want to come in with concrete to rebuild the house. So they come in with the concrete, and it’s instead used to build a terror tunnel. Happens literally every day in Gaza. How do you stop that? We talked about some, I think, really interesting long-term projects that maybe we would have focused on in a second term. We talked about creating a port for Gaza off the Mediterranean where there was, let’s say, a half a mile or so between the port and the land and the beach, where everything gets checked at the port, and whatever goes through goes through so that you can sort of identify products that are lethal or dangerous further away from the territory and find a way to get them through. I mean, there are all kinds of theories and ways to try to get humanitarian supplies and get food, medicine, all those kinds of things.

And I think there was a real interest in making that happen. Again, to state the obvious, there’s no Israeli interest in Gaza being more volatile than it needs to be. I mean, it’s going to be volatile because it’s ruled by Hamas. It’s going to be volatile because it’s got closed borders, right? And that obviously is a challenge. But within that universe, to try to make people’s lives as tolerable as possible so that there’s as little violence as possible, yeah, of course Israel wants that. They gave up Gaza in 2005. All they wanted was a quiet border. They wanted nothing. They didn’t want anything else out of Gaza but a quiet border, and that continues to be the desire today.

There’s been a lot being written at the moment about this strategy that Netanyahu had been pursuing that in some ways he wanted a house divided; he wanted to weaken in some ways the Palestinian Authority and allow Hamas to stay in power in Gaza, and he’d actually spoken to Likud colleagues about this, saying, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” What’s the U.S. position on Netanyahu’s strategy there, and is that something that you ever discussed with him? I’m curious if you could bring me into that.

I’ve heard that. I’ve never, never heard him say that. Never had that discussion with him. His view with us was always Hamas is a terrorist organization that should be to the greatest extent possible eradicated, although easier said than done. I think his view was that the PA was better than Hamas, although just a little bit better than Hamas, not a lot better.

So this idea in some ways that there was this strangely symbiotic relationship between extremists on both sides that in some ways, you know, Israel, Netanyahu benefited from an emboldened Hamas and vice versa, what do you make of that?

Look, it’s an interesting conspiracy theory. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I never heard anything. Literally in four years never heard anything along those lines.

… OK, let’s get on to the important business of the Peace to Prosperity Plan. There had been conversations about proposing a plan throughout the early years of the Trump administration. Tell me a little bit about how that plan developed, your role in it, what the president’s—I know he was kind of skeptical at first. Tell me about the genesis of that. Bring me through it.

From the very beginning, Jared was tasked with the role of coming up with a plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The more we worked on it, the more I think we recognized two things. On the one hand, it’s going to be impossible to come up with anything that’s acceptable to both sides. On the other hand, it’s probably a pretty good idea to take this in steps. Let’s see what we can come up with that we think is fair to the Palestinians, but also something that would be acceptable to the Israelis. If we can get something like that, where we can look at it and say, in good conscience, “This is not unfair to the Palestinians; they should really give this some serious thought,” it’s probably worth doing, even if they won’t accept it. That was the thinking.

Essentially we were negotiating with Israel. The Palestinians were not at the table. We were working with Israel to probe and push and cajole and see what they could live with that might be of interest to the Palestinians. That just took a long time. It got delayed more than a year because of the repetitive Israeli elections. We were working on that from probably the first day that I got into office.

Was it in essence, at the end of the day, was it a two-state solution?

The Palestinians didn’t think this was a two-state solution. Oddly enough, I didn’t think it was a two-state solution, because I don’t endorse a two-state solution. What I thought it was was a way of providing the Palestinians as much civilian autonomy and opportunity and prosperity and dignity as, in the aggregate, did not threaten the state of Israel. And I thought that we could refer to that as a state, because I thought that would achieve for the Palestinians nominally something that they wanted. And I care about substance. I don’t care about the nomenclature. But I think, as we tend to think about a state, no, it wasn’t a state, because they lacked control over their own borders. And basically the security was entirely subject to the state of Israel, which I thought was essential. The other thing that we put in there, which Palestinian people should really have embraced, was the Palestinians under our plan wouldn’t get this state or non-state, as you describe it, however you want to characterize it, unless they adopt certain civil rights and protections that would make America proud of having helped create this organization, this state. The way the Palestinians were when we were talking to them, they were highly misogynistic. Homosexuality was illegal, in some cases punishable by death. There was no freedom of religion other than the religion that they chose. So a lot of problems with this Palestinian entity, and we tried to put in requirements for that to change. But depending upon how you look at it, it’s either a two-state solution or it’s a non-state solution. And one thing I would point out—I know you’ve read my book—but if you look at the godfather of the Israeli peace movement, who is Yitzhak Rabin, who gave his life for the cause of peace, when he signed the Oslo Accords and he had to sell it to the Knesset, what he said, in selling it to the Knesset, because they asked him, “Where is this going to end up?,” and he said, “Where it’s going to end up is the Palestinians will have less than a state, and Israel will have a significant presence, permanent, in Judea and Samaria.” That was our plan. …

So are you basically saying that the plan that you had proposed was a better plan for the Palestinians than the one that Rabin had proposed?

I think it was the plan that Rabin had proposed. Rabin didn’t have a real plan. His plan was just, if you read Oslo, it’s very short on details. Our plan fills that in. It creates a very detailed architecture for the Palestinians to live, as we say, in peace and prosperity. Do they have full security control over their borders or over their population? No, because it’s a highly dangerous and volatile world, especially in the Middle East. But as I said, it gave them the maximum amount of dignity, prosperity and human rights that didn’t threaten the state of Israel.

And how did you imagine that this would be a palatable plan to the Palestinians if they had no input, if they weren’t at the table?

Well, we didn’t think it would be well received at first. And we thought one of the most important things would be how this plan is received by other Arab nations and whether from the outside, from the outside in, we could forge some sort of a consensus. And the reaction we received from the outside world, from Saudi Arabia, from Morocco, from the UAE, from Bahrain, from Oman, I think it vastly exceeded even our expectations as to how well it will be received.

So it basically [said]—what I think you’re saying, and help me understand—is that this was going to demonstrate Israel’s willingness to set forth for the first time in history the terms and conditions and boundaries it was willing to live with. Tell me a bit about that.

Well, quantitatively, the Palestinians would have received under this plan territory equal to essentially 100 percent of the West Bank. It wouldn’t be 100 percent of the West Bank. I mean, there was some makeup territory, some swaps that were put in, put together. But essentially, they would have received 100 percent of the territory, more or less, that they were asking for.

On top of that, they would have received huge, huge investment for infrastructure, for health care, for education, for transportation. The major Palestinian cities would all have contiguity, even if they didn’t border each other, because there were Jewish settlements in between. We would create tunnels or bridges that would create contiguity. So you could drive, let’s say, from Hebron to Jenin, from the south to the north, on one road without any checkpoints or seeing any Jewish communities.

So it was a fairly creative proposal that we think would have given to the Palestinians a lot—not everything they wanted, but a lot. And I can tell you, it was also very painful for many, many in the Israeli camp. A lot of Israelis thought this was way too much to give. From Netanyahu’s perspective, he didn’t think it would help him politically, and it really didn’t help him politically. So you kind of see that this was something. It was interesting. I think the best way to put it is to say that the Israeli right accused us of creating a Palestinian state and the Israeli left accused us of destroying a two-state solution.

That gives you a sense of how controversial this issue was and how difficult it is to find consensus.

Set the scene for me, Jan. 28, 2020, the White House announcement of the deal. President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu, tell me about the day. It was obviously an eventful day for various reasons and an important historical moment for us.

Well, it was a difficult day. It was a day that started off really, really beautifully. President Trump introduced the prime minister. He spoke about this breakthrough that we thought we had achieved, this peace plan that the state of Israel could get behind. And then the prime minister spoke about how the president was the first one to offer any kind of solution to the conflict that recognized Israel’s security needs and its other needs. The point that regrettably seems to have been glossed over through all these discussions was that Prime Minister Netanyahu only agreed to this plan based upon our assurances that if Israel agreed to the plan, the territories allocated to Israel in Judea and Samaria, the territories allocated to Israel in the West Bank, would be subject to Israeli sovereignty as soon as Israel declared its sovereignty. The idea was Israel was going to get sovereignty right away, and then in exchange for that, it would keep open and would not try to annex any other portions of Judea and Samaria and would agree for a period of four years to negotiate in good faith this plan with the Palestinians. That was the deal.

Now, after those speeches, Israel proceeded to move forward with sovereignty. Some people call it annexation. I think “annexation” is the wrong word. But they proceeded to move forward with sovereignty, and that was not the understanding of some of us in the administration. It was my understanding, but not all of us had the same view.

I want to understand that, but set the scene a little bit. … Prime Minister Netanyahu speaks, and as I understand it, he starts to kind of freelance. Some saw it as though he was freelancing. And I think the president himself was rather upset about the whole situation. So can you just give me a little color about what happened there?

Look, Netanyahu gave a long speech. I wasn’t particularly upset with the speech, and I didn’t hear the president’s reaction to the speech, but I was told that when they went back behind the curtain that the president was offended by the speech. He thought it was too long. He thought it was too political. He thought it was less about peace and more about Israel’s own internal political ambitions or Netanyahu’s political ambitions. So there was that fallout in the aftermath of the speech. I didn’t hear it; I just heard about it.

Was there a sense—I know not for you, but some in the administration felt, and including, I believe, the president, felt blindsided to some extent. Can you talk about that a bit?

This provision about immediate sovereignty was so carefully orchestrated in advance, I don’t understand how that could be an issue. There was a letter from the president to the prime minister that says very clearly, “If you will agree to negotiate this plan with the Palestinians, hold open their territory for four years, I will support sovereignty over the territories that are earmarked for Israel in this plan.” Not only was that important, but that letter was then cleared by the National Security Agency, national security adviser, and they took that line, they took that paragraph out, and it went back to Israel with the paragraph out. And the Israelis said, “Are you kidding me? That’s the most important line in the whole letter. We have to have that. Without that, we don’t have a deal.” So they put it back in again.

And if you listen to the president’s speech, the president says, “In exchange for Israel doing these things, we will recognize Israeli sovereignty.” I think he used the word—so important. So I don’t know exactly where the misconception is. …

Just to put a finer point on it, though, did the president feel blindsided by the fact that all of a sudden Netanyahu is up there talking about annexation?

Again, I wasn’t there. I don’t think that’s what he was upset about. I think he was upset about the tone of the speech that here he is announcing a peace plan, right, and Netanyahu is saying very, very little about peace and way more about sovereignty and territory. The spirit of the moment was not captured in Netanyahu’s speech.

… Tell me about how that then leads to the Abraham Accords and how the administration was sort of seeing the next stage of this. As you said, it was kind of iterative.

What we’re doing is pursuing a parallel track in the aftermath of Jan. 28 of 2020. There’s the, let’s call it the sovereignty movement within the government, right, led by me, right? I think it’s important for Israel to assert its sovereignty over communities in Judea and Samaria that have been Jewish and Israeli now for more than a generation, and I think that the failure to do that is just creating more and more confusion. It’s not bringing anybody closer to peace. It’s creating expectations that will never be realized. I don’t think there’s any pathway where Israel will ever evacuate any of these communities. So I think that by getting on with it, ripping off the Band-Aid, asserting the sovereignty, I think actually it creates a moment of clarity that will bring us closer to peace. And we’re moving in that direction. And I have the support, some of it reluctant, some of it fulsome, from the government. I have Pompeo very much on board. Jared is very much supportive if it’s done over a period of time where there’s enough time to kind of work this out and to socialize it with the nations in the Gulf.

Then there are others who are absolutely against it—a lot of them in the State Department. But we have that process, and I’m running that process. And then there’s a second process. The second process is having conversations with our friends in the Gulf about what this will mean, about how this will be perceived, about how this will make their own streets potentially more dangerous or less dangerous, or how are we going to handle it and manage it. And so we’re kind of moving on two different vectors. And then somewhere along the line, after a couple of months, as we’re getting closer to pulling the trigger on the sovereignty, and we’re also getting a lot closer to understanding the needs and wants especially of the UAE, the UAE comes out and says, Yousef, the ambassador, Yousef Al Otaiba comes out and says, “Hey, you know what? If you were willing to hold off on this sovereignty declaration, we could get a lot closer with Israel. What do you think?”

So now the vectors have all of a sudden collided, and we have to figure out what’s the best way to manage this thing. Now, even me, right, a huge sovereignty hawk, is of the view that if the United States is able to broker normalization between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, that is a far better outcome for the United States, for Israel and for the world than the sovereignty. Even I recognize that.

So we start thinking, all right, let’s see where that path goes. The negotiations were quick, but I think very, very dynamic. We had to deal with, well, is Israel going to cancel sovereignty? Is it going to put it off the table? Is it on the table? Where does it sit on the table? We needed a thesaurus to try to figure out exactly the right words, but ultimately we settled on the word “suspend,” which was important to me, because “suspend” by definition means it’s temporary. So we agreed to suspend this for about three years so it wouldn’t come back, and there will be time to pursue more diplomatic courses. Then the question is, well, you know, what will the UAE provide?

We were pretty insistent on full normalization with mutual embassies and the exchange of ambassadors. And we got this thing negotiated very quickly as a lesson to future attempts, which I think have not gone as well more recently. We kept it completely secret. Within the entire world, the number of people who knew about this discussion would be five in America, maybe three in the UAE, and maybe three in Israel. That was it.

When we announced it on Aug. 13 of 2020, we really shocked the world. This was one of the few surprises that I think any American government has managed to pull off in decades. I mean, nobody knew about it. That’s how we got it done, because as soon as people knew about it, as was happening now with Saudi Arabia, if you know about it in advance, you have way too much time to take shots at it. So that brought us to the Abraham Accords, this ability to defer sovereignty in exchange for normalization, which has held up really beautifully since then, including through the present day.

… I’d say one thing that we didn’t get to at all was just kind of what you heard of a Palestinian reaction, one to the deal announced at the White House and then later to the Abraham Accords. What are you hearing from the Palestinians’ perspective during this timeframe?

I think the Palestinians were in shock by the Abraham Accords, less so by the Jerusalem decision. I think they were very much in shock. But I think that, to a certain extent, they split into two camps. One camp is, let’s try to find a way to improve our lives here and to move on. The other camp, I think, said, “It looks like there’s nobody left but the Iranians. That’s what we’ve got left.” Unfortunately, the side that went off to Iran is engaging in extremely malign behavior right now. But there is another side. They’re just shouted down. And it’s a very repressive society and a very repressive government, so they’re not able to really emerge. But there are a lot of Palestinians that are seeing the benefits that UAE, Morocco and others are getting from their relationship with Israel. They’re seeing the commerce, the technology, the opportunity, and they definitely want it. They definitely want it. …

Looking back now, Saudi Arabia and others have been saying since Oct. 7 that it was a mistake to try to move to achieve peace without solving the Palestinian problem, that it further fueled anger in Gaza, which only emboldened Hamas. In light of where we are today, what do you make of that? Was there an error here? Do you think that that’s true, that there was a mistake made not to try to make peace?

Look, the only thing relevant about Oct. 7 in terms of Hamas and the PA is that Hamas succeeded in doing something that they’ve been trying to do for 50 years. They didn’t massacre and slaughter Jews on Oct. 7 because they were upset about the Abraham Accords. They would have massacred and slaughtered Jews any day going backwards from Oct. 7 to 1948. They would have done it any time they could have. The problem of Oct. 7, it was a massive failure by Israel and perhaps the United States as well of intelligence and of security apparatus. That was it. They were always going to do it if they could have had the chance. They just got to do it on Oct. 7. It wasn’t the Abraham Accords. It wasn’t the move of the embassy. It wasn’t the Golan Heights. It wasn’t anything else. Hamas has been trying to kill and slaughter Jews for as long as there’s been a Hamas. And unfortunately, on Oct. 7, Israel let its guard down, and they were able to succeed.

… The day of the announcement at the White House. You’d mentioned that you announced a deal in August, I think you’d mentioned, but then there’s the official announcement. … I don’t know whether you were there that day, but can you bring me to Sept. 15, 2020?

Yeah, I was there. It was really one of the greatest days of my life. It was just spectacular to sit on the South Lawn of the White House. It was a beautiful day. Weather was great. We had private meetings before the ceremony with the leaders of the three countries, Israel, Bahrain and UAE. We had that great ceremony on the South Lawn. Afterwards, we all got joined again, about 20, 30 of us for lunch. We really felt that we had accomplished something historic, that we made the world a safer place and a better place, that we had shown that people with very different backgrounds and orientations could come together based upon common objectives, common interests. It was an incredible day. I still think that the achievements … have endured and will endure.

I can tell you, look, the UAE, I think, made a very courageous announcement last week that the Abraham Accords are permanent, that they’re going to endure regardless of how this conflict that we’re experiencing now works itself out. I think the Abraham Accords will continue to expand.

How do you respond to those who say that, in some ways, it kind of goes back to the Saudi question I asked you earlier, but that, again, the Palestinians felt alienated by this, the Abraham Accords; that they were abandoned to some extent and that there could be consequences of losing sight of solving that problem.

The Palestinians have been coddled and over-included, if anything, over the last 50 years. Everybody meets with them, makes proposals to them, wants to be their friend, wants to give them money. … They were offered the sun, the stars, the moon with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat at Camp David.

They’ve been offered lots of other proposals as well. We told them we’re working on a peace plan. We invited them to participate. They said they don’t want to participate. We had a conference in Manama, in Bahrain, called the Peace to Prosperity conference—some of the largest sovereign wealth funds, some of the largest investors in the world. You had the secretary of the treasury there, Steven Mnuchin. You had Stephen Schwarzman there, the head of Blackstone. You had these massive, large, wealthy organizations.

And there was only one item on the agenda: How do we build a more prosperous life for the Palestinians? How do we create the infrastructure and the hospitals and the health care to make the Palestinians on a standalone basis happier, more prosperous and more peaceful? And they boycotted the conference, all right? At that point, you can only try so many times. You can’t be more pro-Palestinian than the Palestinians. And they have disserved their people for as long as I’ve followed this issue.

… The amount of settlers in the West Bank doubled during the course of the Trump administration. Does that not set the course for conflict? If you have all of these settlers that are moving into these areas, is that not a provocation?

I don’t think it’s a provocation because I don’t think that these were ever areas that were going to be dismantled. By the way, there were a couple of settlements that were dismantled, I think at the assistance of the Israeli Supreme Court, but there were times when some settlements were dismantled. But look, our policy with regard to settlements was that there ought to be natural growth, and the growth should occur from the inside out. So if your settlement is a circumference of X and you want to grow because people are getting married and they want to move home to the same neighborhood as their parents, you add another—or you add around the perimeter more, but you’re not kind of taking from the outside and creating these big gaps within settlements just to kind of take less land rather than more. That was essentially the policy. But look, either people are going to live here or they’re not. If they’re going to live here, if they’re going to live in these communities, they have to live like regular people. I mean, people want to move in; families want to grow. You’re entitled to expand.

I’ve been to this area countless times. The vast majority of the land is just open spaces. These settlements are not the impediment to peace. And I believe as a matter of law that the land, as a matter of rights, and I believe as a matter of the Bible, which didn’t drive my views in office but certainly drives them now that I’m not a public figure anymore, as a matter of biblical law, this land is biblical Israel. I mean, these places that we’re talking about are.

This is where Abraham received God’s covenant, where Jacob had his dream of the angels ascending to heaven, where King David built his kingdom, where Joshua brought the Jewish people across the Jordan River. I mean, every biblical story that you’ve ever heard, the odds are it happened in this territory in Judea and Samaria. And I can tell you, as I’ve spoken to many people in the Arab world, because the Arab world is very much a religious world, and I say to them, “Look, what do you think the Jewish people should do? Their entire history is wrapped up in places like Hebron, Jerusalem, Shiloh, Bethel. I’ll show you the stories, and I’ll tell you the events. What do you think?” And they say, “Look, we understand. We understand. You have a Bible. It’s kept the Jewish people together for the past 3,000 years.” We wouldn’t be having this conversation if there wasn’t the Bible. I’m only Jewish today, sitting here talking to you, because the Bible has kept the Jewish people together. And that Bible tells me that this land was given by God. It’s a tiny little piece of land. That little piece of land was given by God to the Jewish people. So I think a lot of people in the Arab world respect that because they respect their own religion. They expect us to respect ours. I don’t think these settlements have anything to do with with peace.

I think that there’s plenty of space for the Palestinians to live in comfort. There’s lots of empty space that could be expanded. And ultimately, I think that Jews and Palestinians are going to have to learn how to live together. This idea of separating us has been tried, and it clearly failed.

On that point, what do you say to those who would contend that your ultimate goal was to use U.S. action to transform the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic into one where any hope of a future two-state outcome would essentially be shattered by this proverbial sledgehammer?

I don’t support a two-state outcome, and I don’t think that anybody who understands the facts and the reality will support a two-state outcome. We will be creating a terror state smack between Israel and Jordan, maybe one of the worst places in the world to create a terror state. The people that live there right now, they do not like the Jewish people. The Palestinians—I mean, there are enough of them. I’m not saying all of them. There are enough Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria that hate Israelis, that given their own devices, will commit the same types of slaughter that we saw on Oct. 7 of 2023. And even if they didn’t feel that way—and believe me, I’ve got lots of Palestinian friends, and I know that many of them don’t feel that way, but there’s enough for there to be some real danger. And if they didn’t feel that way, I can guarantee you that this territory will be taken over by the worst of the worst, whether it’s Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, Al Qaeda, and this will become an existential threat to the Jewish people.

I would also tell you that the GDP per capita of Israel is about $52,000. That’s the GDP, annual GDP per capita. The GDP per capita in Jordan, in Egypt, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Gaza, in the Palestinian Authority, does not exceed $10,000 per capita, and that’s being generous. Many of these places are like $3,000 or $4,000 or $5,000, so the 10% of the GDP per capita is in these places.

Now, if you’re a Palestinian, and you want to have a better life, and you want to succeed, and you want to … why in the world would you not want to be part of Israel, have better relations with Israel, learn from Israel, go to the schools, get the education, get all the opportunities that Israeli Arabs have? The Israeli Arabs are the best-treated and the best-standard-of-living Arabs in the entire Middle East. So this idea that we’re going to keep the Palestinian Arabs away from the Israelis, not only is it not going to work, not only is it going to lead to more friction, but it’s going to be in the worst interest of the Palestinian Arabs.

And when you hear people say that the Israeli state is an apartheid state, that there is a different standard for Jewish Israelis than there is for Arab Israelis, how do you respond to that?

Well, first I would say study apartheid, because if you study apartheid, you’ll see there’s no resemblance whatsoever between South Africa and Israel. Look, in Israel, let’s take away—let’s first talk about Israel … Arabs are voting citizens. They have, I would say, better rights than the Israelis because they’re not required to serve in the army, although some of them do. They get to start their college educations at 18 instead of Israelis [starting] at 21.

You go into the emergency room at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. More likely than not, you’ll be treated by a Palestinian doctor. You go into any pharmacy in Israel, any pharmacy, more likely than not, the owner of the pharmacy is Palestinian, is an Arab. Israel is justifiably proud of the way that Arab Israelis have been absorbed into Israeli society.

Now, you want to talk about the Judea and Samaria. It’s in a state of undetermined status. The Palestinians there don’t want to become Israeli citizens. They’re hostile to the Israeli government. The world is telling Israel that it has no right to be there. What is the right outcome? It’s got to be either a negotiated outcome or Israel has to—you know, my own preference, if you ask me, what would I do?

I would say if I were running the state of Israel, I would say that I would get up, and the first thing I would do is I would say the Israeli government accepts responsibility for the dignity, the prosperity and the health of every single Arab living within territory that we control, whether it’s in Judea, Samaria or elsewhere; that it’s our responsibility. If we control this territory, we have to assume responsibility for you, and we’ll give you the same benefits, the same benefits as Jews living in the same area, save one. Save one, OK? We’re not going to substitute a security disaster for a demographic disaster. There’s only one Jewish state. We’re not going to give you the opportunity to vote us out of existence, OK? We’ll have to figure out some form of governance where you can become permanent residents. You can live there, and knowing that you, your families, your extended progeny will live there forever under the same ability to prosper and have dignity as everybody else, but we’re going to have one Jewish state, and that Jewish state is going to prevail, and you’re not going to vote us out of existence.

That to me is the most humane and it is the most appropriate way to preserve both the Jewish character of Israel and to treat with humanity and dignity the people that live there. And we have a biblical concept for that also. We have a concept of permanent residency in the Bible. The people that Joshua found as he went through the land of Israel, and he found people that were willing to live in peace with the Jewish people, they became permanent residents. I think that is ultimately the best outcome. Again, in a very difficult and complicated way, I would just offer you this analogy.

And just to ask you your own personal reflection on Oct. 7.

I was a mess. I was a wreck. I just could not contain my grief at watching the kind of suffering that was inflicted upon Jewish people, innocent Jewish civilians. Pick your calamity. Pick your atrocity. There were just so many of them. And they were unbearable to watch and to look at and to think that this level of barbarity still existed in the world. For a day or so, I really felt broken by it, and then I got angry. Then I, like everybody else said, “OK, we have to eradicate this evil before it spreads any further.”

The last question is that there’s many folks that say that in some ways, Netanyahu, in his determination from the very beginning, since Oslo basically, to thwart various efforts at peace, that he’s called himself a great defender of Israel, but that there’s been something self-defeating in that. What do you say to the folks that would say that, in some ways, his defending Israel at all costs has actually come back to bite him to some extent?

Yeah, I don’t agree. I don’t think that there was ever an opportunity for real peace between Israel and the Palestinians that he neglected to pursue. Now, you may say that he should have done things that he didn’t do. But in my view, there were never any serious opportunities. Again, I got to know the players pretty well. I’ve spoken to all of them. And I honestly believe that had there been a Palestinian state in place on Oct. 7, Israel might not exist at all today, because I think then the the calamities could have gone from both sides, broken the country in half, and I shudder to think of where Israel would be. So I can’t throw any of this at his doorstep.