Amb. David Friedman: How to Thwart Iran and Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] We’re launching a special “American Thought Leaders” series during this post-election transition period in which I will be interviewing topic matter experts and former and potential future Trump administration officials to understand what the incoming American administration’s policies in 2025 may look like—for America, Canada, and the world.

Today, I’m sitting down with David M. Friedman, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel under the Trump administration, one of the main architects of the Abraham Accords, and the author of “One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Ambassador David Friedman, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Ambassador David Friedman:
Thank you, Jan. Great to be with you.

Mr. Jekielek:
You had a pretty consequential term as U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Off the top of my head, you know, there’s something called the Abraham Accords that happened. Of course, the embassy moved to Jerusalem. That was something that I think nobody really expected. What do you think of the new pick for U.S. ambassador to Israel? What do you think he’s going to face?

Ambassador Friedman:
Mike’s a dear friend, really one of my closest friends. I think he’s going to be great. I couldn’t be more excited about his pick. Obviously, he’s coming into a different period in the relationship than when I came in. I mean, when I came in, the relationship was challenged. Israel had a very difficult time during the Obama years. I came in and the goal was to fix that. He’ll have the same general focus, to fix some of the problems with the Biden-Harris administration.

But then, of course, you have the war, which I didn’t have. I didn’t have this October 7th massive trauma to Israel. So he’ll have to work on the rebuilding. He’ll have a more security-oriented focus. But his commitment to Israel is absolutely rock solid, just as strong as mine. But we both view American support for Israel as really essential, both to America’s national interests and to America’s soul. I think he’ll follow much in the way that I did.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is America’s soul that you’re talking about?

Ambassador Friedman:
America has the First Amendment, in which we don’t establish any religion, but America has never been a godless country. In America, you can go to any courthouse in the United States, you’ll see the words in God we trust. We pledge allegiance to one nation under God. The Declaration of Independence, which was a transformative document, says that, you know, the human rights that are enumerated there, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, are endowed by our Creator, right? They come from God. And how do we know what values, what rights God thought should be endowed in every human being from reading the Bible.

People talk loosely about Judeo-Christian values, but they really are at the core of the American founding. And where did those values come from? From where did they emerge? Where are they emitted? Oh, Isaiah tells us that out of Zion goes forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. So, this is not just an ordinary relationship between two countries. This is a relationship between America and the country from which the essential core values that animate and create the American civilization emerged. That’s the soul I’m referring to.

Mr. Jekielek:
What would you say was the biggest single challenge that Ambassador Huckabee is going to face?

Ambassador Friedman:
The Islamic Republic of Iran, that is the essential challenge. All of the bad actors that have attacked Israel recently and even going back years,
they’re all either funded or inspired or motivated or trained or in some cases all for by the Islamic Republic of Iran. So where does Iran go from here? We’ve witnessed in the last six months a real war, like an actual war between Israel and Iran, actual kinetic activity. Israel has done some magnificent things.

But they’ve had 180 ballistic missiles shot at them by Iran, then 300 ballistic missiles. None of them so far have had nuclear warheads. But just imagine, you know, if they did. So these are things that Israel has to now make sure it can prevent. There’s rumors that the Islamic leader just died today. I mean, we’ll find out more information about that. But there’s a lot happening in Iran. It deeply affects Israel and the United States. And I think we’re getting the right administration in place to deal with that.

Mr. Jekielek:
So before we get into your book, One Jewish State, I just want to kind of cover a bit of a lexicon here, if you will, to make sure that we’re all clear on what we’re talking about. For example, you mentioned Judea and Samaria, and so a lot of people might not be familiar with what that is.

Ambassador Friedman:
Judea and Samaria is also referred to as the West Bank. That’s probably the more common phrase. And what it refers to is a swath of territory that ends at the Jordan River. Over the river, you’re now in another country called Jordan. So it ends in the Jordan River, but it’s sort of a lima bean right smack in the middle of Israel. And it is the land that the Palestinians, or some of them, claim as the primary territory for their state. And it is the
land that many in Israel claim should be part of sovereign Israel. And this has been a conflict for 50 years or so since the Six-Day War when it was conquered by Israel.

But I should point out, I think it’s not just a detail, Israel didn’t conquer the West Bank from the Palestinians. Palestinians have never had a state in their entire history. Israel conquered the land from Jordan. No one recognized their entitlement to be there. And in fact, there was much little at the time that enabled Israel to have sovereignty over this land. So Israel got it back. There are about 500,000 Jews living there now, citizens of Israel, a couple of million Palestinian Arabs living there. And this is sort of the territorial dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians, although as I say in the book, the dispute goes far beyond mere territory.

Mr. Jekielek:
People talk about annexation. Tell me about what that means.

Ambassador Friedman:
Well, annexation is a shorthand word for Israel going from where it is today, which is essentially having, you know, control, if you will, military control over Judea and Samaria to having full sovereignty. The sovereignty over Judea and Samaria just like it has sovereignty over places like Tel Aviv and Haifa. I don’t like that word, annexation, and I’ll tell you why. Annexation is when country A takes over country B in a military conquest, but the only entitlement it has to that country is that it conquered it. Its rights derive entirely from the fact of the conquest. Now here, when you talk about the West Bank, right, Israel’s entitlement to it, it goes back 3,000 years.

And it goes back, you know, more recently to when Israel was created and when, you know, the League of Nations established, you know, territorial mandates. And, you know, the simplest way to put it in America had a guy who became the dean of the Yale Law School named Eugene Rostow, who was in charge of advising the United States about all this at the time. And he, his advice was, his conclusion was, Israel has the best legal claim to the West Bank of any of the litigants.

Mr. Jekielek:
We hear a lot about settlements, Israeli settlements in the West Bank, in Judea and Samaria. What is a settlement?

Ambassador Friedman:
People think of it as like a bunch of caravans, you know, with a bunch of guys wearing cowboy hats and horses, you know, kind of fighting off all those who want to, you know, all the indigenous people. You know, it’s not like that. I mean, first of all, Jews are just as indigenous, more so than anyone else. But these have become towns. I think I have the numbers in my book, but there are three or four so-called settlements that have over 100,000 people living there.

Now, these are fully blown cities. There are 20,000 person communities, 40,000 person communities. So people call them settlements because they want to create a temporal air to it, a sense that it’s temporary. This is just a bunch of people. They moved in, they planted their homes there, and they could just easily be uprooted. These are places with banks and movie theaters and restaurants and roads and parks. They’re just as permanent and just as communal as any community anywhere else in Israel.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s go to the bigger picture now. What did the Abraham Accords accomplish? What do they mean?

Ambassador Friedman:
Well, the meaning, I think the breakthrough of the Abraham Accords was the opening of the opportunities for other countries, other Arab Muslim countries, to pursue their own self-interest, to normalize relationships with Israel, without the Palestinians kind of having a veto on that process. So for years and years, the State Department had said, you cannot advance relations between Israel and places like the Emirates or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain or Morocco unless you first solve Palestinian demands. So we proved that wrong. And so that’s sort of the one way of looking at it.

The other way of looking at it, which is I think the more really big picture, is because this is the way the Emirates look at it. I’ve had these conversations with the foreign minister of the Emirates, for example, and I said, what do they mean to you? What he says is the Abraham Accords really is a victory for moderates over extremists. That’s really what it is at the core, right? It’s the decision by people who are moderate people, forward-looking people, people who embrace modernity and science and technology saying, you know what? We can create a much better world for all of us if we stop letting these grievances of the past drive and limit the progress towards the future.

That’s really the Abraham Accords in a nutshell. These countries, because they see Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East, a technological powerhouse, and say, why wouldn’t we want to trade with them, be on the same side with them? We have the same enemies. We all are pro-America. We all want to be, you know, closer to America. So it’s kind of a recognition of these countries that their own self-interests, and they’re all lurching towards modernity, outweighs these ancient grievances.

Mr. Jekielek:
Of course, you’re advocating for a one-state solution. Before we talk about that, what is a two-state solution?

Ambassador Friedman:
A two-state solution is you take the West Bank, you take Judea and Samaria, and I use those phrases interchangeably, And you basically give almost all of it to a Palestinian state of some sort. I mean, you’d have to create the workings for a Palestinian state, and that state would then have sovereignty over the West Bank and ultimately Gaza as well.

Mr. Jekielek:
Well, that’s what I was going to ask, because how does Gaza fit into the picture? Because they seem to be treated quite differently, right?

Ambassador Friedman:
Gaza was the first experiment with the Palestinian state. Because, I mean, they’re not contiguous, right? There’s a big country called Israel in between, right? So you can’t just go from one place to the other. But Gaza was this strip of land, 13, 14 square miles, not a huge strip of land, but a beautiful beachfront. It was all along the Mediterranean Sea, western facing. You get to see the sunset on the Mediterranean. And in 2005, Israel said, you know what? We’re just going to leave. There’s 2 million Palestinians there. There’s only about 10,000 Jews there. We’re just going to get out and let them have it. And let’s hope that they take this and they make the most of it, right?

So what happened? In the first place, they had elections. They elected Hamas, right? So they made a very bad choice in terms of who they elected. They elected a terrorist organization to run them. And then they proceeded to get billions of dollars in foreign aid, both from the United Nations, from America, from the EU, from the Gulf. And what did Hamas do with all this money? You know, they built terror tunnels and weapons of mass destruction. They did absolutely nothing to cultivate the enormous commercial potential you have by having this huge beachfront piece of land.

So that was the experiment. That was the first experiment with a real Palestinian state. And they completely failed. And October 7th was the pinnacle of that failure when they came and attacked Israel and committed these acts of torture and barbarism and rape and kidnapping. So the lesson of Gaza, if you will, is that the Palestinian state experiment failed, right? Now there’s some pressure, a lot of pressure from the world to do it again in the West Bank, okay? And the data point that’s relevant there is when Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza, 80% of the Palestinians living in the West Bank endorsed and celebrated, applauded what Hamas had done.

So the primary thesis of my book, the first thesis of the book, we got to end this discussion of a Palestinian state. It is, it didn’t work in Gaza and it won’t work in the West Bank. And the West Bank strategically is a far more dangerous place for there to be a terror state established. So much more significant religiously. Many many more Jews, 500,000 versus 10,000. And the notion that somehow you’re going to take that territory, make 500,000 Jews leave their homes, and then create a benign state that will live side by side in peace with Israel is an utter fantasy.

Mr. Jekielek:
Maybe just tell me a little bit about what was accomplished during the Trump administration with respect to Israel? We talked a little bit about the Abraham Accords and these peace agreements, but what else happened?

Ambassador Friedman:
The thing that was the most anticipated and probably the most appreciated was moving our embassy to Jerusalem. There was a Jerusalem Embassy Act passed by huge waive the move in six-month intervals because
of an argument of national security. So whether it was under Clinton or under Bush or under Obama, they promised during their campaign that they would move the embassy because it was very popular among American people, but they never did it. And they always used this national security waiver as the way to act.

So we changed that a year into the Trump administration. The president stopped signing waivers and we recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moved the embassy to Jerusalem. We had a ceremony opening the embassy on May 14th of 2018, 70 years to the day of Israel’s independence. I think we had 100 million people watching it live on television. It was such a momentous and popular event. It was just the right thing to do, especially in response to so many of Israel’s enemies simply denying any historical connection between the Jewish people and the city of Jerusalem, which is just, you know, disproven textually, archaeologically, for all kinds of ways. So that was the first thing.

Then, you know, there were other territorial disputes that we dealt with, such as the Golan Heights, which is incredibly strategically important. There’s a dispute between Israel and Syria as to who has sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Israel had declared its sovereignty back in 1981, but the U.S. and other countries didn’t accept it, so we changed that. President Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Then we turned to the West Bank that we were just talking about, and the question was, well, did the Jewish people have the right to live there or not? Because the State Department, back to 1978, had a policy written by a guy named Herbert Hansell that it was illegal for the Jewish people to live anywhere in the West Bank, which by the way, extends as well to the old city of Jerusalem. He said, it’s all illegal. It’s all illegally occupied territory.

That was really a call for Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, to look at that. And he did. And we spent about eight months researching and looking at it. And he came out with what’s been referred to as the Pompeo Doctrine, where he reversed all that and said the Jewish people have the right to live in Judea and Samaria, which is their biblical homeland. So that plus the Abraham Accords is sort of, I would say, the four things that are mostly closely associated with the president’s pro-Israel position throughout his first term.

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you expect that Saudi Arabia might join into something like the Abraham Accords in this during this future administration?

Ambassador Friedman:
I think so. Saudi would have joined if we probably had another six months or so in our first term but I think they will join. I think they have every interest in joining. There’s a lot to be gained from a Saudi normalization with Israel. It’s, I think, a very strong bulwark against, you know, further dangerous activity by Iran. There’s also a lot to begin from Saudi, you know, increasing its ties with the United States. And there’s a lot to begin from Saudi moving closer to, I would say, modernity. I mean, they’re doing a lot now trying to move forward, you know, from a fairly non-modern society. I think all that is good. I think it hopefully leads the Muslim world, because the Saudis are the leaders of the Muslim world, leads the Muslim world, I think, out of the dark ages, which unfortunately so many Muslim regimes have kind of facilitated. So, yes, I think we’re heading in that direction.

Mr. Jekielek:
Something that we’ve heard a lot about is UNRWA. I’ve actually done a number of episodes on the topic. And, you know, we know now that there were some of these UNRWA employees that were, you know, involved in the October 7th activities. And of course, the Trump administration
kind of famously defunded it. Then it was refunded. What should happen with UNRWA?

Ambassador Friedman:
I would just bury it and start again. It’s so deeply flawed. I think that comes not just from UNRWA in Gaza, but the UNRWA establishment all the way back to a couple blocks from where we are now at the UN.

Mr. Jekielek:
I should just mention that this is, for those that aren’t aware, it’s this agency specifically for Palestinian refugees.

Ambassador Friedman:
Right. And I will clarify it even a little further. The UN has an all-purpose refugee organization that tries to settle refugees called the UN High Commission for Refugees [UNHCR]. That’s for all the refugees in the world except for one group, the Palestinians. UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East] is the singular commission for Palestinian refugees. Technically, it would extend to somebody like Gigi Hadid, a supermodel who lives in Beverly Hills, but who came from Palestine before 1948. It’s not just a waste of money, but it does sponsor schools that really inculcate people with deep hatred for Jews.

I can tell you one about a fourth-grade school play. Half the kids dress up as Jews with beards and big noses put on, the worst caricatures of Jews. And then the others dress up as terrorists with machine guns and fatigues. And the guys with the machine guns shoot the Jews. The Jews fall down dead. And then the guys with the guns take a bow. And the parents all applaud. This is a fourth grade play, all under the supervision of UNRWA, so I think it’s irretrievably broken. I don’t know how many UNRWA employees were Hamas terrorists. But it’s not a small number. Just start over from scratch.

Mr. Jekielek:
What do you expect the U.S. will do?

Ambassador Friedman:
Under the Trump administration, they’re going to be very circumspect about any organization that purports to inject money back into the Gaza Strip without getting real assurances that the money is going to go to the right places. We need another country to come in that has some credibility. Again, I’m not sure why anyone wants to jump into this mess. But I would be very skeptical about the idea that America is going to throw money at this without real assurances that it’s going to lead to a better outcome.

Mr. Jekielek:
Without further ado, let’s jump into the one-state solution, or the one Jewish state. Why don’t you kind of lay out the argument for me?

Ambassador Friedman:
You start with the conclusion that we can’t have a Palestinian state. It is an existential risk to Israel. It’s probably an existential risk to Jordan as well. The last thing the world needs is a terror state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The Palestinians have proven themselves ineligible to have a state in which they control their airspace, their borders, their electromagnetic spectrum. They just can’t. It’s too much of a risk to the entire region. Now, we’re in the business of collecting resumes. Who is best equipped to be sovereign? Someone has to be sovereign.

Mr. Jekielek:
Basically you’re saying that the Palestinian people do not have a right of self-determination. Is that what you’re saying here?

Ambassador Friedman:
On a national level, yes, I would say that. I’m not sure why they’re any different from other people. There are lots of people around the world that don’t have their own country, that are living good lives and are content with their environment. And I would also say that the Palestinians have never really expressed a serious desire for national self-determination. That’s different from controlling your own local taxes, your own local zoning, your own local curriculum, assuming it’s not malign. I don’t think anyone would deny any people the right to have local autonomy.

But national self-determination, where they get an army and they get the ability to act potentially against their neighbors, no. Because they’ve shown no capacity to live in peace with their neighbors for a period of many decades. And of course, the low point being on October 7th, 2003. Mahmoud Abbas is supposed to be the better one, the better leader of the bunch, right? He got a phone call from President Trump, after the election. He’s in like the 19th year of a four-year term, right? He was elected for four years and he stayed on for 15 years. He hasn’t called elections. He’s shown a massive capacity for corruption and enrichment of his cronies.

From the perspective of the Palestinians, of which I have a decent perspective, having spent four years in the region and meeting a lot of Palestinian people, a lot of them have no particular confidence in the ability of a Palestinian government to act appropriately, to make their lives better, more prosperous, more freedom, more dignity. So I think you have to look at this not in terms of absolute rights. It’s a question of reality, facts on the ground, and what’s happened in the past. And on this record, I would say the Palestinians do not have a right of national self-determination.

Mr. Jekielek:
Essentially, you’re arguing for Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.

Ambassador Friedman:
Right. I am. But Israel’s sovereignty over the West Bank does not mean the absence of a right of the Palestinians to live there. The West Bank is divided into areas A, B, and C. And areas A and B are entirely Arab.
And area C is mostly Jewish, although Arabs have encroached into it. My view is to get rid of all those fictions. One large territory governed by Israel, where Israel will export to this region the values of democracy and freedom
and opportunity that it has in its own legally recognized country. And the Palestinians who live in this territory will continue to live there, as will their children and their grandchildren. They’ll have the right to be permanent residents in this territory. And their lives will improve dramatically.

This is a very important point because people love to use the, you know, the A word, you know, the apartheid word when they talk about Israel generally. People should study apartheid because apartheid was, you know, efforts by the South African government, the racist South African government to take black people, pull them out of their homes, move them into shanties without running water or electricity, and move them all into these substandard areas. This is the opposite.

This is a plan where the Palestinians who live in the West Bank will live there, will have the legal entitlement to remain there, their children, their grandchildren as well, and their lives will be improved because Israel will then, once it has sovereignty over this area and it owns it, it will have the capacity to then inject better roads and highways and schools and hospitals. So it’s an end to the notion of a Palestinian state, right?

Because obviously, if Israel takes sovereignty over the entirety of the land, that would have been, at least in part, earmarked for a Palestinian state. There can no longer be a Palestinian state. That’s a good thing. That’s a good thing for Israel. It’s a good thing for Jordan. It’s a good thing for the world. It’s a good thing for the world, and it’s a good thing for the Palestinian people as well.

Look, inside of Israel right now, there’s a 20% Arab minority. There’s about four or five elite universities in Israel, maybe better than some of our most elite universities. More than 20% of the students in these elite universities are Arab. Arabs have achieved the pinnacle of law, medicine, commerce, business, academia. Israel has a track record of empowering its minorities and treating them well. That’s why I’m very careful about the words I use for the book, One Jewish State.

There’s 30 or 40 Muslim states around the world, right? There’s Christian states, Buddhist states, Hindu states, okay, we’re just talking about one Jewish state, just one, right? It’s the size of New Jersey. Okay. And my argument is, there ought to be room in this world for one Jewish state on the land as to which the Jewish people have the greatest historical entitlement than any people anywhere in the world. If Israel is going to absorb this territory, you’re under risk that Palestinians are going to elect a non-Jewish regime for the one Jewish state.

So we have to find a way to thread this needle. And I believe it’s threadable. There’s no government in the world that hasn’t created some negotiated regime around the goals that the government sought to achieve. So for example, when America was formed, there was a concern about just having a House of Representatives, which is the most populist house, the most populist body of our branches of government because it’s picked directly by people in every single congressional district.

So they created a Senate, right? What does a Senate mean? Senate means that if I live in Montana, right, where I am, you know, one one-thousandth of the population of the United States, I still get to pick one-fiftieth of the United States Senate. Is that a democracy? These are the various, you know, interests that came together to create our country, right? It’s not a pure democracy.

So we can come up with 10 different ways to thread this needle. What we can’t do is create a governance mechanism that jeopardizes the one Jewish state. Short of that, the Palestinians would have autonomy on civilian matters. I think that would, frankly, give people a lot of pride as to how the Palestinians were able to run their lives.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re suggesting they wouldn’t have voting rights. Is that right?

Ambassador Friedman:
Not on a national level. Arabs in Israel have that right. Citizens of Israel have that right. Citizens of Israel have that right. I had one example. I pointed out the fact that in America and Puerto Rico, they also don’t vote. In a national election, America has full sovereignty over Puerto Rico, even though the citizens of Puerto Rico don’t vote. There are other ways.

Mr. Jekielek:
But there’s a lot of debate about that. In fact, I think they want to vote, right?

Ambassador Friedman:
There’s certainly debate. And I have no doubt that this book will spawn lots of debate as well. I hope it does. The governance mechanism, I mean, you could write three books on the best way to create the governance of the West Bank, as between the Jews who live there, the Palestinians who live there, and the broader state of Israel. It’s complicated. You get 50 lawyers to work on it. I’m not looking to solve that issue today.

I’m looking to have kind of a recognition that the best outcome here is one Jewish state with Israeli sovereignty, Israel taking responsibility for every single human being within its control and its borders, and then working out some form of governance, as other countries have done in the past, that threads the needle between the various considerations that animate the state of Israel.

Mr. Jekielek:
This isn’t necessarily such a new idea. Caroline Glick wrote a book about it. There are people advocating for it. But you don’t hear very much about it on this side of the pond. Why is that?

Ambassador Friedman:
There are a couple of reasons. First of all, there’s only so much appetite people have to really deal with a problem that’s been around forever. For everybody’s collective memory, it’s always been a problem, and I think people might productively spend their time elsewhere. The other thing is the two-state solution has become, if you will, certainly it’s the mother’s milk of the Democratic Party and probably other than Trump, the mother’s milk of the Republican Party.

Somehow people kind of got this idea back from the early 90s that this was the idea. You put the Jews over here, you put the Palestinians over there, they live equal measures of whatever you think is important for autonomy and dignity. They live side by side with whatever is important for autonomy and dignity. They live side by side and then we’d have peace and kumbaya. It’s just a fantasy. It’s the lazy man’s approach to the Middle East.
Because you just say, yee, why don’t we just split? They’re having a dispute on land. Just split it up. Draw a line. Split it up. Everybody gets what they get. And then it’s not what the conflict is about. Palestinians do not want to live peacefully in a state side by side with Israel.

The Palestinian movement, from the day it was created, is a movement to destroy the state of Israel. It’s not a two-state solution. It’s really their one-state solution. When you hear everybody yelling on college campuses, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, that is the Palestinian goal. From the Jordan River to the sea, which means extinguish the state of Israel, replace it with Palestine.

I think that people don’t want to confront that unpleasant reality because once you confront it and you’ve got to deal with it, it makes it much harder. You lose your convenient split-the-baby argument. Nobody has managed to construct a two-state solution that won’t be an existential threat to the state of Israel.

Mr. Jekielek:
How does Gaza then fit into a one-state solution?

Ambassador Friedman:
I’m not arrogant enough to start talking about the future of Gaza long term. You can talk about that in the West Bank, because the West Bank is relatively stable. There are security issues there, for sure. But it hasn’t gone through the kind of a war that we saw in Gaza. So Gaza doesn’t have a long term solution until it first has a short term solution, right?

Until you start talking about, are people going to live there? Are people going to be absorbed elsewhere? Is this going to get rebuilt? How is it going to get rebuilt? Who’s going to pay for it? Who’s going to watch it? To me, it’s just a waste of time to talk about, you know, long-term. But what I do say, look, if the one Jewish state template is implemented and it works, it could certainly be exported into Gaza as well, probably with some success.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s a movement that has developed, perhaps since you published the book, called Israel365 . Tell me a little bit about what you know about that.

Ambassador Friedman:
This is a movement that I think believes strongly in the notion of a single state, of a one state solution. I think it’s born of two primary focuses. One is national security. Like everyone else, they recognize that Israel won’t be safe unless it has sovereignty and has complete control over this territory. Otherwise, it’s just going to be a continuously painful process of terror attack after terror attack. The other motivating factor is deeply religious. Generally speaking, these are people who read the Bible.

I would point out that a lot of people read the Bible. It sells about 2000 copies an hour. I wish my book sold like 10% of what the Bible sells. About 20 million people a year buy a new Bible in America. The Bible is pretty clear on this issue. God made a covenant with Abraham and then Isaac and then Jacob, that he would give this land, this land that the Palestinians are fighting for, to the Jewish people. And then, you know, you’ve got prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel about the return of the Jewish people to this land.

And a lot of people believe deeply in it, believe that ought to be the way to, we ought to be trying to fulfill God’s will, especially when fulfilling God’s will, in this case, as I argue in my book, brings the best outcome for every single human being in the area, Jew, Palestinian, Christian, Muslim alike. That’s the movement. They claim to be inspired by my book, and I’m happy that I’ve managed to inspire someone.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is actually one of these crux issues. There are people that would say they also have a religious claim to the land, and that’s the reason they’re fighting so vehemently to have it.

Ambassador Friedman:
I’d like to know what that is. I suppose that someone could say they have a religious claim to anything because how people observe their faith is pretty subjective and personal. But if we’re talking about a religious claim to the land based upon time-honored ancient texts, there’s no argument that there is. Look, the first temple was built 3,000 years ago. It lasted about 500 years, was destroyed by the Babylonians, and rebuilt again. It lasted another 500 years, and was destroyed by the Romans. That’s about year one, right? Or the year 70. That’s when Jesus came along.

Jesus would visit the temples and Christianity was born in those temples. The mosque, that famous gold dome that we tend to associate with Jerusalem, it’s a beautiful domed building. It wasn’t built for another 600 years. And there’s not a single mention in the Quran of Jerusalem, let alone any of the other places. And I think the Quran does recognize the divinity of the Jewish and Christian prophets, Moses, Jesus, Joshua.

So somewhere along the line, I think the Islamic faith took a wrong turn. And again, I don’t mean to criticize the faith, and I don’t mean to criticize the people. I have many friends who are of the Islamic faith. But the historical claim to Israel, I think many Islamic scholars reject that. And somehow it’s become much more of an argument that has political connotations rather than religious connotations.

Mr. Jekielek:
One thing I didn’t ask you about, you’re obviously an unabashed Zionist, right? This is a word I think a lot of people, frankly, have a lot of different definitions for. At least that’s been my experience. So when you say you’re a Zionist, what do you mean?

Ambassador Friedman:
Zion is another word for Jerusalem. A Zionist is someone who believes strongly in the legal right, the moral right, the religious rights of the Jewish people to live as a free and independent sovereign nation within the land of Israel. And that land, by the way, I believe extends to the West Bank. And I think there’s all kinds of adjectives that precede Zionism for different types of people. Some people call themselves religious Zionists, some people call themselves political Zionists. I’m all of them.

I’m just a Zionist from all perspectives, but the Torah speaks very clearly to how the Jews, if they follow God’s ways, will flourish in the land of Israel, and if they don’t, they’ll be evicted. And the prophecies of the return are very meaningful to me. But also, if you want, on another level, if you’re sitting around today and you’re watching anti-Semitism all around the world, you watch what happened in the Netherlands a week ago, literally a pogrom against Jewish people coming out of a soccer stadium, right?

If you want to use the words, never again, to me the words never again have no meaning outside of the state of Israel. When these kids were getting beaten up in the Netherlands, what did Israel do? They sent two planes to Amsterdam to pick them up and bring them home. Nobody else did that.

So you can look at it from any number of different ways. I look at it from all those ways, whether it’s faith, whether it’s national security, or whether it’s religious freedom. This little place the size of New Jersey, has to be the one and only Jewish state for eternity. And I’ll spend the rest of the days that God gives me fighting for that principle.

Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned that the biggest challenge for the U.S., at least in the region, is Iran. Yep. Is there going to be an escalated war with Iran? What do you expect will happen? And what does the Trump administration
really have to do?

Ambassador Friedman:
We’re at a place we’ve never been before, right? We’ve never seen action between Israel and Iran. Now, if you look at those two real significant episodes, where the Iranians shot probably 500 ballistic missiles in total, they really achieved almost nothing. And Israel, when it fought back, it took out their air defense systems. It was able to show that it can hit Iran anywhere, anytime, anyplace. And of course, as we’re finding out now, more recently, they were able to actually destroy one of their major nuclear research facilities.

So I think Israel’s got Iran on the run. OK, America is now coming in and they can do something very simple, which is start enforcing sanctions against Iran. I mean, Iran doubled its GDP from the end of the Trump administration to now. If you noticed, when Trump got elected, the Iranian currency dropped precipitously to the lowest in history. So maybe America never has to fire a shot.

Maybe America, with the combination of enforcing massive sanctions that bankrupt Iran, and with the recognition that Israel can hit Iran anytime, anywhere, it’ll probably do so again with American support. And if you look at how the currency has already dropped to nothing, and if you see the supreme leader who may be dead or may be about to become dead, there could be a lot of dynamic, it could be a very dynamic activity over the next few months. I’m optimistic that without a war, it brings Iran away from its nuclear activity. But I also believe that if they don’t, if they continue to pursue a nuclear bomb, I have no doubt that America together with Israel will be partners in whatever it takes to stop that activity.

Mr. Jekielek:
Can you clarify your comments about the Supreme Leader?

Ambassador Friedman:
If you go on social media today there was a report that he died. He has a very advanced stage of cancer. He’s an old man. I don’t know if you saw the movie Princess Bride but he’s either dead or mostly dead and I’m sure that that will have significant connotations for the region. I mean, what are the implications of that, really?

The Iranian people are really not with the Supreme Leader. They’re really not Islamic fundamentalist fanatics. They’ve never been. And they’ve been taken over for the last 50 years by this fanatical regime that has imposed morality police upon the people and a way of life that they don’t really support.

But the Iranians are very well educated and would love, I think, to go back. They’d love to embrace modernity. There’s a whole world out there that they’re not participating in, of science, technology, culture, that they’re not part of. They have risen up in the past, and they’ve been shot down with brutal responses by the regime.

The question is, if the supreme ruler dies, will that be an opening? Will that create a window? That plus the Trump administration coming in, which everybody understands, that’s a whole different set of rules for Iran. Will that be a catalyst for the type of regime change, which I know many of the Iranians really want?

And if that happens, will America support them? And how will that play itself out? The answer is, I don’t know. But we’re hitting probably an inflection point that we haven’t seen in the last five or ten years or maybe longer.

Mr. Jekielek:
Often it’s said that these sort of crippling sanctions, like the level that you’re describing or that once, you know, that haven’t applied to different countries in the past, that they actually impact the people a lot more than the regime.
You know, is it possible that we won’t be so happy with America with such sanctions?

Ambassador Friedman:
You know, there were crippling sanctions under the Trump administration And we didn’t sense that. We didn’t sense that there was hostility between the Iranian people. They desperately want to throw off the yoke of this regime. But it’s very hard, you know, when you’re a civilian and you’re trying to throw off military oppression—they’ve got the guns and you don’t. It’s very difficult. So the question is, how will all these factors come together? I don’t know. As I said, it will be a very significant time over the next year.

Mr. Jekielek:
On college campuses around the U.S., U.K., and Canada, there’s a significant antipathy towards Israel, and even Jews at large, as we were discussing earlier. And it isn’t just from the Left. It’s from the Right as well in some cases, and it seems like that has been increasing even. That’s just my bird’s eye view here. Do you think that would influence a Trump administration perhaps?

Ambassador Friedman:
America is still overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, both in absolute terms and relative to its fight with Hamas and Hezbollah. I think most Americans understand who’s right and who’s wrong. What’s happening on college campuses, it requires constant fuel. These kids on college campuses are not well informed about the circumstances at all. They’re all being, I think, organized by a common, largely anti-American influence, whether it’s Soros or the Rockefeller Foundation. You can tell because there’s really no central leadership among the students.

When the students get up and give speeches, they hold up an iPhone and they read from a speech that’s been emailed to them by headquarters somewhere. But it’s not organic. They’re being shown pictures of, you know, pictures that would cause any human being to recoil, pictures of dead babies. Some of them may be babies who unfortunately died in this conflict. Some of them were from the Syrian civil war that we’ve seen. They’re playing on the emotions of these students.

But what’s interesting about the student uprising is in the spring semester last year, they had a list of demands. The first demand was Palestine from the river to the sea. Now the demand has changed a little bit. That’s like number four. Now they want to end the American colonial project, whatever that means. The people who were getting behind it, you know, they’re smart. They’ve taken the least informed, you know, the most impressionable people they can find. You can’t get tenure on an American college campus if you’re pro-Israel. It’s just impossible. They got a lot of support from academia.

But I just don’t think it’s real, because I just think these kids, you know, today they’re protesting Palestine. Tomorrow they’re protesting Palestine tomorrow, they’re going to find some other grievance that they’re going to talk about. They’ll find something else. And then they’re going to try to find a job, and then they’re going to realize that somebody Googled them and saw that they did all these things and they can’t get a job. I’m shocked at how poorly informed people are from seemingly good schools.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of the things you hear talked about very often, actually, is just this concept of aid to Israel. And that’s actually not just from people basically criticizing the idea that America sends all this aid to Israel. There’s actually Zionists like Liel Leibovitz in Tablet Magazine arguing against U.S. aid to Israel. So maybe we could kind of unpack that for me a little bit, what your thoughts are about it.

Ambassador Friedman:
It’s really a tiny amount of money in the context of the overall American foreign aid budget. Even during the period of the war, where Israel really has had specific needs. It’s a fraction of what is sent over to Ukraine. But more importantly, there is a reciprocal benefit here. First of all, Israel is buying almost all the weapons that it gets. It’s not getting aid. It’s getting military funding, right? It’s only used for military equipment. I don’t know, almost all of it is being purchased in the United States. So it’s obviously having a commercially beneficial impact.

But more important than that, the relationship between Israel and the United States is far more reciprocal, far more of a partnership than any nation perhaps other than the UK. You got to see the Intel in a room together. I’ve been there. I spent four years working on the relationship between the intelligence communities of both countries, the military of both countries.

America will make an F-35, which is an incredibly complicated aircraft, but they don’t fly it in combat. Thank God they don’t have the need to fly it in combat. Israel has these F-35s. They fly it in combat. They change the avionics. They change the helmet configuration. They change, they make it better. All that technology that Israel does, they send it back to America.

So these are not countries at arm’s length. These are countries that are fighting together. And I’ll tell you this, and this is 100 percent, I wish I could give you more details, but I can’t because, you know, these are not public facts. But I will guarantee you that there are Americans today in the United States who are safe only because of the intelligence sharing and cooperation by Israel towards the United States. So I wouldn’t compare this to any, you know, people like to say, why are you spending money on other countries? It’s an incredibly important investment as to which America gets an excellent return.

Mr. Jekielek:
What about the Zionists that think that age should end?

Ambassador Friedman:
Look, it’s a very nice idea that Israel should be fully independent of any country. It’s not real. It’s not realistic right now. I mean, Israel is fighting an existential battle, and it needs what it needs. Could Israel wean itself off over a period of 10 to 20 years? Sure. I would be in favor of that. I’m not looking for Israel to be in a position where it’s constantly needing money from America, although I think America gets its money’s worth. But Israel is not in that position today.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have been having conversations with your friend, soon to be Ambassador Huckabee. What’s the top advice you’ve given him?

Ambassador Friedman:
I don’t think he’ll be making policy. I think that will probably come from Washington. If he’s lucky enough to get the runway that I got from President Trump, maybe he will have the opportunity to really participate and drive a lot of policy. But I don’t know. That’s going to be the relationship between him and the president.

But I think that, you know, what I would tell him, and I’ve told this to my successors under the Biden administration, the most important thing to do, it may sound trite, every morning, find out where there are soldiers recovering from their wounds. Find out where there are families grieving for lost children, the seven-day mourning period. Find out where there are hostages, families that are, you know, that are suffering, and just spend a couple hours every single day, give them a hug, and tell them that the United States is praying for them. I did that a lot. I can’t tell you how much the Israelis appreciate the idea that an ambassador representing the President of the United States cares about their welfare and understands their trauma. That’s more important than anything else.

Mr. Jekielek:
Ambassador David Friedman, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ambassador Friedman:
It’s been a great conversation. Thank you, Jan.