Previous governments, he said, struggled only to bring Palestinians to the negotiating table. Waiting for the Palestinians to agree to the negotiations before moving on has given them a veto over the process, said Friedman, which only encouraged them to adopt irrational demands.
“A flood of refugees in Israel? It will never happen, ”he said. “Dividing Jerusalem? This is never going to happen. Israel giving up certain parts of its biblical heart? Never gonna happen. “
He said the White House “has injected an extremely necessary dose of realism into the Palestinian psyche about what is possible and what is not.”
Palestinians disagree.
Husam Zomlot, who headed the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington until its closure, said Friedman’s sense of his achievements is delusional. Far from increasing American influence in the conflict, he said, Friedman reduced it almost to zero, almost destroying hopes for a two-state solution.
“He was the American mafia on our Capitol,” he said, referring to the recent insurrection in Washington. “Same logic, same behavior. This is Friedman. And just as Congress did, the Biden government will have to clear the ground of US-Palestinian relations and the peace process completely. “
Mr. Friedman stated that Trump’s peace plan, by setting requirements for financial transparency, human rights and other standards for Palestinians to gain statehood, was in fact “a gift for the Palestinian people” that would make its “quality” much more bearable life. ”Israel’s heated relations with Arab states, he said,“ would open the Palestinians’ imagination to what it could be ”.
He also insisted that the Trump administration never sought to help Netanyahu’s reelection campaigns – although his recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, to quote a plum widely regarded as a campaign gift, came just two weeks before the first vote.