‘I Have No Idea How This Ends. I’ve Never Seen It So Broken.’

It’s been just over 100 days since Hamas’s attack on Israel, and the costs of the war are staggering. In polling from late fall, 64 percent of Gazans reported that a family member had been killed or injured. Nearly two million Gazans — almost the entire population — have been displaced from their homes, and analysis of satellite imagery reveals that about half the buildings in the Gaza Strip have probably been destroyed or damaged. Israel believes that more than 100 hostages are being held captive in Gaza, and polling reveals that Hamas has gained popularity among Palestinians while support for Israel has plummeted around the world. When this war ends, will Israel really be safer? Who will govern Gaza? What will be left of Gaza? Thomas L. Friedman is a New York Times Opinion columnist and the author of “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” among other books. He has covered the Middle East for decades and won a Pulitzer for his reporting from Israel. And so I wanted to ask him: What does he think of where Israel is now, and what does he imagine comes next? Mentioned: Columnist Assistant application Thomas L. Friedman’s recent columns “‘Joe Biden May Be the Last Pro-Israel Democratic’” by Thomas L. Friedman Book Recommendations: The Little Drummer Girl by John Le Carré The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson I’m Your Man by Sylvie Simmons Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  So before we begin today, a bit of housekeeping. We are hiring a column assistant for me and Tracy McMillan-Cottam, who's going to do fact checking, research, clerical work. It's a great entry level job at the Times, and you can find it by going to nyco.com/careers, or we will have a link to it in the show notes. So it has been a bit more than 100 days since October 7th, a bit more than 100 days since Hamas attacked Israel. It has been almost 90 days since Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza. Since then, the Gaza Ministry of Health says more than 24,000 Gazans have died, more than 60,000 have been injured, about 10,000 of the dead are under age 18.

• 1:08Ezra Klein?

  I know some object to using numbers from the Gaza Ministry of Health. They say, well, that's Hamas. I think that's complicated, and I think those numbers have probably been viewed to be reasonable. But here's, if you don't trust them, another way of thinking about it. There was a recent poll, independent, that asked Gazans if any member of their family had been killed or injured since the attacks, and 64% said yes, they had. 64% of Gazans in this poll said a member of their family had been killed or injured. We know nearly 2 million Gazans have been displaced from their homes. That's in a population that is only a bit above 2 million in total. And for many, there are no homes to go back to. An analysis of satellite imagery by two researchers estimated that about half of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged.

• 1:53Ezra Klein?

  A Washington Post analysis separately concluded, quote, "The evidence shows that Israel has carried out its war in Gaza at a pace and level of devastation that likely exceeds any recent conflict." And to what end? Is Hamas gone? Is Israel safer? Israel believes over 100 hostages still remain in Gaza. No military expert I know of believes Hamas to be destroyed or on the verge of destruction. Polling shows Hamas is more popular in Gaza and the West Bank than it was before the attack. The Palestinian Authority, the more moderate Palestinian governance faction that controls the West Bank, has seen what support it had collapse. There is no plan anywhere that anyone knows of for the so-called day after Gaza, no sense

• 2:34Ezra Klein?

  of who will govern it or how, only that Israel will maintain control for who knows how long and at who knows what cost. And the cost in how Israel is seen around the world has been massive. Morning Consult polled 43 countries and found favorability towards Israel had dropped in 42 of them. The average drop was almost 20 points, and in China, in South Africa, in Brazil, Israel's gone from being seen positively to being seen negatively. And South Africa has brought charges of genocide against Israel at the UN. And then, of course, there are all the other threats that linger. The threat that this war could expand into something much bigger in the region now or later, as others see Israel's weakness and the strain between it and other players and

• 3:19Ezra Klein?

  countries and allies as an opportunity. In my first commentary after Hamas's attacks, I said, and I was only one of many who said this, that Hamas knew that to attack inside Israel at the scale it did, with the barbarity it did, would elicit an overwhelming military response. Absolute destruction would rain down on Gaza. And so it was necessary to ask then, why would they want that? What would it mean if Israel gave them what they seem to want? What would it mean if Israel didn't give them what they seem to want? But Israel gave them what they seem to want. And so I think it is time now to return to those early questions in light of what we now know. And I wanted to do so with a colleague who knows the region much better than I do, who

• 4:03Ezra Klein?

  has far more authority among policymakers there than almost anyone else, and who has been a consistent and clear voice for restraint here, a wise voice, I think. Tom Friedman is the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem, which won the National Book Award in 1989. He's won three Pulitzers, including one for his reporting from Israel. And so I wanted to understand, given all he's seen and everybody he knows, how the war and the region look to him now. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 4:37Ezra Klein?

  Tom Friedman, welcome to the show.

• 4:39Thomas L. Friedman?

  Great to be with you, Ezra.

• 4:40Ezra Klein?

  Let's begin here. What has life in Gaza become?

• 4:44Thomas L. Friedman?

  Life in Gaza has become hobbysian, nasty, brutish and short. For 85% of the population has been dislocated. Many of them have lost their homes entirely. And we're talking about a relatively young population. So when 2,000-pound bombs, dumb bombs land there, it kills inordinate a large number of children. It has been hellish because Israel is fighting an enemy that has deliberately created an underground network that is almost incomprehensible in its scope to fight Israel. That means the only way you can get at this enemy is basically by going through the homes and buildings and offices on top of that ground.

• 5:26Thomas L. Friedman?

  And Israel's done that in a way that I think a lot of experts would say has been way too casual about civilian losses. If you compare it to other such situations like Raqqa and Mosul, where we were fighting ISIS. All of that said, one must never lose sight of the fact that Hamas started this war knowing from much experience what the Israeli response would do. And it provided not one underground shelter for a single civilian in Gaza. Early on, a Hamas spokesman said, "That's not our job. The tunnels are for Hamas. It's the UN's job to protect the civilians."

• 6:10Ezra Klein?

  There's this poll that sits in my gut that found 64% of Gazans said a member of their family had been killed or injured during the current war in Gaza. And one thing inside of that is when you ask, what does Hamas run on? It runs on people. And it runs on people's desire for revenge, people's desire, Palestinians' desire to destroy Israel. And probably on an individual level, to regain dignity and agency and autonomy for themselves.

• 6:47Ezra Klein?

  I wonder, when I read that, not just about the amount of grief there, but about what that grief can be turned into.

• 6:53Thomas L. Friedman?

  I think you're asking a really important question. The consequences of this war on both sides will be vast. And I don't know what the right proportionality is for killing civilians inadvertently as part of pursuing this kind of war. But I feel in my own gut, and I certainly believe the world believes Israel's well past that proportionality. And we shouldn't be at the stage we're at right now, Israel, 100 days into this war. And you can't tell me, and I can't tell you, what Israel's political objective is for the morning after.

• 7:38Thomas L. Friedman?

  Are we heading for a situation where 7 million Jews are going to permanently control 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza? If that's where we're going, that's a disaster. Because I believe that the attack on October 7th, as awful as it was, was not existential. It was not an existential threat to the state of Israel. It was awful. I believe Israel permanently stuck in Gaza. Oh, that's an existential threat in the world we're living in. That is something that could really begin to unravel the state because I think the pressure on the West Bank then would grow. We already see that growing every day. And the pressure from the neighborhood would grow

• 8:24Thomas L. Friedman?

  because it would legitimize what the Houthis are doing, what Hezbollah is doing, what Turkey is doing in ways that I think would be very dangerous for Israel.

• 8:35Ezra Klein?

  One thing that you've been worried about and have written quite a bit about is the possibility this could blow up into a wider war. And we keep seeing small things, rockets from Hezbollah, that kind of thing. But tell me what you fear there and what would be the signs that it might be happening?

• 8:50Thomas L. Friedman?

  Israel today faces a strategic dilemma that no other country faces in the world. It is fighting non-state actors on four different fronts. Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and Islamic militias, Shiite militias in Iraq, who've actually launched stuff at Israel too. This is worth a show of its own. How we've entered a world where smaller and smaller units now can amass greater and greater power. We now have four of them going on around Israel. The Houthis, who are living in the middle of a completely failed state that may be the first country in the world to run out of water.

• 9:34Thomas L. Friedman?

  These are basically tribesmen that are firing cruise missiles at international ships that are forcing them now to no longer go through the Suez Canal but around the Cape of Good Hope and are raising insurance rates for shipping all over the world. The Houthis actually are contributing to inflation all over the world. This small group of tribesmen in Yemen, they are, in a way, super empowered. Israel's surrounded by four of them. So what I fear is that a Hezbollah-Israel war, Israel would be like none other. They fought a war in 2006, but at the time Hezbollah only had dumb rockets.

• 10:15Thomas L. Friedman?

  So if you had to shoot 50 rockets at a target and maybe one or two would hit and they were vulnerable to Iron Dome. But much more serious, Hezbollah now has hundreds, maybe thousands, of precision rockets, where you fire one and it lands within a five or 10 or 15 meter radius of whatever the target is. If it start firing those at every military airbase in northern Israel, at Israel's Defense Ministry, at Lut Airport, at Haifa Port, God forbid at the Dimona Nuclear Actor, it could cripple the Israeli economy. Now, Israel in response would cripple Lebanon, as if it already isn't crippled enough, but

• 10:57Thomas L. Friedman?

  we're talking about something that could devastate the Israeli economy and possibly then lead to an Iran-Israel rocket war. And then you're talking about something that is a fundamental threat to Israel that would certainly draw the United States in. Russia and Iran have become very close. Iran's now providing drones for Russia in Ukraine and you could be into a real world war.

• 11:22Ezra Klein?

  So I found it really hard to stop thinking about the counterfactuals here, about the different kinds of world we could be inhabiting right now. And one counterfactual that has sat in my head is one you offered in a column very early on. This was in late October, and you talked about how India chose to respond to the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. So could you talk about that? India's prime minister at the time, Manmohan Singh, what did he do?

• 11:49Thomas L. Friedman?

  He did nothing. He basically decided that if he was going to retaliate against Pakistan for the attack in Mumbai that was perpetrated by Pakistani Islamist group, really quite similar to Hamas, that what it would do would reduce the impact. And people would just then treat the whole thing as another tit for tat between Pakistan and India and actually lose sight of how vile and how grave the incident was. And to refresh my memory, Ezra, I went back and reread specifically about why they chose not to retaliate. And Ezra, everything warned about in the India context has played out between Israel and Hamas.

• 12:34Ezra Klein?

  From where we're sitting now, would Israel have been better off if it had done as politically unthinkable as it was then, nothing? That it had contained what it did to more covert operations, that in the public eye, at least, it did not engage in a full-out reprisal, leveling of Gaza, ground invasion?

• 13:01Thomas L. Friedman?

  You know, several people have asked me that, and I've asked myself that question. And everything I wrote at the time, Ezra, was written with just incredible humility and awareness that there are huge trade-offs here. That when a country like Israel gets this vile of an attack, that was really designed to trigger the kind of massive response that Hamas wanted. Imagine America on 9/11 lost 20 million people. So that every American knew someone or knew someone who knew someone who died on 9/11. The act of self-restraint would have been enormous. And I realize that.

• 13:42Thomas L. Friedman?

  I was very aware that the debate in Israel was completely one-dimensional. And a little bit of what I was trying to do is just a little kind of red team, you know, Team B. I don't know if this is right, but have you thought of this? Because what if you just said, "We're going to make this operation Rescue Grandma"? That you focused entirely on getting back the hostages first and foremost, and on what Hamas did, and elevated to the world, enabled the world to understand what an unprecedented attack this was by Hamas on not the occupied territory, but pre-67 Israel, the most liberal part of Israel, the border Kibbutzim,

• 14:24Thomas L. Friedman?

  where they abducted infants and they abducted grandparents. They killed parents in front of their children, children in front of their parents, engaged in awful sexual predation. And had you done that, you actually would have gone a long way to delegitimizing Hamas. I think there would have been a real revulsion by many Palestinians, by many Arabs. And I think it could have put Hamas in a position where it had to give back those hostages. And even if it was in trade for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, Hamas would have been branded as ISIS. And that would have been, for Hamas, a very dangerous thing. And the reason I said that...

• 15:08Thomas L. Friedman?

  Ezra, at the time, because there were two little stories I noticed. Within thirty-six hours of the attack, one was a Hamas official who came out from some underground, a spokesman, and said, "We only attack soldiers." And the other was that they released a picture of Hamas giving water to a young hostage, I believe. And that told me Hamas knew they were in trouble. Whether it was exactly designed to this or it got completely out of control, whatever happened, they knew that they were in trouble. And unfortunately, Israel kind of took them off the hook. It may not have been a conscious decision by Sinwar, the Hamas leader, but I believe he certainly understood the benefits of it,

• 15:53Thomas L. Friedman?

  that he has been trading the lives of Gazan civilians for one of the greatest public relation coups by any Palestinian against any Israeli government, getting Israel delegitimized on the world stage and hauled before the International Court of Justice. I think it's a shameful trade-off, but I think we'd be very naive not to think that he isn't enjoying that.

• 16:18Ezra Klein?

  When I see Israel debating South Africa at the UN over whether what they're conducting in Gaza is a genocide, I think to myself, Israel's not winning.

• 16:31Thomas L. Friedman?

  Exactly. And when I look at South Africa and I say, "Look, you hauled Israel before the International Court of Justice for what it's done in Gaza against Gazan civilians." That's a very legitimate issue, I think, to be raising right now. But when I see you do that, and you, South Africa, have not said one word about Russia's, I don't know if it's genocide, but it certainly rhymes with it, in Ukraine, to actually wipe out the identity of another country, to wipe out the identity and people of another country, and using rape and kidnapping of children. When you ignore that and you only focus on the first,

• 17:15Thomas L. Friedman?

  then I think the moral impact of what you're doing is diluted for Israelis, for a lot of Jews, and for a lot of, I think, fair-minded people.

• 17:25Ezra Klein?

  But doesn't that attend to the United States as well? And I want to say, I agree with you on what you're saying there about South Africa. One of the deep injuries that Israelis carry around is a feeling that their country is held to a higher standard in the international community by other countries than than anyone else. But if you take American support, America's been quick and correct to condemn Russia, to support Ukraine, to call what Russia is doing war crimes. And it's sometimes hard for me, as somebody who's fundamentally sympathetic to Israel and who believes that America should support Israel in areas of legitimate self-defense, to look at what has been done in Gaza and see something that we should still be supporting. I mean, I mentioned that poll about how many Gazans have lost a family member. But but here's another. There was this analysis of satellite data by two researchers, found about half of all structures in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed.

• 18:10Ezra Klein?

  It is very, very hard for me to believe, and I've heard nothing from the Israeli side that makes me believe it, that that was necessary to stop Hamas or make Israel safer, as opposed to a kind of collective punishment that we would condemn elsewhere, and properly so.

• 18:25Thomas L. Friedman?

  So now that I share your view, but thousands of casualties ago, I did a column called "Time for Some Tough Love" by Biden to Israel on exactly this issue, urging the US to support a ceasefire in return for the hostages and get out of Gaza and let's get NATO and American troops on the border. But this has to stop. It has to stop because it is unjust, it's horrific, and it's going to, besides devastate Palestinians, it's going to be a stain on Israel that it will regret, I think, one day.

• 19:01Ezra Klein?

  You've been arguing in your columns from the beginning of this to do less. I'm sure you have a lot of voices there trying to convince you that you've gone soft, that you're missing the real picture. What's the argument they make to you? That what Israel is doing now is making it safer? And also that this idea that you're going to destroy Hamas, that's not really an achievable goal. To level Gaza behind that theory is to send yourself on a on a mission you cannot complete. And yet, they are doing something like that. So what is the best argument you hear from them? That this is the right thing for Israel's security, the trade off here in terms of

• 19:42Ezra Klein?

  world opinion, in terms of grieving and revenge inflected Gazans? That the security that they're getting from doing this is worth it? Give me the best argument you've heard.

• 19:55Thomas L. Friedman?

  The best argument is exactly the one you've made, to which I have pushed back, that I think that's an unrealistic objective, particularly if you have no end game in mind, that will create a stable structure in Gaza that won't involve permanent Israeli control. Because that kind of attack that you just described, that kind of retaliation, Ezra, absent that kind of morning after political structure, that just looks like revenge. We need a legitimate Palestinian political structure that can partner with Israel in governing the West Bank and Gaza in the context of a broader political horizon of how to

• 20:40Thomas L. Friedman?

  end this conflict and engineer two states for two people. And the fact that Israel, at the leadership level, is canceling cabinet meetings to discuss it, that they can't even discuss that, is terrifying to me.

• 20:55Ezra Klein?

  I was just reading a story in Haaretz before we sat down to talk about a split in Israel's war cabinet between Netanyahu and the Defense Minister Galant, who want to continue the operation until they've quote unquote destroyed Hamas, and Benny Gantz, and some of the others sort of on his, in his faction, who are arguing, it's time to get the hostages back, there are deals we can cut, we can be more creative about this. There's already been talk on Egypt's and Qatar's part of, you know, a sort of full hostage exchange for something that leads to a full ceasefire. And Netanyahu has basically said, no, clearly Gantz wants to explore something in that realm.

• 21:39Ezra Klein?

  And so I'm curious how you see the split at the top levels now of Israeli politics, but specifically the incentives of Netanyahu.

• 21:48Thomas L. Friedman?

  You know, this is a kind of strange war where Sinwar, Yahya Sinwar thinks if he's standing at the end of this thing, he wins, no matter how many Gazan civilians have paid the price. Netanyahu, I would argue, Ezra, doesn't want to win. He wants to be winning. Okay. That is, he wants to be able to say, we're winning, we're winning, we're winning. It's just around the corner. But he doesn't want to actually win because if the war actually ends, two things are going to happen. Then he can no longer avoid what is the new political end state. And I believe there will be an eruption, a massive eruption of Israeli anger

• 22:29Thomas L. Friedman?

  at him that I hope and pray will drive him from power. Because I believe he is not only the worst leader in Israel's history, I believe he's the worst leader in Jewish history. And that's a long history. And what is Netanyahu's calculation is very simple. If he is not in power and has to face the conclusion of his trial and three corruption charges without the protection and influence that comes over the judiciary from being in power, he has a very good chance of going to jail. People forget Israel jailed a president and a former prime minister. They're not afraid to do that. And he does not want to go to jail.

• 23:10Thomas L. Friedman?

  And he does not want to give up power. And so this is a terrible situation where Israel is in a existential war and its prime minister has basically dual loyalties, one to the state and one to himself. And at every turn, he is prioritizing himself. And so that's what's worried me before. It's worrying me now. And it worries me about Joe Biden. Because Biden keeps telling him, stop killing so many civilians. And he's saying, yes, absolutely, sir. You know, we're going to do that. And they keep killing more civilians.

• 23:43Ezra Klein?

  There's a lot I want to come back to there, and we will. But I want to spend a moment on Benny Gantz, who I think is a name known now, but not a figure well-known. When I talk to Israelis who are central left or centrist, their only faith in the war cabinet is that Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot and some others around them have influence. But who is Benny Gantz? How would you describe him?

• 24:10Thomas L. Friedman?

  This is an imperfect analogy, but in terms of the political spectrum, think Joe Manchin. Center-right, but from the left side. I don't know if I'm... He comes to the center-right, but he comes to it through the left, not from the right.

• 24:27Ezra Klein?

  No, that's a good way of putting Joe Manchin. That's actually quite helpful for me.

• 24:30Thomas L. Friedman?

  Yeah, so Joe Manchin, but former chief of staff of the army and part of a long tradition in Israeli politics of former generals going into politics and becoming kind of unifying centrists, basically. So that's kind of the general perspective he comes from. A good man, in my view, a very decent man. His partner in leadership, Gadi Eisenkot, is probably the most respected former chief of staff of the Israeli army alive today. He's already lost his son and his nephew in this war. Was literally sitting in the command headquarters when he was informed that his son was killed.

• 25:12Thomas L. Friedman?

  And so the two of them are admired by both the military and the public and widely respected. But Benny is not a man for, okay, we're going to go from this war to a two-state solution. I talked to him about this at length when I was last in Israel a few weeks ago. I think he sees it going from where we are now to two entities, and maybe those two entities can then evolve into two states. So he's not a radical, but he's certainly someone who will be prepared to talk about the morning after and in the context of some kind of political endgame for the Palestinians that involves two states for two people.

• 25:54Ezra Klein?

  So Benny Gantz wins the next election in Israel and called you to get your advice, what would you tell him?

• 26:03Thomas L. Friedman?

  The necessary, but not sufficient, condition for Israel to have a secure Gaza and have a coalition in the Middle East that can push back on Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Cheyenne militias in Iraq. The necessary, but not sufficient, condition is that you have a credible, legitimate, legitimate from a Palestinian point of view, Palestinian partner that can govern the West Bank and Gaza. And it is a vital Israeli national security interest that you work to nurture that partner, that you try to enlist America and European and Arab help to do that.

• 26:44Thomas L. Friedman?

  You want to know what was the most disturbing story I read in the paper in the last three days? It was that America assembled a coalition to fire back at the Houthis, to deter them. Do you know how many people were in that coalition? Us and the Brits. Wait a minute, wait a minute, folks. A tribe in Yemen has disrupted international shipping so much that the Suez Canal is practically empty and ships have to go around the Cape of Good Hope. Everyone's having to pay more, insurance is paying more, and how many people could we muster? One, I mean, there are others supposedly involved, but basically it was only the Brits. What am I saying?

• 27:29Thomas L. Friedman?

  I'm saying that if Israel doesn't create a context where it has a legitimate Palestinian partner for the future, it can't build the regional coalition it needs, not just to deal with Gaza, but to deal with the much wider regional threat it faces.

• 27:46Ezra Klein?

  And now, this seems to be something in a weird way that Palestinians and Israelis agree on, and Americans and you do not, which is that the Palestinian Authority should not be in charge of Gaza or anything else after this war. I mean, Netanyahu has been very clear about this. And they don't have credibility when you look at Palestinian polling. I think you still think that there is some hope for creating a strong enough Palestinian Authority, that that is the future of Palestinian governance. So tell me how you see that playing out, what would make that possible?

• 28:18Thomas L. Friedman?

  When Israel does a real investigation of this whole October 7th moment and goes back, one of the most damning things that will be said about Netanyahu was that he deliberately pursued a policy of strengthening Hamas in Gaza, weakening Abu Mazen and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to ensure that there would never be a unified Palestinian decision-maker, and that he could always go to every American president, secretary of state, “What do you want from me? The Palestinians are divided.” But it’s worse

• 28:57Thomas L. Friedman?

  than that, Ezra, because the Palestinian Authority has been keeping the lid on in the West Bank by cooperating, some would say collaborating, with the Shin Bet and the Israeli military 24/7, 365 days. Netanyahu knows there would be so many more Israelis dead today but for the cooperation of the Palestinian Authority. And yet, knowing that, every chance he got to publicly discuss Abu Mazen and the PA, he used it to denigrate them, he used it to delegitimize them. This was all driven by a political agenda to make

• 29:38Thomas L. Friedman?

  sure that there was no credible Palestinian Authority. And I believe what has to happen out of this is that the PLO, which is still the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, needs to convene, it needs to appoint a Palestinian government of technocrats and experts that will run Gaza in partnership with the PA, and with the understanding and a date certain that there will be elections in two years for a new Palestinian Authority leadership that would govern Gaza and the West Bank. And now, if I haven’t pissed off people enough, let me add one more thing.

• 30:21Thomas L. Friedman?

  Any Hamas person who renounces violence and embraces Oslo should be allowed to run in that election. Hamas is part of the political movement and culture of Palestinians, and to try to exclude them would only be to perpetuate this crisis. It would be like saying to Israel, "You can have an election, but no right-wing parties can run," because we Americans find them vile. Not going to happen. And what we need is a broad, legitimate Palestinian authority that encompasses political Islam.

• 31:03Thomas L. Friedman?

  It doesn't have to be Hamas, I'm not making any case for them, but encompasses the political Islam segment of Palestinian politics. Otherwise, it won't be legitimate. And it's not only a vital interest to have that partner to deal with Gaza and the regional threat, it's a huge opportunity. Because something very big has also happened in the region. We've talked a lot about the voices that have been shouting, but the fact is, one of the biggest structural changes in the region since 1979 is that Saudi Arabia is legitimately talking about normalizing relations with Israel.

• 31:48Thomas L. Friedman?

  The benefits to Israel of that, both diplomatic, political, economic, cultural, societal, are profound. And you not only need a legitimate, credible Palestinian partner to secure Gaza, build a regional alliance against these non-state actors and Iran, but you need it to reap what is one of the most potentially important opportunities for Israel since, not just since Cantor, but since its founding. So I say that knowing it will be hugely hard, but I say it pretty convinced you will have

• 32:28Thomas L. Friedman?

  many Arabs, many Palestinians, many Americans, and many Europeans ready to help you. And I say it knowing that if you announce that's your intention... People in Tehran will be very, very sad.

• 33:10Ezra Klein?

  So one thing we see in the polling that has been done of Palestinians since the attacks is that Hamas's legitimacy has gone up, much more in the West Bank than in Gaza, but it's gone up, and the Palestinian Authority's legitimacy has completely collapsed. How do you read that?

• 33:23Thomas L. Friedman?

  I think there's sort of three important elements of that. The first is Palestinians in the West Bank are always, and we've seen this in past conflicts, they are full of anger at the occupation they're living under, and when they see someone taking action, they support it, even if it's this kind of vile kind of action that Hamas did on October 7th. It's also a huge vote of no confidence in their own corrupt and feckless leadership. And so that part of this poll, Ezra, didn't surprise me at all. The part that I thought was most revealing was the fact that support for Hamas in Gaza went up just very marginally. And that was Gazans, I think, saying what they will say when this war is over, when

• 34:05Thomas L. Friedman?

  Yahya Sinwar actually has to come out of his tunnel, if he survives, and face his own people, two things will happen. On the morning after he comes out, he will be carried on people's shoulders around Gaza as a hero who held off the Jews for 100 days and inflicted a huge military and political and public relations defeat on them. I think the morning after, the morning after, there are many Gazans who will say to him, one way or another, "What the hell were you thinking?" I've lost my family, my house is on the ground. Like, what were you thinking? The real truth is, these people were under an Israeli occupation and a Hamas occupation.

• 34:49Thomas L. Friedman?

  There were two episodes in Gaza, one in 2019 and one in 2023, which I think we may in time discover was also part of the timing of this. A movement of Gazans, it would be called in Arabic called Bidna Naish, "We want to live." Think about the name of that movement, "We want to live," okay? There's a whole website that was devoted to giving Gazans the opportunity to actually call in, this is before October 7th, and talk about their complaints of living under a Hamas tyranny. This was a case of incredible misrule by people who, as I've said, Bibi, what's your plan for the morning after?

• 35:33Thomas L. Friedman?

  What was their plan? What was the new steady state that they thought was going to come as a result of this war that would be better for the Palestinian people? And so there's been a huge asymmetry here from the very beginning, where every action Israel does, it gets questioned rightly by the Israeli press and by the world press and by world diplomats. Israel's been hauled before the International Court of Justice. Yahya Sinwar has not been required to answer a single question.

• 36:03Ezra Klein?

  When I think about the steady state, Hamas seems to have been targeting here. And I think that to say they were targeting anything might be giving them more credit than they deserve. But when I've read things making the case for them, when I've spoken to people who are more sympathetic to them, I would say the most common thing I hear is that the Palestinians had become invisible and Hamas made them visible again. That there were these deals being made across the Middle East, normalization with the Saudis and Israel. There'd become a whole theory that you could just move on from this. And that what Hamas did was break that steady state.

• 36:42Ezra Klein?

  And the thing I found most disturbing in that poll was the huge majority of Palestinians who said Hamas was right to launch the 10-7 attacks. Now, who knows what the reporting is and what they know about what was done that day, or what they don't know about what was done that day, but overwhelmingly believe Hamas is right to do it, even with all that has happened afterwards. And the thing that I keep hearing is that the Palestinians were being turned invisible, and now they are visible, and that that for them is a victory.

• 37:13Thomas L. Friedman?

  Well, first of all, I would say that there are no two national movements in the history of national movements who have had more visibility on the world stage than the Zionist national movement and the Palestinian national movement. What would the Kurds, Ezra, give for one day of publicity that Palestinians have had or normally get, or Israelis for that matter? What would Yazidis give for that? I think one of the problems has been that maybe there's been too much attention to both sides here by the world, and it's given both inflated senses of themselves and a unwillingness at times to compromise when they should be. So I don't quite buy that argument.

• 37:56Thomas L. Friedman?

  There is a big, not a small, kernel of truth, which is that Netanyahu was trying to make them invisible in the current context by trying to do a normalization with Saudi Arabia that would require him to do nothing. So there is truth in all of this. It's just that the only way to get at that was not necessarily through violence. What if Sinwar had sent a million Gazans to walk to the border carrying the Arab Peace Initiative? Not one, not 10,000, a million. What if a million Gazans announced that they were walking to the border peacefully, each carrying the Arab Peace Initiative? And what if their brethren in the West Bank said, as Israelis did in resisting Netanyahu's

• 38:41Thomas L. Friedman?

  attempted judicial coup, every Saturday night, for the rest of our lives, we are going to block every road in the West Bank with a map of the Arab Peace Initiative and a two-state solution? I would argue they'd be a hell of a lot better off right now. They would have gotten just as much visibility, maybe a lot more, and I think the pressure on Israel, if that were sustained, would have been significant.

• 39:11Ezra Klein?

  Do you want to say a word on what the Arab Peace Initiative is and what it did say should happen?

• 39:17Thomas L. Friedman?

  Well, I know a lot about it since I was involved in its evolution. I used to write every once in a while phony columns, letters from President Clinton to world leaders. And I thought maybe of writing a letter from George W. Bush to the Arab League, saying, here's what you guys should do. You should put forward a peace plan for Israel, calling for total withdrawal to the 67 lines, West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, in return for total peace, trade, tourism, commercial relations, and diplomatic relations. So I went home and I wrote that column. A week later, the Saudis invited me to come to Saudi Arabia. I'd been writing very critically about them after 9/11. And on that trip, in the middle of it, then King Abdullah, then Crown Prince Abdullah,

• 40:01Thomas L. Friedman?

  invited me for dinner at his horse ranch. And after dinner, at midnight, he asked me and Adel Al-Jubair, then the embassy spokesman for the Saudis in Washington, later the foreign minister, to come to his house. And at midnight, I sat at a desk with King Abdullah, and Adel was the translator. And the first thing King Abdullah said was, "You broke into my drawer." I said, "Your Highness, what are you talking about?" He said, "That peace plan you put in George Bush's voice, that was my idea." Well, I said, "Really? Tell me about it." And then he basically elaborated on that whole idea. Well, we did that till about 3:00 in the morning. At 3:00 in the morning, I got up and I said, "Your Highness, you need to put this out to the public."

• 40:45Thomas L. Friedman?

  He said, "You just put it out as if that's what I'm thinking. You just say it." I said, "No, no, you say it." He said, "No, no, you say it." I said, "No, no, you say it." So we're going back and forth with Adel in the middle. Finally, I said, "Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to write it up just as you said it, and I'm going to send it to you. And if you agree with it, if you're ready to stand by it, we'll write it as a column. If not, we'll throw it away." I went back to my hotel room, I wrote it up, faxed it to him the next morning, there were only faxes then. He agreed with it. And that Sunday, it appeared as a column in the New York Times. It exploded around the Arab world. The Arab League decided to call an Arab League summit in Beirut around it.

• 41:27Thomas L. Friedman?

  And they added a couple of things around refugees to it, and it became the Arab Peace Initiative.

• 41:33Ezra Klein?

  But tell me more about what it says should be done. I mean, given we've done episodes on the show about some of the peace deals that got floated during Camp David and elsewhere, how does it differ from the kinds of deals that Americans are familiar with?

• 41:45Thomas L. Friedman?

  It called for a Palestinian state on every inch of the West Bank, Gaza, and Arab East Jerusalem in return for full diplomatic relations, full commercial ties, and total normalization of relations. But it also, when they took it to the Arab League summit, they added at the Syrians behest, and by the way, the Syrians agreed to this, too. They added at the Syrians' request, the right of return for Palestinians. It was never clear how much and exactly what context, but they added a right of return. But that was pretty much the only big thing that they added. One of the great failures of American and Israeli diplomacy was, they never really picked up on it, Ezra. They never picked up on it.

• 42:28Thomas L. Friedman?

  But it was very real, and to this day, it is the only peace initiative the entire Arab world, through its governments and the Arab League, have ever affirmed together. And by the way, Ezra, they've never taken it back either.

• 42:42Ezra Klein?

  So I don't want to blow up your spot here, but my sense is of us columnists, you're the one that Joe Biden, President Biden, reads most closely. You've had a lot more contact with him during his presidency, in terms of your columns at least. So play Biden whisper here for a minute for me. What is your sense of what Biden, in his heart of hearts, thinks of all this?

• 43:05Thomas L. Friedman?

  I think he believes that certainly, let's start at the top, that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination and a right of self-defense in Israel. He also believes, I think, that Hamas is ISIS, a really evil organization, that not only Israel is telling him needs to be destroyed, but quietly, every pro-American Arab leader is telling him the same thing. We tend to assume that Biden is only acting because of what Israel is saying. But I guarantee you, there are a lot of Arab leaders who do not want to see Yahya Sinwar walk out of Gaza alive. Let's remember, Egypt's government wiped out, quite violently,

• 43:47Thomas L. Friedman?

  the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which is, Hamas is just the Palestinian equivalent of that. Saudi Arabia and the UAE do not allow any manifestations of the Muslim Brotherhood. So I think he feels that defeating Hamas as a military organization and as a political organization is a necessary but not sufficient condition for some kind of resolution between Israelis and Palestinians. He has been willing to give Netanyahu a lot of leash to do that. But I believe personally, and have said this in my own ways, to my own context, I think

• 44:26Thomas L. Friedman?

  we've given way too much leash for them to do that without articulating a political horizon and a legitimate credible Palestinian partner. You know, I have a rule as we're covering the Middle East. What people tell you in English is irrelevant. All that matters is what they say in their own language to their own people. So I'm only listening to that. And I believe Netanyahu has been fooling Biden a little bit by saying, Joe, I'm with you. But this is Netanyahu's favorite line. He's used it on every Secretary of State and every American president. You've got to respect my political constraints. I'm with

• 45:09Thomas L. Friedman?

  you, Joe. If you just get me the right kind of situation, Joe, I'm telling you, I'll surprise you. Ask how many Secretaries of State have been told by Netanyahu, I'll surprise you. By the way, Ezra, do you know where the Abraham Accords happened? You know how they happened? Jared Kushner comes along, sits down with Netanyahu, and Netanyahu says, Jared, I'll surprise you. You take care of my political conditions, I'll surprise you. So you know what Jared Kushner did? He accidentally tested him. He basically said to Netanyahu and Dermer, the Israeli ambassador in Washington at the time, here's the map. You draw what you politically need.

• 45:55Thomas L. Friedman?

  And they drew Palestinians would get 70% of the West Bank, but not a single Israeli settlement would be removed. So they'd be completely non-contiguous. That was the rough Trump plan. By the way, it had a very creative dimension on Gaza, that Gaza would be expanded into the nega. It's worth reading the Trump plan on Gaza, which is actually quite creative. So basically Bibi sent to Kushner, test me. And Kushner, more than any Secretary of State in American history, tested him by just saying, you draw it up. And guess what happens? Trump announces the plan. Netanyahu goes to his cabinet. And what he discovers, Ezra, is that the right-wingers in his cabinet,

• 46:38Thomas L. Friedman?

  they weren't at 70% for the Palestinians, or 60, or 50, or 40. They were at zero. So here Netanyahu told Kushner, test me. Kushner tests him. And what happens? Netanyahu couldn't accept Netanyahu's own plan. So he was completely up a tree because his right-wingers wouldn't accept it. And so the David Friedman, Trump's ambassador, tells Netanyahu, just annex your 30%. And Donald Trump, God bless him, says to Netanyahu, no. You only get your 30 if you give the Palestinians their 70. So Netanyahu is now up a tree.

• 47:20Thomas L. Friedman?

  Along comes Yusef Al-Ateba, the UAE ambassador to the United States with a ladder and says, Bibi, yo, Bibi up there in the tree. I can get you down the tree. If you will agree not to annex, I will give you diplomatic relations. And thus were the Abraham Accords born. They were born because the Kushner plan completely failed on the Palestinian side. And it failed because it tested Netanyahu. And Netanyahu could not accept Netanyahu's own plan.

• 47:56Ezra Klein?

  I am far from the world's most sympathetic person to Bibi Netanyahu. But I want to take something that you say he says a lot seriously, which is the political constraints and the story you just told. I love your rule from a minute ago, that what gets said in English in the Middle East is irrelevant. And I often wonder whether or not the English-speaking contacts that so many of us have in Israel and among Palestinians, I've been thinking about this while I've been doing this series of shows, ends up deceiving us as to the nature of the politics on the two sides. The non-English speaking politics are much more extreme than the English-speaking

• 48:36Ezra Klein?

  politics. Has Israeli and to that matter Palestinian society moved in a direction that we have not yet caught up with? And maybe another way of putting it is that sometimes I look at polls and the only place a two-state solution appears to be popular is in America and in Europe. But you look at polls in Israel and in among Palestinians and it's not. Have these societies gone to a place that we have not followed, in part because we do not really want to see it?

• 49:06Thomas L. Friedman?

  That's a very good question. It may be true, but there's another dimension there I think you have to focus on, which is that none of these public opinions are just emergent realities. They've all been cultivated. And different leaders can nurture a different politics. Had Bibi Netanyahu met with Abu Mazen and thanked him on the occasion where the Palestinian Authority had helped save lives of Jews, would Israelis all feel that way? Had he any way gone out of his way to, you know, try to build a partnership, would Israeli public opinion all feel that way? So you can't just summon a constituency when you need it. You have to nurture it. I've had this sort of debate with people about

• 49:47Thomas L. Friedman?

  2000. Ehud Barak, you know, goes to Washington, meets with Yasser Arafat, offers him 90-plus percent of the West Bank, a very generous offer, unprecedented. And Arafat says no. Now, I happen to believe Arafat was right to say no, that Palestinians already conceded a majority of Palestine in the context of 1967 and the previous partition. And so I think it's legitimate for them to say all of the West Bank, all of Arab East Jerusalem, and all of Gaza should be the future Palestinian state. I would say to people, Israel, Arafat should have said no, but he should have said no but.

• 50:31Thomas L. Friedman?

  You know what I want to do with you, Mr. Prime Minister? I want to go with you from Matula to Eilat, from the northernmost city of Israel to the southernmost. And I want the two of us to do a tour of Israel together. And I'm going to help you persuade Israelis why we should get 100%. And then I want you to come over, and you're going to help me persuade Palestinians the same thing. That to deal with all this as if politicking doesn't matter, as if nurturing a constituency doesn't matter, I think has been one of the great failures of leadership on both sides.

• 51:36Ezra Klein?

  This in a way brings us, I think, back to Joe Biden. Many of your columns have, and I think a lot of American commentary on this issue, ask as a fundamental question, you know, what should Biden do? How should he push Israel? You know, you've called for tough love. You've talked about it's not in America's self-interest to be supporting an Israeli government that is making Oslo impossible. Does Biden have leverage to push Netanyahu? And even if he does, will he really use it?

• 52:07Thomas L. Friedman?

  So the answer is yes, he has leverage. The question is where in the election cycle he has that? And therefore, when he might want to use it? There is politics around this issue. And he's running in a very close election against Donald Trump. He's already probably lost a lot of Arab-American votes over this. He certainly doesn't want to lose more Jewish-American votes over this. So we'd be naive not to think that isn't in his calculation. But I'm gonna throw out an idea, Ezra, that maybe it's not gonna happen. Maybe you won't hear about it ever again. But I've been talking to people, and I don't want to say it's in the administration, but it's in people who talk a lot to the administration, who are talking about the United States actually recognizing a Palestinian state right now within provisional boundaries,

• 52:52Thomas L. Friedman?

  the pre-1967 boundaries, and then making the argument that that state will come into being when Palestinians meet certain institutional metrics to make it a reality. I think that would be a gigantic shock to the Israeli system if it happens. I think the odds of it happening are somewhere between 5 and 8%. But I don't think there's zero anymore. Because why? Because when you look at what Blinken said in his last trip to Israel, you know, we need exactly this, a Palestinian Authority to govern these areas, said it publicly after meeting Netanyahu, and you know where Israel is.

• 53:34Thomas L. Friedman?

  The question has to be asked, how long do we go just declaring this? Or do we bring any leverage to bringing it about?

• 53:42Ezra Klein?

  I will say, given Biden's performance here, that the polling on him is much more negative and much stranger than I would have anticipated. So Times and CNN did a poll in late December. We found 57% disapproval of Biden on how he's handling Israel, only 33% approved. Among voters, 18 to 29, 72% disapproved. But then here is the other thing that I thought was really weird in that poll. When asked who they trusted more on Israel, 30% of 18 to 29-year-olds said Biden and 49% said Trump. I mean, people's sense of politics and what others may do might be hazy, but I think it's hard to imagine that if you're thinking Biden has been too locked up with Israel,

• 54:27Ezra Klein?

  that you'd imagine Trump is your solution to that. But what do you make of the morass that Biden has found himself in, the sort of absence of support for him seemingly really from any side?

• 54:38Thomas L. Friedman?

  It is a morass. A lot of people have been asking me lately, like, I tend to be a positive person. I try to be solution-oriented. Like, how does this end? And I just tell everybody, I have no idea.

• 54:54Thomas L. Friedman?

  I have no idea how this ends. I've never seen it so broken. Ezra, it was like we were putting a thousand-piece puzzle together, and somebody came and overturned the table, poured coffee on them, and the dog is now chewing on half of them. And someone's saying, "Well, go put that puzzle back together again." And so I think Biden's just been trying to navigate this situation where he knows that a weaker Hamas is necessary in order to get a more decent Palestinian government in both the West Bank and Gaza. He's being told that by Israelis and by Arabs, I can assure you. And yet, he has this partner in Israel, Netanyahu,

• 55:39Thomas L. Friedman?

  that keeps telling him things in English that he's not saying in Hebrew. And his Palestinian partners are very weak and less and less legitimate every day in Palestinian eyes. We're talking about the Palestinian Authority. And it's just a hellish situation. I've been doing this since 1979, when I went to Beirut for the first time. So for 44 years, I'm not surprised by much. I covered the sovereign Chittila massacre, the Hama massacre, the US Embassy bombing, the Marine bombing, the Israeli invasion. I covered a lot of really bad stuff. But I was surprised by the viciousness of the Hamas attack.

• 56:21Thomas L. Friedman?

  I hadn't seen people kidnapping infants before, grandparents, the use of rape. It was killing parents in front of their kids, kids in front of their parents. I hadn't seen that before. And I was shocked at the reaction on US college campuses. And so I've been surprised by a lot of things. And the reason, to go back to a point we were talking about before, I hope Israel goes to a ceasefire and gets the hostages back. And whatever happens with Hamas is left for another day because I think the hostage situation has made Israel crazy. I think the war has made it crazy. I don't think

• 57:01Thomas L. Friedman?

  this can go on without the country having a kind of political nervous breakdown. And I think just everyone needs, I'm not trying to trivialize this at all, but a kind of timeout for cooler heads to sort of prevail and think, but without hostages. And it won't be a resolution, but it at least maybe give time for people to take in what's been done, what's been done to them and what's been done by them and maybe lead to better decision making.

• 57:31Ezra Klein?

  You brought up the college campuses and I want to try a theory about them on you. I've also been surprised by some of the dumbest things we've seen there, but I also remember being in college and remember there being a lot of dumb politics. And I've come to have this thought that is bothering me, which is that you can kind of break the politics of Israel and America down across three generations. There are sort of older Americans, boomers, who remember Israel being founded potentially, who certainly remember it as young and vulnerable and as something of a miracle, as an impossibility, as winning these extraordinary battles in which it was almost wiped off the map and then wasn't and then gained territory and

• 58:16Ezra Klein?

  built this remarkable culture and science and economy. And then you have this straddle generation, which I'm sort of part of. That's how I think about it. Gen X, older millennials, who sort of saw this mixed Israel and Israel that by the time we were paying attention was by far the strongest power, was not vulnerable to being wiped off the map, had nuclear weapons, had control, but also lived under threat, right? Had suicide bombings, was under attack and was also trying to find peace. There was a constant peace processes, the normal thing you heard about, you know, you heard, as you put earlier, about the wars, but also the timeouts and the effort to become something different. And so there was a fear that it was, it had, you know, become an occupying nation that was happening

• 58:59Ezra Klein?

  in the West Bank and Gaza, what was immoral, but is trying to find a way out of that. And you could see the difficulty of it. And then you have this third generation that has only ever known the Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, right? They only know the Israel last 15 years, which had stopped trying to find a way to peace, which had settled into simply occupying the West Bank that has become much more right wing, that had this blockade around Gaza. And when I look at those protests, right? There's always the craziest sign of the protest. There's always like the dumbest campus group you can find. But when I look at the polling, where you see much less support for Israel among young people, when I look at why most people are out in the streets at a protest on behalf of Gaza,

• 59:42Ezra Klein?

  it's not mainly that they're anti-Semitic. And I think there's an effort to try to not see the thing behind the thing that is easier to see. And this sort of collapse of support for Israel among people who are younger, because Israel just looks like something different to them, seems both like it's picking up on something real, but also like a genuine threat to Israel in the long run, because Joe Biden and people of his generation are not going to be president forever. And I feel like this sort of rising generational threat to Israel, which people are trying to deal with by, you know, shutting these protests down and getting college presidents fired and being angry at the kids. But what you do about that story that has taken hold and what they've seen now, including on social media, you know, direct from Gaza, you know, when you think on the 15 or 20 year timeframe,

• 1:00:27Ezra Klein?

  that's something I think to take seriously. I'm curious if that tracks for you.

• 1:00:32Thomas L. Friedman?

  Hundred percent. So I'll take you back to Barack Obama's president. And Netanyahu maneuvers the Republicans with the help of AIPAC, which I think will go down in history as one of the most destructive organizations in Jewish history as well, for the way it not only abetted Netanyahu's every action of settling the West Bank, but for the way it abetted his destruction of the Iran nuclear deal, which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of American foreign policy. And now really is, looks so frightening that Iran is now weeks away from a bomb, instead of a year away from the bomb as that treaty would have made possible. So Netanyahu insists on coming to Congress.

• 1:01:16Thomas L. Friedman?

  Barack Obama and Joe Biden will not invite him. And he manipulates the Congress to get himself invited through the Republicans.

• 1:01:25Thomas L. Friedman?

  I did a column at that time, it was rather controversial. I said, you know, AIPAC can manipulate Congress to get Bibi an invitation to speak at the US Congress. But you know where Bibi can't speak? He can't speak at the University of Wisconsin. I wrote in that column, Ezra, that if Bibi Netanyahu were to try to speak at the University of Wisconsin, they would have to bring out the National Guard. Today, Ezra, they'd have to bring out the 82nd Airborne. So I was keenly aware of exactly the narrative you described, as it was beautifully said, of this erosion of the Netanyahu years, which basically said to American Jews, "We don't need you.

• 1:02:09Thomas L. Friedman?

  You're all going to intermarry Gentiles. We only need Republicans and evangelicals, and we're going to make Israel a wedge issue for the benefit of Republicans." And as a result, a generation grew up seeing only the Israel of Netanyahu, pro-evangelical, pro-Republican. And what happened, basically, I think, on October 8th on American college campuses, is the 16 years of Netanyahu melded with a decade of sort of woke politics on a lot of these campuses and exploded the whole American consensus on Israel. It all kind of came to a head, the meeting of those two things.

• 1:02:53Thomas L. Friedman?

  And it's a real threat for Israel in the long run. Joe Biden, as I've written, I think will be the last pro-Israel-American Democratic president. And I've had a lot of parents ask me to talk to their kids. Now, not a lot, I've had several friends ask me to talk to their kids. And when I do, I try to explain to them that to think about Israel, you have to actually hold three thoughts in your head at the same time. And to think about Palestinians now, you have to hold three thoughts in your head at the same time. On Israel, the three thoughts are that Israel is an amazing place. What is built in 75 years is amazing by way of in-gathering of exiles, of culture, of revival, of literature, of science, technology, agriculture. Israel's, it's an amazing achievement, number one.

• 1:03:38Thomas L. Friedman?

  Number two, Israel does really bad stuff sometimes, particularly in the West Bank. Steals Palestinians' land, allows settlers to kill Palestinians with impunity, lets Israeli Arabs be treated as second-class citizens. And third, Israel lives in a crazy, dangerous neighborhood, and the weak don't survive. Now, the same, I believe, is true with Palestinians. Thought number one: Palestinians suffered a true, what they call Nakba, a communal tragedy. Another people, an indigenous people, but another people came back in large numbers to claim their historic homeland. And even if they were ready to share it in the end, for Palestinians, it resulted in

• 1:04:21Thomas L. Friedman?

  a mass refugee population being created of people who were driven out or left by fear. And it was a real communal tragedy that no community should ever want to endure. And they're calling it a Nakba. A great tragedy is not an exaggeration. Number two is Palestinians do bad and stupid stuff. They've missed enormous opportunities. They've fought each other. They've done vile things to Jews. They have had a government that tolerated too much corruption. They do bad stuff. And third, Palestinians live in an incredibly dangerous neighborhood that has often exploited them.

• 1:05:02Thomas L. Friedman?

  There's a phrase in Arabic for many years, from 1948 till the present. It said, "No voice shall be louder than the battle." Every Arab dictator loved to use that quote, "No voice shall be louder than the battle." That was saying, "No voice should be louder than the battle for Palestine. Therefore, don't pay attention to my autocracy and my corruption. Let's just talk about Palestine." They were used by the neighborhood in ways that were unfair and deeply detrimental to their cause. And unfortunately, the world is dynamic, it's complicated. And if you can't hold all six of these thoughts in your head at the same time, along with the seventh,

• 1:05:46Thomas L. Friedman?

  that one of the greatest tragedies is that when Israelis were ready to make peace, Palestinians weren't, and when Palestinians were ready to make peace, Israelis weren't, which is common to both of them. Really, if you can't hold those seven thoughts in your head at the same time, really, don't, don't come to this story. And I have a very simple rule. I'm for a two-state solution. I'm for two states for two people. If you're for that, you're my friend. And if you're not for that, you're not my friend. And I'm together with the Israeli, or Arab, or Palestinian, or Jew, or Zoroastrian. And that's always been my North Star. And that's what's kept me balanced. Because my motto is, do you want to make a point? Or do you want to make a difference? And I really want to make a difference.

• 1:06:30Thomas L. Friedman?

  So I'm focused on how we advance that and not focused on all the other stuff.

• 1:06:36Ezra Klein?

  That's a good place to end. So then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:06:42Thomas L. Friedman?

  Well, in honor of this interview, The Little Drummer Girl by John Le Carré, which is a study in all the moral complexities of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The second is on my desk, The Splendid in the Vile by Erik Larson, which is just an amazing study in leadership. And Lord knows, we need leadership now. And lastly, to make it more personal, I'm Your Man, The Life of Leonard Cohen, by Sylvia Simons. Because I love Leonard Cohen. I love his music. And I need a little dose of hallelujah right now.

• 1:07:19Ezra Klein?

  All right, this is great. Well, Tom, I'm excited to hear what Secretary Blinken says in response to the plan. And really, thank you. This was great. And I've told you this privately, but I've been so, so admiring of your columns. I think you've played a uniquely important and needed role here.

• 1:07:35Thomas L. Friedman?

  Well, that means a ton to me and back at you. So let's do it again sometime.

• 1:07:39Ezra Klein?

  All right, thank you, sir.

• 1:07:40Thomas L. Friedman?

  Thanks, Andrew.

• 1:07:56Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klanso is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Afim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.