One Jewish State, The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, by David Friedman. Humanix Books, 2024.
In late October of 1948, the young state of Israel launched an offensive against the seven Arab armies that had invaded it five months earlier. The Israelis attacked the Egyptian army (including Sudanese, Saudi and Muslim Brotherhood battalions) encamped in the northern Negev desert and on the hills stretching from southern Jerusalem to Hebron. They swept through the Egyptians and their allies, moving up the slopes to the outskirts of Beit Jala overlooking Bethlehem, able with one more push in the morning to take the entire area known today as the southern West Bank (historical Judah). On the night of October 19-20, Prime Minister Ben Gurion called a cabinet meeting. Over the pleading of brigade commander Moshe Dayan, he called a halt to the operation. Instead, Jordan moved its army into the area and occupied it for the next 19 years. Ben Gurion adhered to a vision of partition between Israel and Jordan he had outlined well before the war.
Now, on the brink of another multi-front Israeli military victory, David Friedman suggests a re-do. It’s time, he writes in One Jewish State, for Israel to extend sovereignty over the entire West Bank, the Biblical heartland, and fix its eastern border on the Jordan River.
“This is not the type of book ordinarily written by a diplomat,” writes Friedman. Indeed this is not the ordinary diplomatic memoir that recounts in detail the author’s career exploits. Instead Friedman, President Trump’s ambassador to Israel, focuses on one key issue – the case for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank (and eventually Gaza) – and uses episodes from his ambassadorial stint to help build the case.
I especially liked the episode of the US government’s internal deliberations leading to the decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018. “I was the strongest advocate in the Trump administration for the move, and an explosion of violence would have cost me my job, ” he admits, citing the warnings of unnamed “pundits.” Friedman turned out to be right, the embassy move didn’t precipitate a wave of violence (though there was a border provocation by Hamas in Gaza).
For the time being, however, the “pundits” are having the last laugh. The Biden administration has slow-walked the embassy move announced in 2018. More than six years later, most embassy staff remain in greater Tel Aviv, leaving the American ambassador nearly alone in Jerusalem in a small compound built to process visa applicants. There has been no progress in building a new chancery in Jerusalem needed for this large embassy. The State Department knows how to build a large chancery quickly in response to policy priorities. For instance, the one in Baghdad was completed in two years during an active insurgency. This is intentional.
In another enjoyable part of the book, Friedman describes Biblical sites he visited on the West Bank, from Rachel’s tomb near Bethlehem to Joshua’s altar on Mt. Ebal. Indeed the Biblical injunctions about the land of Israel (centered in today’s West Bank) and its Biblical history are at the heart of his argument.
And yet, any plan to annex the West Bank must deal with its Palestinian residents. Granting Israeli citizenship rights to 2.5 million West Bankers (and eventually another 2.2 million Gazans) would change the nature of the Jewish state. Israel’s Declaration of Independence promises “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”
Friedman has a creative solution to this conundrum: the Puerto Rico model. Puerto Ricans enjoy the full panoply of US citizen rights, except they don’t vote in national elections (although they do participate in the presidential primaries of US political parties) and aren’t represented in Congress. In exchange, they don’t pay the same federal taxes as other US citizens.
There are two problems with the Puerto Rico model for the West Bank. First, the majority of Puerto Ricans agree on their status in the US, most recently in a 2020 referendum on statehood. Friedman doesn’t mention offering West Bankers a similar referendum on becoming part of Israel. We know what the result would be. The Puerto Rico model resembles the Palestinian autonomy plan called for in the 1979 Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty, which had no Palestinian takers then or now. They want an independent state (though haven’t made much progress on building the institutions of said state). Second, there is no consensus inside Israel on annexing the West Bank.
Instead, Friedman might consider reviving the Trump Peace Plan of 2020. It does allow Israel to annex the strategically important Jordan Valley and adjacent desert (roughly 30 percent of the West Bank) under certain conditions. Whether or not it is formally annexed to Israel, the Jordan Valley will undoubtedly remain Israel’s eastern security border. That is an Israeli consensus only strengthened by the recent Iranian-led attacks. It is thinly populated with Israeli kibbutzim and moshavim (mostly established by Labor governments after 1967) and a few Palestinian villages. No Israeli leader (including Prime Minister Rabin who vowed in his last Knesset speech to retain it) would consider withdrawing from the Jordan Valley. Nor would the King of Jordan, in private, want Israel to withdraw from it.
David Friedman’s well-reasoned arguments resonate with me. He has proven right about a lot of things. But I am also listening to another student of the Bible, David Ben Gurion. He was presented the opportunity 75 years ago to take historical Judah in a defensive war and decided against absorbing this populated hill country into the Jewish state. I suspect the majority of Israelis still agree with Ben-Gurion.
