David Friedman was Donald Trump’s tax attorney before the former president made him Ambassador to Israel in 2017. The Senate confirmed his appointment by a whisker-thin majority, over the vociferous opposition of the foreign policy establishment and the liberal Jewish world. What seemed like a crony appointment at the time turned out to be a stroke of genius.

　　Friedman played a critical role in crafting the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and two Gulf monarchies, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrein. Without Friedman’s energetic and impassioned involvement, foot-dragging by establishment leftovers in Trump’s diplomatic and national security team might have scuttled the project. But the Abraham Accords stand out as one of the Trump Administration’s most praiseworthy accomplishments. Friedman’s 2022 book Sledgehammer presents a personal view of these events. His latest book, One Jewish State, argues for a one-state solution in light of the October 7 attacks.

　　I cannot think of another work by a statesman of standing that addresses geopolitics from a standpoint so explicitly religious as Friedman’s present volume. By one Jewish state, Friedman simply means the annexation to Israel of the whole of Judea and Samaria, the so-called West Bank, with dominion status for their mostly Arab inhabitants similar to Puerto Rico’s relationship to the American mainland. He rules out a two-state solution in part on grounds of practicality, but mainly because God promised the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. And he believes that “the Abraham Accords could be the secret sauce that solidifies the plan for Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.”

　　“In the United States, no one is supposed to make public policy based on faith,” Friedman avers. He rejects the two-state solution because of “the undeniable evidence that Palestinians don’t want a state alongside Israel; they want a state instead of Israel.” And he adds:

　　Many people of faith, however, cannot support a two-state solution. While understanding the enormous security risks such a scheme imposes upon the State of Israel, thats not their primary objection. Instead, many in the Christian community, especially Evangelicals, and some in the Jewish community, especially the Orthodox, oppose the two-state solution as a matter of their religious beliefs. People of faith recognize that the land of Israel was given to the Jewish people by God. And if God gave this land to the Jews, no one has the right to undo that grant.

　　Biblical prophecy never retreats from Friedman’s view, even in his discussion of Middle East Realpolitik. In May 2024, he reports, Secretary of State Blinken convened a group of Arab officials to discuss the postwar governance of Gaza. The Palestine Authority representative promised reforms to enable it to govern Gaza and the West Bank. “Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed pushed back and raised his voice, noting that he had seen no evidence of reforms by the PA. He went so far as to call the Palestinian leadership ‘Ali Baba and the forty thieves.’” Friedman thinks that “the rest of the moderate Sunni world shares [bin Zayed’s] view” and would support Israeli sovereignty, in part because “they understand the power of biblical prophecy and why Judea and Samaria are so important to people of the Jewish and Christian faiths.”

　　Whether people of faith should pursue a strategy based on faith, though, is a question that has a long and contentious history, starting with the disagreement between Mordechai and Esther reported in the Megillah of Esther. As Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik explained, Mordechai was the great-grandson of one of the exiles from Jerusalem after the destruction of the First Temple in 587 BCE, and looked back to the age of prophecy. His cousin Esther, a generation younger, belonged to the post-prophetic era. Mordechai’s impulse was to emulate the prophets, and confront King Ahasuerus to protest Haman’s plot to exterminate the Jews. Esther instead advised guile and subterfuge—and she was correct. An open confrontation with the Persian king would have failed, but Esther’s scheme to maneuver Haman into a compromised position succeeded.

　　Even a Biblical heroine like Esther could engage the secular world on its own secular terms. And that, Soloveitchik taught, explains why Jews do not recite Hallel, or Psalms 113–118, which recount the miracles that attended Israel’s departure from Egypt. Esther and Mordechai required no miracles to defeat Haman, only the exercise of human reason, whereas the helpless Hebrew slaves required God’s direct intervention.

　　There is a related debate among Jewish religious authorities: Should the authority to make decisions about such matters as territorial concessions reside with religious or secular leaders? Friedman cites approvingly the intervention of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, who wrote after the 1967 War: “I am completely and unequivocally opposed to the surrender of any of the liberated areas currently under negotiation, such as Yehuda and Shomron [Judea and Samaria], the Golan, etc.” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik by contrast ruled that religious authorities must accept the professional advice of secular political and military leaders in such matters, just as they would accept the recommendation of a physician. All Jewish authorities, including Rabbis Schneerson and Soloveitchik, argued on religious grounds that saving Jewish lives took precedence over holding territory, even the Biblical homelands explicitly promised to the Jewish people. The argument centered rather on whether religious authority applies to such matters in the first place.

　　There are highly practical reasons to reject the two-state arrangement—it doesn’t deserve the name “solution”—and Friedman cites some of them, after he has presented the religious argument:

　　A Palestinian state, if ever created (God forbid), is likely to fail economically in the same manner as its neighbors. This, in turn, will accelerate the radicalization of the Palestinian people and increase the already strong likelihood that “Palestine” will become a terror state. In contrast to its Arab neighbors, Israel’s GDP per capita is about fifty-four thousand dollars, placing it within the world’s top twenty nations. That’s more than twenty times the production of the Palestinian Authority. This goes a long way to explaining why the two million Arabs who are citizens of Israel live peacefully inside a Jewish state. The opportunities for Arabs—Christian and Muslim—in Israel are unrivaled anywhere in the Middle East.

　　And he adds:

　　Never, prior to the creation of the State of Israel, was there a national movement for an Arab Palestinian nation in this land held sacred by the Jews. After Israel came into existence as a modern state, the Palestinian Arabs took the name Palestinian exclusively for themselves. The Palestinian nationalist movement was begun by Yasser Arafat in 1964. It was not a movement to create a nation but a terror organization to drive Israel into the sea. In reality, the term Palestinian originated as a brand, not a people. And a violent brand at that.

　　He also notes that 930,000 Jews were expelled from Muslim countries after 1948, and the overwhelming majority went to Israel, for they had nowhere else to go. The newborn state with just 600,000 Jews in 1948 became a country of 1.5 million by 1955, mainly due to the expulsion of the Jews from North Africa, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran. The latter two communities had lived in peace with their Babylonian, Persian, and later Arab neighbors for 2,500 years, and left with the clothes on their backs. Sephardic (North African) and Mizrahi (“Eastern”) Jews comprise a narrow majority in Israel.

　　The Arab population of British Mandate Palestine, for that matter, was largely composed of recent economic migrants. The Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger has published a useful precis of the relevant documents and academic research.

　　Israel is home to 2 million Arabs, who are flourishing. As Friedman writes, “To put this in the starkest terms, since 1948, the Jewish population in Arab countries has been reduced by 99.83percent.”

　　This is sufficient to put down the Black Legend of Zionist settler colonialism; Israel was populated mainly by the expulsions of Jews from Muslim countries. The founding of Israel involved a population transfer like Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s, with one big difference: Israel absorbed the Jewish refugees while Arab refugees were sequestered in camps rather than returned to their countries of origin, as a sign of Arab rejection of the existence of the Jewish state. If Saudi Arabia normalizes relations with Israel, the last vestige of Arab rejectionism will vanish, and the Palestinians will become irrelevant.

　　Israel is home to 2 million Arabs, who are flourishing. As Friedman writes, “To put this in the starkest terms, since 1948, the Jewish population in Arab countries has been reduced by 99.83percent. In contrast, the Arab population in Israel has increased by 1,296percent—far more than tenfold. For the world to accuse Israel now of genocide is grotesque and maliciously false.”

　　The definitive argument against a Palestinian state, Friedman argues, is that the Palestinians don’t want it. “In the Trump administration,” he writes, “we spent years crafting a Vision for Peace that we hoped might be acceptable to Israelis and Palestinians alike.” This required the Palestine Authority to write a constitution, hold free and fair elections, create a judiciary, and guarantee freedom of religion, among other hurdles. Here was a detailed offer from the United States and Israel for specific territory with enormous financial backing. And yet Mahmoud Abbas, in the face of arguably the best deal the Palestinians have ever been offered in terms of the specifics and quality of life, went to the Security Council, ripped up the document, and shouted various and sundry curses in Arabic at the sponsors, he concludes.

　　Evangelical leaders pushed back against the “Vision” program, Friedman reports, because they supported Jewish sovereignty over Judea and Samaria on religious grounds. “Fortunately, God intervened; the Palestinians rejected the plan out of hand, and the United Arab Emirates engaged with us to begin the diplomatic process that led to the Abraham Accords. It was a much better outcome,” he concludes.

　　Friedman proposes Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, with status for Palestinian Arabs comparable to that of Puerto Ricans in the United States (local self-government but no participation in national elections). West Bank Palestinians “will not pay Israeli income taxes but will be taxed to support their local needs. Palestinians, just as Puerto Ricans, will give less to their sovereign nation and receive less in return.”

　　On practical grounds, Friedman’s proposal is the least unworkable alternative. As an observant Jew, I wish devoutly for Jewish sovereignty over Biblical Israel, but I agree with those religious authorities who assign responsibility for such issues to political and military leaders.

　　Israel may not be able to count on the degree of evangelical support it has had in the past, and it faces a multi-polar maze of shifting alliances in its region.

　　Then came October 7, a suicide mission launched by Hamas against its prospective irrelevance in the face of the Abraham Accords. Hamas does not have the power to defeat Israel, but as the totalitarian ruler of Gaza, it has the power to force Israel into a prolonged and bloody war with substantial civilian casualties. Saudi Arabia abhors Hamas as a branch of its mortal enemy the Muslim Brotherhood, but must preserve appearances. It cannot normalize relations with Israel in the middle of a wave of Muslim outrage, and has declared that a treaty with Israel is contingent on the creation of a Palestinian state. That is an impossible goal, because there are very few Palestinians who want a state as opposed to a jihad, and almost none who will accept coexistence with a Jewish state.

　　The United States could break the logjam by isolating Qatar, Saudi Arabia’s rival in the Gulf. Even if indirectly, America bears some of the blame for the October 7 disaster. Israel’s great intelligence failure involved misdirection from Qatar, the oil-rich sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood and the main funder of Hamas. Israel allowed Qatari diplomats to pay Hamas $15 million a month or more in suitcases filled with cash, with the promise that the subsidy would buy peace.

　　As Friedman notes, Hamas remains headquartered in Qatar. If Hamas deceived its Qatari paymasters, why have they exacted no penalty from their Hamas clients for this deception? It is hard not to conclude that Qatar helped deceive Israel. As the host to America’s largest foreign military base, Qatar also had bona fides with the American military. Did Qatar also deceive US intelligence? In that case, why has the Biden Administration put Qatar at the center of the grisly, humiliating negotiations between Israel and Hamas for the return of Israeli hostages seized by Hamas on October 7?

　　The Trump Administration bore some of the responsibility for this disaster as well. Saudi Arabia and the UAE blockaded Qatar in 2018, alleging that it funded jihadists who threatened the conservative Gulf monarchies. The United States pressured the Saudis and Emiratis to stand down, and then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (who wrote the introduction to Friedman’s book) declared in a January 2019 visit to Qatar that “great things” were happening between Qatar and the United States. We should have supported Saudi Arabia and the UAE and put Qatar in its place.

　　Friedman hopes that American diplomacy buoyed by the support of evangelicals will settle the Palestinian problem. “No group is more steadfast in its support for Israel and its commitment to Israeli sovereignty over its entire biblical homeland than Evangelical Christians. There are more than six hundred million Evangelicals in the world with the United States having the single largest proportion—nearly one hundred million worshippers with deep faith. It is the largest denomination of Christianity [in fact, there are 1.4 billion baptized Catholics, and the Vatican recognized a Palestinian state in 2015].”

　　B’ezrat Hashem—with the Lord’s help! But a great deal has changed since Donald Trump left office and David Friedman left the embassy in Jerusalem.

　　America’s influence in the Middle East has diminished, not least because of the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Ukraine War. China’s stature in the Middle East rose after it mediated the resumption of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran in January 2023, and between the Saudis and Syria in September 2024. Chinese exports to the Persian Gulf and Central Asia have more than doubled since 2020; China sells five times more to the Saudis and UAE than does the United States. The Ukraine War occasioned an alliance between Russia and Iran, while Iran’s oil exports to China have surged. Qatar, on paper a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States since 2022, is a rogue state.

　　A generational change among American evangelicals is underway that is unfavorable to Israel, according to some accounts. A recent book by Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin cited by The Jerusalem Post reports: “As of late 2021, only 33.6% of young Evangelicals under 30 support Israel, compared to 67.9% in 2018. At the same time, in 2021, 24.3% of young Evangelicals said they support the Palestinians, compared to only 5% three years before.”

　　Israel may not be able to count on the degree of evangelical support it has had in the past, and it faces a multi-polar maze of shifting alliances in its region. The realpolitik of Esther may avail it more than the prophetic vision of Mordechai.