Pie in the Sky
Why does Friedman keep barking up this tree?
It's astonishing that someone who ostensibly knows the region like Thomas Friedman cannot recognize (see article below) that however much a large segment of the population is extremely alienated from Netanyahu, Israeli public opinion rejects, and has for some time, the idea of a two-state solution. They are utterly convinced of the narrative that it would be a "dagger pointed at the heart of Israel," and doubly so after October 7. They can't imagine that Palestinians aren't primarily motivated in life by a desire to kill Jews, and prioritize it over things like wanting to live like human beings with hopes and dreams, like not having their homes burned over their heads, their sons and daughters shot while herding sheep or harvesting olives.
If the Israelis were ever serious about allowing a Palestinian state, they would not have set up a West Bank so hopelessly broken up into Bantustan-like islands, nor authorized the settlement of 750,000 Israelis and still counting. Even Trump couldn't impose a Palestinian state - we would have to cut of aid for a decade, and AIPAC looks to keep making that an impossibility for the foreseeable future.
The repugnant Smotrich proposes emigration as the solution, and yet no reporter, nor Friedman, asks the basic question, to where? Name one Arab state willing to absorb millions of Palestinians. Which doesn't mean we won't see foreseeable expulsion, probably to Jordan and Egypt. Another Nakba - which is happening already in slow motion, but not in huge numbers that would empty out the West Bank.
Many Palestinians would actually gladly emigrate to the United States. But Trump is as likely to open our doors as he is to win a Nobel Peace Prize. (Though Israelis seem to have no trouble emigrating at all.)
I don't have a solution, but let's at least stop wasting energy on a scenario that has absolutely zero chance of happening.
MCO 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/opinion/israel-iran-netanyahu.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NFA.NdJ6.RBPqf-QAjTho&smid=url-share
They were never serious about it, the architects of Zionism that Herzl represented were all about carving out a ‘kingdom’ based on a very disputable idea that Judaism once ruled all the lands that are now considered Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Sinai Peninsula & part of Saudi Arabia. That is the basis of the ‘Ben Gurion Map’ or the ‘Greater Israel’ that was discussed by the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland 1897…it references all the land between the Nile & the Euphrates & it is why a majority of Muslim peoples in the region have been so animated to the implementation by European governments of any of the Zionist claims to land, feeling they were just European proxy colonists that were being given a massive tract of land that had significant Islamic history & ownership, which had already been disturbed immensely by the Sykes-Picot agreement & the British support of the wahhibinist Saud monarchy against the ottomans, which led to the Lord Balfour edict that gave no consideration to the primarily Islamic, but also smaller groups of Christians & other ethnic sects that had existed under Ottoman rule, wherein Palestine was considered to be partitioned & given to the European Zionist contingency (which, at the time, was a small minority of Jewish people) & which the Zionist group actually bombed & killed British soldiers & representatives in Palestine because they refused to accept the small area the British designated for them & began purchasing & acquiring properties outside of those areas in the period prior to WW2 that led to some of the first violence between non-Jewish Palestinians & Jewish Palestinians…this, of course, set the stage for the Haavra agreement with Nazi Germany in 1933 & then after the war as Britain & France were spread thin in their attempts to control all of the colonized areas they absorbed in Africa & the Middle East, the now even better funded group that had been the core of the terror campaign against the British & the agreement with the Nazis launched the Nakba, with some British & US support & the initial State of Israel was founded, which immediately led to the reaction from all of the surrounding Arabic speaking states, all of whom were fledgling colonies of France & Britain up until recently, to attempt to counter the implementation of the small British allowance of a state because they knew the endgame has always been Greater Israel or the Ben Gurion Map, which would disenfranchise most of the Islamic peoples in the center of their most holiest region & cultural centers…