Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman is launching a movement “to kill the two-state solution,” he declared in a speech to the One Israel Fund in New York City.
The centerpiece of the rollout is his controversial new book, One Jewish State, which advocates for Israel to annex all of Judea and Samaria, dissolve the Palestinian Authority, and grant non-voting citizenship to the Palestinians.
“A two-state solution will literally be a final solution for the Jewish people. So we have to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Friedman warned the One Israel Fund audience who came for the book signing at John F. Kennedy Airport’s TWA Hotel.
His publicity tour began earlier this month with the book’s release and included interviews with mainstream, Jewish, and Christian media; book signings and speeches for Jewish and Christian groups; and the creation of the website onejewishstate.net.
In an interview with The Jewish Press after the event, Friedman revealed for the first time that his One Jewish State movement will be expanding to include various forms of content and marketing across social media platforms, including a YouTube channel.
The Plan
Friedman’s proposal calls for absolute Israeli sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria, where approximately 500,000 Israelis reside. Palestinians in these areas would have all the civil and human rights guaranteed by Israel’s Basic Law on Human Dignity, but without the collective right to self-determination outlined in the Nation-State Law, meaning they would not vote in national elections, similar to the status of Puerto Ricans under U.S. law. Palestinians would also be allowed to create their own local rules, provided they do not conflict with Israeli laws. They would be exempt from Israeli income taxes but would be taxed to fund local needs. Additionally, a professionally managed trust fund would be created to pay for upgrading infrastructure and medical facilities in the Palestinian communities which will help persuade nonviolent Palestinians that life will improve under Israeli sovereignty.
The idea of Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria was particularly appealing to the 150 One Israel Fund supporters because the non-profit organization is focused on providing security, medical services, and humanitarian aid specifically to those two areas.
“Ever since handing over the entirety of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians, and their abject failure in creating a viable and peaceful state, the majority of the country has realized that they never had the intention of recognizing a Jewish State nor living side-by-side in peace,” One Israel Fund executive vice-president Scott Feltman told The Jewish Press.
“The fact that someone with the gravitas and connections of Ambassador David Friedman, a true hero of the Jewish People, has taken it upon himself to bring this message to the international community is vitally important,” he said.
Not everyone is as supportive of the plan, of course.
“Wishful thinking that can never happen,” wrote Times of Israel blogger Moshe-Mordechai van Zuiden. “He doesn’t understand this can’t be done in a democracy… He never ponders why Muslims would agree, especially those who hate us.”
A possible retort could be found in Friedman’s speech to One Israel Fund. Friedman asserted that Israel has the “best track record in the world for empowering its minorities” and that his experience with Palestinians indicates more potential interest in living under Israel sovereignty than the critics may think.
“I’ve met lots of Palestinians,” he said, referring to his time as ambassador. “They won’t say this publicly [but] I can tell you the last thing they want is to be ruled by the Palestinian Authority or any other Palestinian group.”
Van Zuiden also cautioned that Palestinians would continue to pose an internal security risk under Friedman’s plan. “A sizable portion of Muslims in and around Israel doesn’t [sic] want prosperity or peace. They want the Jews out,” he wrote. “Even Gazans whose lives were saved by Israeli physicians happily participated in the pogrom of October 7.”
As for Gaza, Friedman told The Jewish Press he wants to see how the situation plays out before taking a position on post-war governance. However, his book points out that Gaza is part of Biblical Israel and therefore the “long-term path for Gaza must be the same as for Judea and Samaria.” He cites the Book of Joshua chapter 15 in which Ashdod and Gaza are granted to the tribe of Judah.
The Political Obstacle
Friedman and his allies are seeking to establish the One Jewish State plan as a legitimate alternative to the two-state solution, which is the approach still being pushed by the Biden Administration, presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and many in Congress.
Friedman believes that “virtually everyone” in the Republican Party has abandoned the two-state approach. After October 7, Donald Trump cast doubt on the prospects of two states. “I’m not sure a two-state solution anymore is going to work,” he said in an April Time interview. In the past Trump has said he was indifferent to whether the parties agreed to one or two states.
Although Friedman is in communication with Trump, he told The Jewish Press that he is not planning to speak with the former president in detail about the One Jewish State plan during the busy presidential campaign.
“You [have to] understand that the president [Trump] is never going to be more of a Zionist than Israel,” he said. “If I said to him, ‘Would you support Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria?,’ he would ask me, what does Israel wan to do? I think he will be supportive of whatever Israel decides.”
Friedman knows Trump well. He was one of Trump’s senior attorneys before being tapped as ambassador to Israel, a position he held from 2017 to 2021. After that post, he founded The Friedman Center for Peace Through Strength, the pro-Israel non-profit that is running the One Jewish State initiative.
The stakes for Israel and the One Jewish State plan in the election are high, given that U.S. partnership is needed to make the deal work and that Harris and the Democrats are firmly wedded to the two-state solution. Indeed, Friedman is critical of Harris for her lack of understanding and support regarding Israel security, as evidenced by her never visiting the country.
A Failed Test
In his speech, Friedman cited the Palestinian track record as a major reason why they cannot be permitted to have their own state. Palestinians got control of Gaza and quickly elected Hamas. Then they received massive amounts of foreign aid from the U.N., UNRWA, the E.U., the Gulf states, and every U.S. administration except Trump.
“They had all kinds of money, tons of money,” he said. “Did they build the Singapore of the Middle East? Did they put money into hospitals and schools and beautiful hotels and opportunities? They created the greatest home-court advantage in ground warfare. They created 350 miles worth of terror tunnels. They created weapons of mass destruction to shoot Israeli civilians. That was their test,” he said.
The Palestinian Authority also cannot be trusted with governance based on what happened after being given the right to manage Areas A and B in Judea and Samaria, he added. “Did they do anything worth noting there? No, they created the most corrupt government. The PA is no better than Hamas,” Friedman said. “What is the PA’s signature legislation? Passing laws that incentivize Palestinians to kill Jews. Pay to slay. If you kill one Jew, you get a pension. If you kill two Jews, you get a bigger pension. If you kill Jews and you get killed in the process, your family gets money. In all these cases, this is money that is more than you could get going to work. That is the government. Those are the ‘good’ Palestinians.
“We have to be as clear about this. They were given the opportunity to show that they can live in peace with Israel, and by their own choosing – not by being hijacked by Hamas – by their own choosing, they failed the test,” he declared.
The Trigger
Friedman decided to write One Jewish State after becoming upset at what happened after October 7. He read, for example, that 80% of the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria were excited about what Hamas did. And perhaps even more surprising, the Biden Administration and other leaders eventually declared that the fix to the problem is that the Palestinians must have their own state.
“That was a triggering event that forced me to go lock myself in my office for 10 weeks when I wrote this book,” he said in the speech. “I didn’t leave. Sometimes 12, 13 hours a day. I didn’t get any researchers. I didn’t get any editors. I just sat there, researched it myself, and it became an obsession for me to get this book out because we have to kill the two-state solution.”
Friedman wrote the book to provide the intellectual heft to the arguments in favor of the One Jewish State plan. But the goal was not just to reach the American audience. An essential part of the movement is to undertake a public education campaign in Israel. In October, a Hebrew version of the book will be released in Israel.
Lending Support
Friedman’s book-signing and speech were the featured part of an evening to thank The One Israel Fund’s donors, especially given their financial assistance for emergency needs after October 7.
“Judea and Samaria look different than they did pre-October 7th,” One Israel Fund president Jacqui Herman said after the event. “We have better security, better recreation, better areas for children to go to, better areas for mothers who need support, psych groups that work together with psychology giving support. It’s just a completely different world, and it’s only going to get better.”
Feltman shared that after October 7th, One Israel Fund “doubled and tripled our efforts in this area as well as other vital needs such as emergency medical equipment, support for refugees, trauma victims and everyday life to ensure that what happened down south would not be repeated in the Heartland.” The organization is also building a medical center in Binyamin that will open soon.
“Given what’s happening in Gaza and Lebanon, the top concern right now is security,” Rabbi E. Samuel Klibanoff, spiritual leader of Etz Chaim in Livingston, New Jersey, told The Jewish Press regarding aid from Diaspora communities. “But within Israel itself, they have to have constant awareness, whether it’s video equipment, cameras, patrol vehicles, or safety material, vests, helmets, things like that for their security teams, which are all volunteer. The government only provides so much, so we supplement what they can’t get on their own.”
Rabbi Klibanoff does not think that Jewish communities in the U.S. are slacking off in davening for the hostages over time. “In our shul, for instance, every single week, we read the bios of hostages so that people shouldn’t forget about it. We hold up their picture. We take five or six hostages, and we read their bios, and we say this is who they are. This is a real person with a mother and a father or a child, a brother and a sister, and it’s extremely important that we have constant awareness.”
One thing people can do to reconnect to the situation is to travel to Israel. Rabbi Klibanoff went three times this year and plans to go a few more times. “That;s when you see it up close and you just speak to the average person because everybody’s affected one way or another, whether they’re displaced from their homes, they have a family member who’s in the army, or someone who’s a hostage. Just feeling that up close will sort of reinvigorate that feeling and people understand what they have to do,” he said.
Us Plus G-d
At the end of his remarks to the One Israel Fund audience, Friedman issued a call to action.
“We all have to become ambassadors to press the case. And it’s not about a land grab. It’s about a solution – G-d’s solution – which, not surprisingly, is the best solution for this area,” he said. “So come and join this movement.”
When speaking with pro-Israel allies, Friedman recounted how he says to them, “You understand, it’s just us against the world.”
“And then I say, ‘Wait, I underspoke. It’s us plus G-d against the world.’”
