The Path of Abraham

Before we get to President Biden’s stop at Jeddah, let’s go back 20 years. That’s when the sage of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, wrote to a bevy of Arab leaders an imaginary memorandum from President Bush. The column proposed what came to be known as the Friedman Plan: “Full peace with all 22 Arab states for full withdrawal” — meaning acceptance in return for a return by Israel to the 1967 lines. Days later, Mr. Friedman was on a plane to Saudi Arabia to meet with the then crown prince, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, who exclaimed: “Have you broken into my desk?” A couple of days after that he published another column adumbrating the plan, now with a royal imprimatur. It included a call to split Jerusalem in the midst of the so-called Second Intifada, when buses were transformed into mobile morgues in a Palestinian Arab assault on the holy city. The Friedman plan, first known as the Saudi, and then the Arab initiative, died on the vine (King Abdullah died in 2015). Yet the Friedman plan fetched up again Friday, in a piece entitled “Only Saudi Arabia and the Israeli Arabs can save Israel as a Jewish democracy.” Israel, Mr. Friedman explains, needs its Palestinian Arab minority and the custodians of the two holy places of Mecca and Medina to save it from its adventurism in Judea and Samaria. Just to mark the point — the Friedman idea is that salvation for the Jewish state will come not from its own vibrant democracy or valor in arms, but from the House of Saud. Mr. Friedman would, in defiance of American law, divide Jerusalem to save it and lop off land, long ago promised, in return for acceptance of what Israel has already secured via the Abraham Accords. Mr. Friedman is demanding a price more dear than the Arabs are asking. Mr. Friedman knows that what saved the Jews after the horrors of the 20th century were Jews, with the recognization of America. Yet the columnist encourages the same trade as 20 years ago: In exchange for normalization, Israel would “halt all settlement-building to the east of the Israeli security barrier in the West Bank and agree that the Saudi-Arab peace plan for a two-state solution be a basis of negotiations with the Palestinians.” Mr. Friedman argues that if these demands were made “public, they would play a central role in Israel’s Nov. 1 election and help spark the kind of debates and creativity needed to preserve Israel as a democratic state,” a kind of collective brainstorming session. It is Mr. Friedman’s fervent hope that “the Israeli occupation of the West Bank — the biggest existential problem facing Israel — would be front and center in the fall elections.”The idea that Israel’s democracy has failed to digest these issues strikes us as chimerical. Mr. Friedman has what he has called a “pet theory about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — that it is to wider trends in world affairs what off-Broadway is to Broadway.” The formulation strikes us as condescending. The actuarial reality is that events have passed by the aging columnist and Saudi monarchs with whom he pressed his plan. The same with the American president who is in Saudi Arabia today pleading for oil. Never has normalization between Israel and the Saudis been closer, and never has Israel had less reason to trade Jerusalem. If normalization happens, it will be achieved by a new generation, in Saudi Arabia, in Israel, and in America. And, we’ll hazard, by following what President Trump’s envoy in crafting the first accords, Jason Greenblatt, calls “the path of Abraham.”

The Path of Abraham

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