Editor’s note: The following article is based on an interview with Geopolitical Futures Chairman and Founder George Friedman conducted by Christian Smith. Two years ago this week, Hamas’ October 7 attacks stunned Israel and the world. And now for the first time there is palpable excitement that the war in Gaza may be on the path to an end. The first part of Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan seems to have been agreed by Israel and Hamas, though the plan still faces many hurdles.
When we try to understand how the latest diplomatic contours around Gaza have emerged, George Friedman urges us to look far back — not merely to the immediate political crises and military contests of the post-1948 era, but to the tangled decisions and strategic calculations of the First World War. As he puts it, “[i]n the First World War, the Turks were involved in a war on the German side. Turkey at that point had an empire, the Ottoman Empire. Palestine was a small part of that.” The British, he reminds us, “in the course of the war, wanted to weaken the Turks and announced that it would support a Jewish state in Palestine.” That statement — the Balfour Declaration — was, Friedman stresses, born of strategic calculation rather than a settled plan for the peoples who lived there. The idea “had always been present in Jewish thought,” he notes, “but it never was expected to be addressed like this. They did that to weaken Turkey and, to some extent, to gain support among Jews.”
Friedman’s narrative is not merely historical pedantry; it is a framing device for how we view modern instability. The British declaration, the collapse of empire after World War II, and the trauma of the Holocaust converged into what Friedman calls “a general Western theory that this was the least that was owed to the Jews.” Yet, he insists, the Palestinians’ fate was never addressed with equal seriousness. “On the other hand, the question of Palestinians never really arose,” he says. “It was agreed that the state would be divided between a Jewish and a Palestinian part. The fact that the Palestinians were the dominant population in the Israeli part, and it meant their expulsion, was not considered.” This, in Friedman’s view, is not merely a historical grievance but the seed of recurrent crisis: a people dispossessed within the framework of international decisions made for geopolitical ends.
The United Nations, Friedman notes, played a legitimizing role in partition, but it failed to secure the practical outcome the Palestinian people were promised. “The Palestinian state never emerged because the Arab state, Jordan, the Kingdom of Jordan, occupied the West Bank, which was the part that was, by the division of the United Nations, the Palestinian part. So that, in part, victimized the Palestinians over and over and over again.” That accumulated victimization — by the Ottomans, by the British, by international bodies and then by the realities of Israeli statehood — has left Palestinians with what Friedman bluntly characterizes as “no homeland. They have no government. They’re a distinct nation, if you will, whatever you want to call them. They’ve been screwed by the Ottoman Empire. They’ve been screwed by the British. They were screwed by the United Nations. And everybody’s walked away.”
From the Israeli perspective, Friedman emphasizes an existential anxiety born of geography. Israel, he insists, is a country that cannot “lose a war or be destroyed.” The state’s narrowness — “at its widest point, between the river of Jordan and the sea, it is only 80 miles wide. At other points, at the narrowest point of Israel, it’s nine miles wide” — ensures that any serious military penetration is a threat to national survival. “Therefore, Israel cannot lose a war,” he says. “If an attack is made and broken through, then Israel will cease to survive.” That fear, in Friedman’s analysis, created a state whose military posture is not merely aggressive but existentially defensive: “Israel developed a massive military force, quite unpredictably large and capable, because it was desperate.”
So when we think about the latest diplomatic breakthrough — the initial parts of a 20-point Gaza plan reportedly advanced by Donald Trump and now said to be provisionally accepted by Israel and Hamas — we must read it through these twin histories of dispossession and vulnerability. Friedman frames the contemporary deal as an attempt to resurrect an old principle: “the old principle of the United Nations, which is two states living together.” But he is quick to caution that history and geography have conspired to make that principle far harder to realize now than it might have been in 1947. “The question is, after all this time, can these two states reach accommodation?” he asks. “It’s extremely unlikely to succeed. Just given the nature.” The contradictions are straightforward: “Palestine wants a state. Israel is nervous about Palestine on its border.”
Those anxieties were dramatically underscored by the October 7 attacks and their aftermath, an event Friedman uses as a pivot to explain how both sides entered the current phase of negotiations. The attacks “terrified Israel,” he says, because they revealed intelligence and security lapses that every Israeli policy-maker fears. Simultaneously, the attacks “emboldened the Palestinians,” giving them a fleeting sense that they could inflict strategic harm — a sense that led, Friedman argues, into a catastrophic Israeli military response. The paradox is stark: the same assault that convinced Palestinians they could strike a mortal blow convinced Israelis that their survival had been imperiled, and that perception fueled a punitive campaign in Gaza. “The very fact that they believed they could do this was also believed by the Israelis. So the worst thing they did, the Palestinians, was feel triumphant of what they achieved.”
That triumph, Friedman stresses, precipitated a disaster. Hamas as an organization, he contends, is now “shattered as a military force.” But he cautions that organizational destruction does not end the conflict’s root grievances. “Anti-Israeli feeling among the Palestinians is not gone. Anti-Palestinian feeling in Israel is not gone.” The prospect of a renewed Palestinian entity near Israel’s population centers — “very close to Tel Aviv as the crow flies,” as he puts it — will keep Israeli strategic anxiety alive. Hence the central dilemma of any deal that seeks to end active hostilities while creating a durable political settlement: can political arrangements containing Palestinians and Israelis be made resilient enough to overcome deep emotional and strategic insecurities?
Friedman places the burden for this resilience, in part, on a third party capable of guaranteeing compliance and holding the peace. “There has to be a third party that is super powerful and able to control both,” he says. “Well, let’s just come on to that in a moment, but I want to just ask about what’s kind of changed in the near term, in the near history since, well, in the last six months even.” He notes that exhaustion is the immediate factor pushing both sides toward an agreement. “Fundamentally, exhaustion,” he says. Hamas and its supporters were drained by the Israeli response; Israel itself was also depleted by the war’s toll and the political shock of October 7. Under those conditions, a negotiated pause becomes more thinkable — not necessarily because the parties now embrace compromise, but because they have less capacity for continued escalation.
Yet exhaustion alone cannot produce durability. That is why Friedman turns to the geopolitics surrounding the Palestinian territories, in particular the role of the Gulf states. “They have enormous influence in the Arab world, in Europe, and the United States, because they’re extremely wealthy,” he observes, pointing to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia as critical financial and political actors. The Gulf states, he says, “badly want to see this war to end. They have lots of economic possibilities. They don’t want to waste it on this.” Beyond the economic appetite for regional calm, these states can underwrite a Palestinian polity: “They have the ability to finance a Palestinian state, have the ability to arm it without Hamas, and they can exercise a degree of control over a Palestinian state.”
That influence, Friedman argues, is a crucial piece of any sustainable settlement because someone must underwrite the political and security arrangements that would replace Hamas’s governance. He is skeptical that the UN can step into that role with real capacity. “[T]he United Nations took no action in this matter, as it normally does, takes no action,” he says, recalling how earlier UN decisions failed to produce practical enforcement or reconstruction mechanisms. “The fact that the Palestinians were the dominant population in the Israeli part, and it meant their expulsion, was not considered. The United Nations, by the way, was the entity that legitimized the claim for the division of Palestine.” That kind of legitimacy, by itself, is not enough; what is needed are institutions and forces that can implement and guard a transition.
When asked about the possibility of a U.S. security guarantee for Gulf states like Qatar and whether that matters to the deal’s engineering, Friedman is pragmatic: “[T]he United States already is a defender of Qatar. They don’t need a treaty.” He points out that American bases and Central Command presence in the Gulf reflect a long-standing reality of U.S. military engagement in the region. “So the idea that we formalize a preexisting reality, which existed for 20 years, it’s not an issue.” But he also sees limits to U.S. ability to be perceived as neutral within the Palestinian political imagination. “The United States is not conceived of by the Arabs as a neutral force in this, by the Palestinians. They are simply a dimension of Israeli reality.”
If the United States is not neutral in Palestinian eyes, who then? Friedman casts his gaze back to Europe and, pointedly, to Britain: “The British own Palestine. They created this situation. The United States approved it. It seems to me the two entities that are responsible for this are the British and the United Nations.” With that historical nod, he suggests that Europe — and Britain in particular — should accept responsibility and provide the kind of neutral peacekeeping and administrative muscle the region will need. “In other words, there will have to be peacekeepers. That border has to be closed. It has to be defended. The Americans are not trusted enough by the Palestinians to do it.” The stumbling block, of course, is that the UN has been weakened and Europe is not eager to take on the slog of a Middle East peacekeeping mission. “Now, will the United Nations do that? I don’t think they can even decide what time to have dinner,” he says with characteristic bluntness.
Friedman is equally frank about the internal politics that will shape the deal’s fate. On the Israeli side, he notes, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a critical actor: “It’s very useful for this that Netanyahu is going to do the one making the decision on peace, because he is known to be a rabid Israeli nationalist.” Yet, Friedman observes, there are also anti-war factions inside Israel that could view a negotiated pause as preferable to endless conflict. On the Palestinian side, the problem is perhaps even starker: who will claim the moral and political authority to agree to a compromise that stops short of full Palestinian territorial recovery? “The question is, who on the Palestinian side will emerge with the authority of having waged war to stand there and say, hey, I’m as tough as anybody, and I’m saying, let’s stop it.” Without such internal champions, any externally brokered settlement may lack the legitimacy needed to endure.
And then there is the thorny question of who will govern Gaza and whether Hamas will genuinely disarm. Friedman is skeptical about the easy triumph of disarmament: “They can buy guns in many stores in the United States if they need, or in any other country. They can be rearmed.” The destruction of Hamas’s current organizational structure, while significant, does not automatically produce a politically stable or demilitarized Gaza. “The issue is that this particular organization of Palestinians has been destroyed. But there have been many organizations of Palestinians, many Arab organizations. So the threat with the destruction of Hamas doesn’t end.”
Friedman sees one pathway to making any deal stick: an externally guaranteed interregnum that buys time for political evolution and institution-building. That is why figures such as Tony Blair — whose Blair Institute has been associated with governance proposals — have surfaced in discussions about post-conflict administration. But Friedman warns against romanticizing such interventions: the core problem is not merely who is asked to preside over an interim administration, but whether a credible, neutral, and enforceable compact can be put in place to prevent renewed violence. “You need a neutral force. The United States is not trusted enough by the Palestinians to do it,” he repeats. “The Arabs don’t want to be in this position. The British own Palestine. They created this situation.”
In the end, Friedman’s assessment is a balance of realism and faint hope. He acknowledges the novelty of present optimism — “now for the first time there is palpable excitement that the war in Gaza may be on the path to an end” — while warning that structural and historical forces make any durable settlement difficult. The deal’s early stages — hostage releases, the withdrawal of troops to agreed lines, the entry of aid into Gaza, and the freeing of prisoners — are important and meaningful. But these steps are stage one, Friedman says, not the end of the story. “There’s a long way to go before any form of permanent peace can be agreed. And the more difficult issues seem to be still to be surmounted.”
What he compels us to remember is that peace is not merely the absence of fighting; it is the construction of stable institutions that address the psychological and material insecurities of both peoples. For Israel, that means overcoming the fear that a border is a vulnerability that can kill the state. For Palestinians, it means remedying a history of dispossession and creating the governance and economic conditions of statehood. “The Palestinians wanted legitimately their homes back. The Jews were guaranteed a state by the British Empire and by the United Nations. And this was it, and it was a very vulnerable state.” The two narratives are fundamentally incompatible unless someone — a third party with the credibility and muscle to guarantee both sides — can bridge them.
Friedman ends, not with prophecy, but with a prescription of realism. The political will exists in parts of the Arab world to underwrite a solution; the United States retains an indispensable role, albeit one constrained by perceptions of bias; Europe and the UN retain historical responsibility but uncertain capacity; and Israel and the Palestinian leaderships remain deeply divided internally. “If the Americans want to continue the war without the United States there, well, they can’t,” Friedman says, pointing to the centrality of external power in any settlement. Yet he also implies that no outside power, acting alone, can make peace. “There will have to be peacekeepers. The border has to be closed. It has to be defended.”
This interview read as a reminder that geopolitics is the slow, often ugly work of aligning narratives, interests, and institutions. Optimism about a deal must be tempered by an understanding that the historical injustices, the geography that breeds existential fear, and the political fragmentation on both sides create a high bar for success. As Friedman makes clear throughout, any hope for durable peace must reckon with the past’s unfinished business and the urgent need for third-party guarantees that the parties themselves might not accept without credible external enforcement. “The truth of the Middle East is generally massive tragedy everywhere,” he says. “With this tragedy resulting from goodwill on all sides and all sorts of dreams, we now are dreaming that there can be a settlement with Hamas.”
Dreaming is perhaps where the conversation must begin. Translating that dream into durable institutions and reliable security, Friedman argues, will require more than stage-one agreements and headline-grabbing announcements; it will require a sustained, practical architecture of guarantees, peacekeepers, economic underwriting, and political resolve — a complex bargain that must reconcile the territorial, psychological, and strategic imperatives that have defined Israeli and Palestinian histories for more than a century. Until that architecture exists, the early steps of any plan, however promising, remain fragile. As Friedman’s assessment makes clear, the possibility of peace is real; the probability of a sustained and just peace remains, for now, uncertain.
