US Ambassador says Israel has right to annex parts of West Bank

Palestinian leaders have rejected the idea, saying there can be no economic peace without a political solution, and that they do not trust any plan from the Trump administration, which has taken actions to favor Israel in the conflict. They also deny that they have pressured businesspeople to boycott the Bahrain conference.

Israel “has the right to retain some” of the West Bank, Ambassador David M. Friedman said in an interview at his Jerusalem residence.CreditIlia Yefimovich for The New York Times

A major American supporter of the Israeli settlement enterprise before his appointment, Mr. Friedman has seldom been accused of being evenhanded as ambassador. Asked if he shared the view of many right-wing Israelis that Palestinians bore the brunt of the blame for the failure to reach a settlement of the conflict, he said, “There’s more blame on the Palestinian side,” but allowed that Israel had “made its own mistakes.”

“There were some extraordinarily generous proposals made to the Palestinians that they turned down,” he added.

He had harsh words for the Palestinian Authority, saying it had “a very, very poor track record on human rights” and that its institutions “don’t give anyone in the region sufficient comfort that Palestinian autonomy is not threatening.”

“The Palestinian leadership is really the difficulty right now,” he said.

He defended what has been an all-stick, no-carrot approach to the Palestinians. He said this was “reality-based” and responsive to hostile Palestinian rhetoric and actions. “They brought those sticks upon themselves,” he said, noting that he had been called a “son of a dog” by the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.

For too long such offenses met with “acquiescence” in Washington, he said. “We’re saying, no, that’s not cool. We call it out.”

He urged the Palestinians instead to “look inward,” saying the Trump administration’s toughness toward them was meant to signal that “the world isn’t going to stop turning” and that they did not “have a veto on progress.”

He said the Palestinians had benefited, for example, from the view that they needed to agree before the United States could recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

That, he said, gave them “an amount of leverage that makes it almost impossible to negotiate a deal.”

Under the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians and Israel agreed that the status of Jerusalem would be negotiated by both parties in a final peace agreement.

Mr. Friedman said the push for a peace plan was motivated by the belief that the dangers confronting Israel — in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Iran — were far greater than when the Oslo peace process began in the early 1990s. “The absolute last thing the world needs is a failed Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan,” he said.

He said he did not believe the plan would promote a violent reaction among the Palestinians, and said the United States would coordinate closely with Jordan, which could face unrest among its large Palestinian population over a plan perceived as overly favorable to Israel.

He added that the plan would not be released if the administration believed it would do more harm than good. “We don’t want to make things worse,” he said. “Our goal is not to show how smart we are at the expense of people’s safety.”

As for whether the plan envisions a Palestinian state, he said, “What’s a state?”

Israel retaining security control in the West Bank should not be an impediment, he argued: Just as American troops are stationed in Germany, Japan and Korea, “places where we were at war with that nation before we left our troops there,” he said, “having boots on the ground is not antithetical to peace.”

He said he did not know when the plan would be released, but would welcome the chance to promote and defend it.

“Maybe they won’t take it, maybe it doesn’t meet their minimums,” he said. “We’re relying upon the fact that the right plan, for the right time, will get the right reaction over time.”

But he did not chart a clear path to a deal given the likely resistance of Mr. Abbas. “It has to capture the imagination of the Palestinian people,” Mr. Friedman said. “Then things have to just take their course.”

Asked what that meant, he reached for a comparison to corporate restructuring, his legal specialty.

“We would put out a plan, and everybody would scream and yell and say this is no good, that’s no good,” he said. “And if you took everybody’s views at face value you’d just put it back in the drawer and curl up into a ball. But that’s not the way the world works.”

People will “posture” and “complain,” then analyze and “poll their people,” determine their options, and try to get a “more palatable” offer, he said.

“I’ve solved some pretty insoluble problems over my career,” he said, “and that’s how they get solved.”