Give Trump the Nobel for Gaza, if He Does the Harder Parts to Come

 

Opinion

Thomas L. Friedman

Give Trump the Nobel for Gaza, if He Does the Harder Parts to Come

 

Oct. 9, 2025

Thomas L. Friedman

By Thomas L. Friedman

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/opinion/trump-israel-nobel-gaza.html

Opinion Columnist

 

I hope that if the first stage of this Gaza cease-fire, hostage release and prisoner exchange comes off as planned in the next few days that President Trump is showered with praise — for three reasons that could impact the future of both the Middle East and America.

 

First, because getting to this point really was hard. It took a geopolitical bank shot that had to bounce off — and simultaneously win the trust of — Israel, Hamas, Qatar, Turkey, the Palestinian Authority, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the U.A.E. before landing in Gaza. On the degree-of-difficulty scale, this was right up there.

 

Good for the president and his team for engineering it.

 

Second, this is just the first stage of a multistage plan. So if Trump owns this early part, has his name on it and wins accolades for bringing it off, it should ensure that he remains engaged to push through the later stages of his peace plan. They are much harder and — I cannot stress this enough — they will require Trump staying fully engaged. Mr. President, you may not be interested in Palestinian or Jewish history, but they are now both very interested in you.

 

I worry that Trump does not fully respect the complexity of the task his administration has taken on with the plan that will bear his name. We are talking about full-scale nation-building in Gaza, which is almost completely destroyed, yet still home to some two million uprooted people. With a national security team that is now woefully small, Trump will have to oversee the disarmament of Hamas, the recruitment and development of a multinational security force to fill the vacuum created when Israel withdraws, the rebuilding of Gaza from scratch and the forging of a transitional government to run the place. And it will all be done under the eye of an Israeli government that is deeply suspicious that Hamas will regroup.

 

Trump told his cabinet Thursday with his usual penchant for exaggeration: “We ended the war in Gaza, and on a much bigger basis, created peace … hopefully an everlasting peace in the Middle East.” I sure hope he does not really believe that, because he will be working on Gaza for the rest of his presidency.

 

That said, if successful, the implementation of the harder stages holds the promise of reviving, over time, the possibility of a two-state solution under a totally new formula — one that combines Palestinian, Arab and international stewardship over Gaza’s future. If it works, the arrangement might one day be extended to the West Bank.

 

I think Trump’s team has come up with an intriguing new model for dealing with the future of both occupied territories, because Israelis and Palestinians can no longer resolve their conflict alone. After the Gaza war, there is not a shred of trust left between them. The gears for collaboration are all stripped bare. They will need permanent U.S. and Arab guarantors for peace. (More on this another day.)

 

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If the implementation of all the stages of this peace plan rebuilds a pathway for Israeli-Palestinian peace, that would be worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe even two.

 

The third reason I hope Trump gets his due for engineering this peace plan has nothing to do with the Middle East. It’s out of a hope, which is probably in vain, that this might actually inspire Trump to make peace in America as well.

 

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” Trump wrote on social media. Well, they sure are, Mr. President, and now that you have brought a measure of peace to Gaza by showing respect and building trust with all the parties — you even got a longtime U.S. enemy, Hamas, to trust you — please try the same diplomacy at home.

 

Instead of making America as fractured as Gaza, by indicting your political foes on the flimsiest of charges and boasting that “I hate my opponent,” as you did at the Charlie Kirk memorial, why not surprise us all on the upside: Invite the Democratic leaders to Camp David and tell the world you’re not coming out without an American-American peace treaty? Remember, you won. You’re president. Set a positive example and rise above all your personal grievances. Look at all the good you can do in the world by forging compromises.

 

Do that at home and your popularity will soar. Don’t do that — and keep playing the uniter in the Middle East and the divider in America — and this Gaza plan will be a footnote to a failed presidency.

 

To that end, I hope Trump reflects on how he pulled together the Mideast deal. His is a rather unusual diplomatic negotiating style. When it came to seeking peace in Gaza, Trump was not interested in the politics of distributing blame or slinging humiliating nicknames at any of the parties, including Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.

 

He was only interested in getting to yes with those who could make it happen and get him closer to a Nobel Peace Prize. In a region where few leaders do not have blood on their hands or political prisoners in jail (for advocating human rights), Trump is a welcome relief from Democratic presidents. He doesn’t give two cents about the human rights scorecard of any of these players. But he also was not ready to indulge their usual excuses about how their domestic politics would not allow them to compromise.

 

Trump’s approach was: I am not interested in who you are; I will judge you by what you do. If it is what I want and need, you are great; if it gets in my way, I will make you pay. Democrats, generally speaking, are just not as good at combining moral indifference with coercive diplomacy in the name of peace. It comes naturally to Trump. Middle Eastern leaders see him as one of them.

 

As Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it: “The president had some extraordinary phone calls and meetings that required a high degree of intensity and commitment and made this happen.”

 

Oh, boy, as a Middle East aficionado, I would love to have listened in on those calls!

 

Both Hamas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel will find a way to say this result is a great achievement, but it is not the result they were seeking as they fought this war.

 

Hamas launched this war on Oct. 7, 2023, in part to destroy a Biden plan that started with reforming the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — Hamas’s archrival, which has embraced the Oslo peace accords. This reform of the P.A., in the Biden plan, was then supposed to pave the way for negotiations with Israel on a two-state solution and, in return for that, Saudi Arabia was to normalize relations with Israel, and the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were to sign a security treaty.

 

Hamas, and its regional backer, Iran, did not want to see any Palestinian progress toward a two-state agreement that would be led by the P.A., let alone normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. That would have left both Iran and Hamas very isolated. Now they are both isolated and militarily devastated.

 

At the same time, Netanyahu fought this war — from Day 1, in my view — in a way that he hoped would result in Israel controlling Gaza forever, through some kind of quisling local forces that would not include either Hamas — the terrorists who started the war — or the Palestinian Authority — the logical alternative to Hamas. Bibi constantly sought to delegitimize the P.A. because he did not want a single moderate Palestinian negotiating body that could represent the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza. That would immediately have led to global pressure to negotiate a two-state solution.

 

With Trump Bibi got just the opposite. Trump’s plan doesn’t promise Palestinian statehood, but it stipulates that as Gaza redevelopment advances and the Palestinian Authority reform program is carried out, “the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.”

 

Netanyahu played into Trump’s hands by putting himself entirely in Trump’s hands.

 

Over the last year, in pursuing his scorched-earth policy in Gaza, Bibi told the world to get lost, Europe to get lost, Democrats to get lost, liberal American Jews to get lost, Israel’s Arab allies to get lost, even moderate Republicans to get lost. He put Israel’s fate entirely in Trump’s hands — thinking that when Trump came up with his first Gaza plan — a cockamamie plan to get all the Palestinians out of Gaza and turn it into a new Riviera — that Trump had given him a free pass to raze Gaza.

 

But when the Arabs and America’s European allies, and Tony Blair, weighed in and turned Trump back toward a real peace process — declaring that Israel could not annex Gaza or the West Bank — Netanyahu had no lever left to pull. He had no Trump or Republicans to undermine the president the way he did with Joe Biden.

 

That is what got us here, and why is “here” so important? A member of the Israeli negotiating team at Camp David in 2000, Gidi Grinstein, put it well in an email to me: The 20-point Trump plan offers a pivotal opportunity to not only bring peace to Gaza and free the hostages, but to “re-establish the longstanding fundamental principles of the Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process since the Camp David Accords of 1978-79.”

 

How so? Trump has established, Grinstein explained, “that there will be no unilateral annexations in Gaza or the West Bank; that an upgraded and reformed Palestinian Authority will be the self-governing body of the Palestinians in the West Bank and, in the future, in Gaza.” And the political horizon, he went on, includes a nod by Trump toward the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, which, Grinstein wrote, “effectively means some form of political separation between Israel and the Palestinians.”

 

As I said, just stopping this terrible Gaza war — if it holds — is worthy of praise and the stuff of wonderful headlines. But seeing this whole plan through would be the stuff of history and Nobel Prizes. And getting Trump to realize what made him effective in the Middle East — governing by addition, not division — would actually make him so much better a president at home. That would be the stuff of miracles.

 

Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook