This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his third official visit to Washington since U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January—the most of any world leader. The two discussed the contours of a potential cease-fire in Gaza, as well as their recent decision to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Beyond the here and now, however, major questions about the future of the Middle East are worth examining. What happens after a cease-fire in Gaza, and who runs the decimated enclave? How do Israel and the United States grapple with the changing power dynamics in the Middle East—as well as their own diminished soft power?

This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his third official visit to Washington since U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January—the most of any world leader. The two discussed the contours of a potential cease-fire in Gaza, as well as their recent decision to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Beyond the here and now, however, major questions about the future of the Middle East are worth examining. What happens after a cease-fire in Gaza, and who runs the decimated enclave? How do Israel and the United States grapple with the changing power dynamics in the Middle East—as well as their own diminished soft power?

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with a commentator who is long used to mulling these bigger-picture questions: Thomas Friedman, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the New York Times. Subscribers can watch the full discussion in the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: Does Netanyahu even want a cease-fire deal?

Thomas Friedman: He wants his cease-fire deal. That would be a cease-fire for 60 days. It would return about half of the hostages, and unfortunately corpses of Israeli hostages, in return for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. After the 60-day cease-fire, though, he wants the right to resume the war, just as he did with the last cease-fire, because his domestic political needs require it. The two far-right members of his cabinet, or I should say the two farthest-right members of his cabinet, [Finance Minister] Bezalel Smotrich and [National Security Minister] Itamar Ben-Gvir, both insist that the war continue until what Bibi called “total victory.” And so the reason that the meetings with Trump are so private, so intense, is that they’re talking not only leader to leader, but politician to politician.

Bibi is explaining his political needs to Trump and insisting they operate within them for a cease-fire. Now, what Trump is saying on the other side, I don’t know. But I covered Jim Baker, and he would be saying that any political needs are subordinate to America’s interests. America’s interests require a cease-fire right now. We want this war over. He would tell Bibi to figure out the politics of it and not come back until he has.

RA: Where do other regional players fit into this? There’s Saudi Arabia, of course, but also Qatar, which is trying to mediate this round.

TF: There really is a two-ring circus going on, and it’s interconnected. So there’s the question of the cease-fire in Gaza. How do you get that consolidated? Because Hamas wants an end to the war. They want to be sure that at the end of 60 days, Israel will not resume the war and expel Hamas. So that drama is going on in one circle. In the other circle, there’s the question of harvesting the military achievements of the 12-day war against Iran to put together a long-term security alliance. The United States, starting with the Biden administration, has been trying to forge a U.S.-Saudi security treaty that the U.S. Congress would then endorse in return for Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel.

I would suggest that another reason the talks are so secret is because they’re trying to see if they can fill the gap between what I would call [Saudi Crown Prince] [Mohammed bin Salman’s] MBS’s bottom line, in terms of Israeli commitments toward Palestinian statehood, and Bibi’s top line, in terms of what’s consistent with his politics. I’m very dubious that gap can be closed. MBS has been really isolated since the murder of [journalist Jamal] Khashoggi by his government, but he’s finally worked his way out of that isolation. Do you really think he’s going to give away the Palestinian store right now? Remember, also domestically, he’s gored many oxen with his religious and governmental reforms. And so his bottom line will be very close to some firm,........

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