Former US Ambassador David Friedman told C14’s Sophia Tupolev that the biggest obstacle to Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria is not in Washington or at the UN, but inside Israel itself. Speaking on the C14 Israel Debrief as Americans head to the polls for the midterms, Friedman, who served as ambassador during the first Trump administration and authored the 2024 book One Jewish State, laid out his case for sovereignty, described a recent dinner he’d had with Israel’s hilltop youth, and warned that the political trend in the United States is moving against Israel.
“No one is going to be more Zionist than the Zionists”
Friedman said the greatest obstacle is the willingness of Israeli society to apply sovereignty. Most Israelis living outside Judea and Samaria visit rarely, he said, and the issue does not affect them day to day. “So the case really needs to be made domestically,” he said. “You don’t hear politicians talking about it on any side, right? No one really is offering a solution.”
Ahead of the U.S. midterms, Ambassador David Friedman roasts Michigan Senate hopeful El-Sayed 👇 Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Friedman (@DavidM_Friedman) says, if El-Sayed wins in Michigan’s Senate race, America gets “a United States senator who cannot distinguish between Israel and Iran.” He warns the US could start to look like “the UK or France or Australia or Canada.” Speaking today with Sophia Tupolev (@SophiaTupolev) on the C14 Israel Debrief, Friedman (now founder of @channel18israel) says this is a wake up call.
— C14 News | EN (@c14english) November 2, 2026
Even with backing from President Trump, he argued, foreign support cannot substitute for an Israeli decision. “No one is going to be more Zionist than the Zionists, as I always say,” Friedman said. “So Israel has to go first and they have to make up their minds.”
Sovereignty, he explained, means that someone living in Beit El or Shiloh is living in land “just as much Israel as if you’re living in Tel Aviv,” with “the same laws, the same rights of citizenship.” For Arab residents who accept Jewish sovereignty, which he compared to the biblical ger toshav, he envisioned local autonomy without a vote in national elections.
“It’ll be like another Gaza”
Friedman rejected proposals to start with Area C alone. “If you’re saying just Area C, you’re giving credence to Oslo, which, you know, to my mind has failed terribly,” he said. Leaving Areas A and B outside Israeli control, he warned, would create “a landlocked, entirely Arab community, hostile to Israel,” without Israeli police or army, a place he said could be “maybe more dangerous than Gaza, because it’s more centrally located.”
1+His preferred approach: “take it all,” then work over roughly a decade to separate the hostile population from the non-hostile one, including collecting illegal weapons.
The ticking clock on a ‘Palestinian’ state
Asked when Israel should apply sovereignty, Friedman answered: “About three or four years ago.” The world, he said, is “obsessed with the Palestinians,” and more countries will recognize a ‘Palestinian’ state over time.
1+Friedman warned that a Democratic president, who could be elected as soon as two years from now, would make recognition of a ‘Palestinian’ state on the 1967 borders the first order of business. “It’s the trend of the United States,” he said, adding that this is “frankly because Israel doesn’t offer its own solution to Judea and Samaria. You know, when you have no solution, when you have a vacuum, the vacuum gets filled by others.”
“Settler violence” and dinner with the hilltop youth
Friedman said the “settler violence” narrative has become an alternative line of attack against Israel. Asked who starts the violence, he said it is caused “overwhelmingly” by Arabs, adding: “it’s one sided, but the media is capturing the wrong side, right?”
He described having dinner the night before the interview with about 15 hilltop youth. In his telling, the 18-year-olds live in tents through cold nights, without running water or proper bathrooms, working as shepherds. “They don’t wake up in the morning saying, we want to go hurt our Arab neighbors,” he said. “They wake up in the morning and they think, let’s, you know, let’s hold this land for the benefit of the Jewish people.”
According to Friedman, the youth are not permitted to carry guns and fight back with sticks, stones and fists, “just enough to create enough deterrence so they can sleep outdoors in a tent at night.” He said the IDF can take half an hour to arrive, and that “armies were not created to defend 18-year-old kids on the top of the hill.” He said he would “much rather see this being done by the state of Israel,” which he said “has created a vacuum.”
Israel must set its own borders
As long as Israel fails to act, Friedman argued, it is “ceding the most important issue to others.” “If you want to be a free nation in your own land, you better decide for yourself, by yourself, what your borders are,” he said.
The Michigan race: “A huge wake-up call”
Turning to the midterms, Friedman pointed to the Michigan Senate race, where El-Sayed has been leading in the polls. “I’m hoping the polls are wrong,” he said. If they are right, America would see “a United States senator who cannot distinguish between Israel and Iran in terms of who is, you know, the worst enemy of the United States.”
A win, he said, would be “a huge shot in the arm for all those that think like him,” creating “a trend line that I fear.” While he does not expect America to abandon Israel during or immediately after the Trump administration, he warned that the trend could produce “a United States that looks a lot like the UK or France or Australia or Canada, and none of them are great friends of Israel anymore.”
“So this is a huge wake-up call if El-Sayed wins the election,” Friedman said. “And even the fact that he’s come this close to winning the election should be a wake-up call for everyone.”
F-35 parts and “looking to the East”
Friedman warned that Democrats with the energy in the party, naming AOC, Chris Van Hollen, Chris Murphy, Gavin Newsom, El-Sayed and Rahm Emanuel, would tell Israel to stop building ‘settlements’ and withdraw to the ’67 borders. Refuse, and the message would be: “Go find spare parts for your F-35s somewhere else.”
“That’s a very, very harsh and dangerous message,” he said. His advice to Jerusalem: “I would be looking to the East, not to the West. I’d be looking to someone like Modi, you know, to build an alliance with because he’s got similar problems.”
Why Israel matters to America
Friedman said much of the Democratic Party has been “taken over by a lot of Israel haters” who no longer see Israel as a strategic ally. “That’s all blindness,” he said, citing intelligence sharing he witnessed over four years on the inside: “Israel saves Americans on their home soil with its intelligence.”
The claim that aid to Israel is why Americans struggle with prices, he said, is unsupported: “the numbers don’t remotely support that.” Yet the message resonates, he warned, because “a lot of people love the idea of blaming Israel for America’s problems.”