On this thread, Trump’s pick for the Ambassador to Israel has been announced, and its roiling up the Israelis. WaPo reports:
President-elect Donald J. Trump on Thursday named David M. Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer aligned with the Israeli far right, as his nominee for ambassador to Israel, elevating a campaign adviser who has questioned the need for a two-state solution and has likened left-leaning Jews in America to the Jews who aided the Nazis in the Holocaust.
Mr. Friedman, whose outspoken views stand in stark contrast to decades of American policy toward Israel, did not wait long on Thursday to signal his intention to upend the American approach. In a statement from the Trump transition team announcing his nomination, he said he looked forward to doing the job “from the U.S. embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.”
Through decades of Republican and Democratic administrations, the embassy has been in Tel Aviv, as the State Department insists that the status of Jerusalem — which both Israel and the Palestinians see as their rightful capital — can be determined only through negotiations as part of an overall peace deal.
Mr. Friedman, who has no diplomatic experience, has said that he does not believe it would be illegal for Israel to annex the occupied West Bank and he supports building new settlements there, which Washington has long condemned as illegitimate and an obstacle to peace.
Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Paul Rosenzweig are incidentally on location and have a report on Israeli reaction:
Unsurprisingly, the reaction in Israel to the appointment has been sharply divided along ideological lines, with the right-wing nationalists who make up the current government enthusiastic and more moderate figures ranging from reserved to despondent. The lefty daily Haaretz actually called on the Senate to reject Trump’s choice. “If the settlers had a state of their own in the West Bank, he might be suitable to serve as ambassador there, and maybe not even that, because his basic identification must be with overall American interests,” the paper commented. “If Friedman’s appointment fails to pass in the Senate after close scrutiny of his background and a thorough hearing, that will be a blessing for Israel.”
Their concern?
One predictable result of announcing an embassy move to Jerusalem and naming an ambassador to Israel who wishes to see settlements expanded and the West Bank annexed to Israel is violence. We don’t pretend to know what the trigger for that violence will be. Nor do we defend the propriety of anyone’s doing anything violent, rash, stupid, or dangerous. But you mess with the Jerusalem status quo at your peril, and (as one colleague of Paul’s, a foreign national working in the West Bank put it) Trump is playing with matches in a gas station here. There may well be a heavy price to pay for such games.
National Review’s Sarah Jones has similar worries:
This is bad for peace and good if you own a website about Armageddon. Friedman’s policies directly contradict ongoing American peace efforts (such as they are) and threaten to destabilize an already volatile situation. Trump has hardly ever been an advocate for Palestinians, but it’s obvious now that his incoming administration will pose an existential threat to their future.
It’s difficult to see this as anything other than the injection of the insanities of religion into politics, although the entire Israel thing is a cross of both in any case.
