Tag: Israel

By appointing a leader of the Israeli settlement project to be his ambassador to Israel, Trump signals a retreat from America’s role as “honest broker” in the region. It’s not hard to see who stands to benefit.

By Jay Michaelson / The Daily Beast
December 18, 2016

Ironically, the appointment of one of the leaders of the Israeli settlement project in the West Bank (ruled illegal by the International Criminal Court and opposed by every American administration since Nixon), and an extreme Jewish nationalist may, in the end, be a catastrophe for Israel.

David Friedman, Donald Trump’s close confidante and ambassador-designate to Israel, is not a right-winger. To be on the right wing implies that one is on a continuum from liberal to conservative. But Friedman — together with around 15% of the Israeli Jewish population — inhabits a different world entirely. His appointment would represent a total realignment of American policy in the Middle East, with the biggest winner being (surprise) Vladimir Putin.

The normal continuum runs as follows. The consensus of the international community, the Israeli government, and every American government for a generation is that that there must be a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel. Of course, within that consensus, there are hawks and doves, right-wingers and left. Some are willing to take more risks for peace, some are more mistrustful of the people they call “the Arabs” and want any peace process to be slow and gradual. But all agree that it’s not feasible to create an apartheid regime in which 7 million Jews rule over 10 million non-Jews.

But in the world of Friedman, the Zionist Organization of America, the settler wing of the Israeli Right, and some parts of the American Jewish community, the path forward is one state — Israel — led by Jews, favoring Jews legally, and running from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. It is an apartheid state, meaning a state wherein one population has civil rights that another does not; where one has freedom of movement and another does not; where one has the entire apparatus of the state in its control, and the other either cannot vote or is guaranteed a permanent minority. Continue reading “Friedman Isn’t a Hawk or a Dove — He’s an Ostrich”

You don’t even have to be a J Street fan to consider calling them “Kapos,” as David Friedman has done, as disqualifying for such a symbolic post for the U.S. Jewish community.

By David Schraub / Haaretz
December 18, 2016

One does not have to be a J Street member or even a fan to think that comparing them to “Kapos” is grotesque and marginalizing, and should be (what’s the word I’m looking for? Help me out, ADL) disqualifying for any administration post — much less one deeply symbolic for America’s Jewish population.

Early in the Trump transition phase, it looked as if Mike Huckabee would be appointed ambassador to Israel. Huckabee had recently accused Jews of plotting false flag hate crime hoaxes to frame Donald Trump supporters; he also has a bit of a history of tossing out casual Holocaust comparisons and then getting really angry when Jews cry foul.

But Huckabee will not be our ambassador. Instead, Trump has tapped close adviser David Friedman for the role. Friedman has called Barack Obama an “anti-Semite” and contended that J Streeters are “far worse than Kapos.” He also asserted, in the course of advocating “allegiance” standards for Israel’s Muslim citizens, that “In the United States, advocating to overthrow the government by force or violence can get you life in prison” (No, it can’t). And of course, he’s an opponent of the two-state solution.

It’s a little unnerving that the thing Trump looks for in an Israel ambassador is a propensity to frivolously toss out Nazi comparisons. It’s almost like he won’t actually be a real friend in the White House. Imagine that. Continue reading “The Grotesque anti-Semitic Turn of David Friedman”

By Nathan Guttman / Forward
December 16, 2016

“Everything an ambassador says and does has an impact on policy. The president hasn’t been sworn in yet, the Secretary of State hasn’t spoken about this, and he’s already talking about the policy he is going to change. This is unheard of.”
—Daniel Kurtzer, Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel

President-Elect Donald Trump’s decision to appoint David Friedman as his ambassador to Israel is brewing into a Jewish battle royale for supporters and detractors of the two-state solution.

For the Jewish left, Friedman appointment has quickly emerged as a banner for rallying troops already concerned with the impact the Trump presidency will have on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the right, Trump’s choice of a pro-settlement bankruptcy lawyer as chief envoy to Israel is seen as ushering in a new era of settlement expansion and changing the fundamentals of American policy toward the conflict. Continue reading “Jewish Storm Builds Over Friedman’s Appointment as Ambassador”

Following the appointment of a settlement-loving envoy, the pretense is over: the United States will no longer be able to claim that it is an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

By Gideon Levy / Haaretz
December 18, 2016

This means the United States will no longer be able to claim that it is an honest broker. It never was one, but now the mask is off. In those terms, Friedman’s appointment is right and good. The Palestinians, Europeans and the rest of the world should know: America is for the occupation. No more pretense.

President-elect Donald Trump has decided to appoint an anti-Israeli and racist lawyer as ambassador to Israel. That is, of course, his prerogative. With David Friedman’s appointment last Thursday, the United States has finally come out of the closet. From now on, it officially supports the establishment of an Israeli apartheid state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

Friedman is not the first Jewish ambassador to Israel — a matter that has always sparked questions of dual loyalty — but he is the first declared friend of the settlements in this position. His predecessor, Dan Shapiro, was also a friend of the settlements, like all the ambassadors before him — representatives of governments that could have stopped the settlement project but did not raise a finger to do so, and even financed it.

But now we have an ambassador who has also contributed to the dispossession from his own pocket. Continue reading “The U.S. Is Finally Out of the Closet”