Too Pro-Israel?
Why the left hates Trump’s new diplomat
THERE’S something oddly comforting about the unhinged freakout greeting Presidentelect Donald Trump’s choice for US ambassador to Israel — but something discomfiting, too.
The reassuring part is the fact that David Friedman, a partner at a major law firm and adviser to Trump on Israel issues, is a genuine outsider who appears ready to shake up the State Department’s notorious suspicion toward Israel. And it’s giving the left fits. “Having no experience in a given field seems to be, in the Trumpian universe, the greatest of virtues,” the New Yorker’s David Remnick sniped. Friedman, grumbled former Ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer, “is unsuitable to represent America in one of the most high-pressure diplomatic positions in the world.” But for sheer chutzpah, the reaction from Martin Indyk, who was Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Israel, takes the cake: “Bankruptcy law and involvement with settlements are not normally seen as an appropriate qualifications (sic) for the job.”
Indyk has a history of bashing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the press, and he was also involved in the Clinton administration’s failed attempt to help Shimon Peres defeat Bibi in 1996. After that, Indyk wrote in his memoirs, “the mutual trust so critical to the ambassador’s role as a channel between the prime minister and the president was missing.” Lesson: Don’t be Martin Indyk. Less amusing, however, are the attacks on Friedman’s views, which boil down to Friedman essentially being too pro-Israel for the mainstream left’s tastes. Indyk hinted at one: that Friedman has supported Israeli settlements. Obsessive overreaction to settlements is what caused the Obama administration to set back the cause of peace by a decade, so no one should be mourning Friedman’s past support for Jews living in their ancestral land.
Another is Friedman’s support for moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Our current policy of keeping the embassy in a city other than Israel’s capital is painfully stupid, and results in American presidents acting accordingly. Like when the White House sent out President Obama’s remarks at Peres’ funeral datelined “Jerusalem, Israel” — only to send out a clumsily “corrected” version that had the word “Israel” crossed out.
Not deleted. Crossed out. With all the professionalism of a kindergartner making lastminute adjustments to his fingerpainting masterpiece.
The embassy belongs in Jerusalem. Diplomats’ excuse for not moving it amounts to a heckler’s veto: it “will inspire riots across the Islamic world,” Kurtzer wrote, calling it “clearly dangerous.” Well, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, this week endorsed moving the embassy. So Kurtzer’s claim that it’s dangerous to recognize Jewish sovereignty in the Jews’ historic and eternal capital might now make him the undiplomatic one.
Either way, the Palestinian claim is to eastern Jerusalem, not the whole city, so this argument doesn’t hold water.
There is another objection to Friedman: He said a mean thing about the left-wing lobby J Street. This accusation is true: Friedman once said J Street is worse than the kapos, Jews chosen by Nazis to supervise concentration camps.
He shouldn’t have said it. But a person close to Friedman tells me he recognizes this, and that it was said in the heat of a vicious campaign in which people he knew were accused of anti-Semitism. He wouldn’t, I’m told, use such language again.
But what about his detractors? In a particularly demented piece in The New York Times, New School professor Omri Boehm shot back: “In fact, however, it is Friedman’s own politics — and the politics of the government that he supports — that’s continuous with anti-Semitic principles and collaborates with anti-Semitic politics.”
I won’t hold my breath for the across-the-board condemnation of Boehm’s “collaborator” smear.
But wait, there’s more! Perhaps the silliest argument against Friedman comes from the Jewish left, as reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “[Union for Reform Judaism] President Rick Jacobs said that the Reform movement has relied on US administrations to represent to Israel, through their ambassadors, the broad range of American Jewish opinion.”
Um, no. The position is US ambassador to Israel. The envoy serves at the pleasure of the president. And anyway, no one man represents all factions of Diaspora Jewry.
In fact, Friedman is Orthodox. This may be unnerving to leftists — Jewish or not — who see traditional Judaism as anachronistic and chauvinist, but a practicing Jew will not be out of place in Israel (even if the embassy stays in Tel Aviv). That Friedman is increasingly out of place in the bastions of American liberalism reflects poorly on the left, not Friedman. Let the ambassador do his job.