Reject choice for ambassador to Israel

Friedman would present not just a risk for Israel but also a risk for relations between Israel and American Jews.

Though Donald Trump may want to be disruptive, the Middle East is the wrong place to try. Yet the president-elect has done so with his choice of David Friedman as ambassador to Israel.

That Friedman is a bankruptcy lawyer with no diplomatic experience is just the start of the problem. He has said Israel should annex the occupied West Bank, an action that would end any chance for the two-state solution that has been American policy. Friedman would move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which could touch off another Palestinian

intifada. U.S. policy is that Jerusalem be part of the negotiated solution.

In addition, Friedman has called President Obama “blatantly anti-Semitic,” a characterization that smacks of racism. Friedman considers American Jews who belong to the J Street organization and support a Palestinian peace deal to be “worse than ‘kapos.’ “The term refers to Jews in Nazi concentration camps who supervised fellow prisoners doing hard labor. Recall that Donald Trump vowed to heal the nation after the divisive campaign.

Trump has announced many horrible appointments, among them potential Cabinet secretaries who want to abolish or cripple the agencies they would oversee. Yet Friedman may be the worst appointee in the worst place at the worst time. A current crisis shows why.

Israel faces a court-ordered Sunday deadline to evacuate an illegal West Bank settlement outpost called Amona. It is home to only about 40 Orthodox families and was built on land seized from Palestinians. Within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, however, the settler lobby is very powerful. Netanyahu has been seeking a way to placate those hard-liners.

This week, he found one. First, the government wants to delay the removal. After that, according to reports in the Israeli press, the government would spend 150 million shekels — about $40 million — from various departments, including the Defense Ministry, rather than simply evict a tiny group of people from where they shouldn’t be living. Among other things, the settlers will get compensation in exchange for not suing over their removal. Still, the settlers issued a statement that said, “If the state does not keep its promise, we will not hesitate to resume the fight with a vengeance. Amona will not fall again.”

But there’s a complication. An Israeli legal rights organization claims to have found the Palestinian owners of the land for the settlers’ new home. An adviser to the group told the Maariv newspaper, “They are transferring the people of Amona, who squatted on private property, to private property of other Palestinians. We will do legally everything that is possible to prevent that.”

Settlements are the main obstacle on the Israeli side to a two-state solution. Friedman supports settlement expansion. Siding with the Amona settlers is the wrong position for the American government. Friedman would present not just a risk for Israel but also a risk for relations between Israel and American Jews, 71 percent of whom voted for Hillary Clinton, based on exit polls. In Israel, the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox hold power; one rabbi this week advised students at Technion University in Haifa to avoid the student union because the university put up a Christmas tree. But the Orthodox are a small minority in this country, where the Reform and Conservative branches dominate.

In an interview with the Times of Israel, Union for Reform Judaism President Rick Jacobs worried that Friedman’s narrow appeal could further erode support in the U.S. for Israel. Orthodox rabbis in Israel have criticized Reform and Conservative Jews as inferior. “Our larger project has been to keep people connected to Israel,” Jacobs said. He added that Trump may bring “a series of policy shifts that make it harder for non-Orthodox Jews to see Israel as a place they love.”

Sadly, the U.S. and our longtime democratic ally in the Middle East face similar divisions based on demographic change. Fifteen months ago, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin expressed concern about the “tension, fear and hostility” among his people. Friedman would exacerbate those divisions here and there.

Daniel Kurtzer, an ambassador to Israel in the George W. Bush administration, wrote in The New York Times that Friedman “would be representing not the American people but a small, extreme minority of Americans who have in mind the interests of a small, extreme minority in Israel.” Kurtzer urged the Senate to reject Friedman’s appointment. We agree. The tinder-dry Middle East is no place to send a diplomatic arsonist.