David Friedman, Hard-Line Ambassador To Israel

Click here for a scathing article by David Remnick in The New Yorker, entitled "Trump’s Daily Bankruptcy and the Ambassador to Israel." He's using the word "bankruptcy" figuratively, not literally; he says reading the news these days feels like you're reading The Onion:

Because, while so much of the media, in ways subtle and broad, attempts to normalize the Trump ascendancy, while we are told that patriotism demands that we accept Trump and “give him a chance,” the President-elect acts in ways that leave even dystopian satire behind. His behavior has little to do with conservatism or libertarianism or populism; his mode is recklessness, a self-admiring belief that unpredictability is the path to national salvation.

The article claims that Friedman is to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu. It mentions the hard-right orientation of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and his family, and the fact that although the State Department has long considered the West Bank settlements an obstacle to peace in the region, Friedman and the Kushner family are ardent supporters of the settlements. He claims that Obama is guilty of "blatant anti-Semitism," which is ridiculous on its face.

Friedman has described J Street, the liberal Zionist lobbying group, as comparable to the “Kapos during the Nazi regime.” The reference is to the prisoners forced to work as functionaries in the concentration camps.

“Finally, are J Street supporters really as bad as kapos? The answer, actually, is no,” Friedman wrote in Arutz Sheva. “They are far worse than kapos—Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps. The kapos faced extraordinary cruelty and who knows what any of us would have done under those circumstances to save a loved one? But J Street? They are just smug advocates of Israel’s destruction delivered from the comfort of their secure American sofas—it’s hard to imagine anyone worse.”

He says: "When one read this morning in the paper that Friedman 'has no experience in diplomacy,' one could only mutter, 'No kidding.'”

Remnick concludes his article with bitter remarks about Trump and the expected outcome of a Trump/Friedman hard-line policy with regard to Israel:

“What can you say about Trump?” Avishai Margalit, an Israeli philosopher and co-founder of Peace Now, told me. “Everything is an outlier. No one can predict anything. It’s not as if there is a deviation and you try to explain it. Everything is a deviation. You cannot rationalize it. It’s a family business, and they treat the White House as a family business, like Don Corleone. He doesn’t feel that he has to please anybody. You bully everyone and see what happens. The only thing you can say about Friedman’s appointment is that it’s not as if some other Ambassador would make a big difference. It doesn’t matter. There is no peace process, though Friedman may escalate things. The Palestinians have given up in any case. They have lost hope in any solution, and this is another nail in the coffin.”