Trump has named David Friedman as his choice
The American Conservative
Daniel Larison
David Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer who represented the president-elect over his failing hotels in Atlantic City, served Trump’s advisory team on the Middle East. He has set out a number of hardline positions on Israeli-Palestinian relations, including fervent opposition to the two-state solution and strong support for an undivided Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
He has called President Barack Obama an antisemite and suggested that US Jews who oppose the Israeli occupation of the West Bank are worse than kapos, Nazi-era prisoners who served as concentration camp guards.
Trump has made a very bad choice here, but unfortunately it is entirely in line with what we thought we knew about his positions on Israel and Palestine. He has made no secret of his pro-settler views, and he has adopted virtually every conventional hawkish “pro-Israel” position from his support for settlements to hostility to the nuclear deal with Iran. Choosing Friedman is consistent with the generally hard-line, pro-settler positions Trump has already taken, and so it may be the least surprising thing he’s done during the transition.
This is just the latest development in the ongoing transformation of the GOP into a radically hard-line “pro-Israel” party that goes beyond what it was during the Bush years.
