Yesterday, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he will appoint his friend and adviser David Friedman to be ambassador to Israel, a move greeted with joy by far-right politicians.
While Friedman says he is “no expert” on foreign policy, he has been fiercely critical of President Obama’s work in the Middle East, attacking what he calls the president’s “blatant anti-Semitism,” accusing him of “appealing to the vilest anti-Semitic biases of the population” and claiming that he won’t denounce anti-Jewish violence.
Friedman called the Iranian nuclear agreement “the worst international accord since Neville Chamberlain conceded Eastern Europe to Hitler” and likened the agreement’s supporters to anti-Semitic mobs.
Like Trump, Friedman has gushed over Vladimir Putin, falsely claiming that Russia is working to defeat ISIS “all by itself.”
Friedman described Jewish supporters of a Mideast peace deal, such as J Street, as “far worse than kapos,” the prisoners who Nazis forced to work as enforcers in concentration camps. He wrote that while “kapos faced extraordinary cruelty and who knows what any of us would have done under those circumstances to saved a loved one,” J Street activists “are just smug advocates of Israel’s destruction delivered from the comfort of their secure American sofas – it’s hard to imagine anyone worse.”
An opponent of the two-state solution, he urged Israel to proscribe disloyalty among its Arab citizens and recommended that Israeli settlements in the West Bank “expand” since the West Bank is “not occupied territory,” adding: “If the Palestinians were given a swath of land tomorrow to build a state, in no time at all that state would become their worst nightmare – rife with corruption and taken over by ISIS or the next fanatical regime. Peace will come if and when Palestinians learn to stop hating us and to embrace life rather than worship death. We should try to help them in that effort, but in all cases let’s continue to build!”
