Trump’s path to ‘most pro-Israel’ president paved by bankruptcy expert and real estate attorney who once lived in a settlement

Speculation is swirling around who will comprise President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet, in part to glean a sense of his policies. Trump dithered on America’s role in the Middle East during the campaign. Yet with regard to Israel, two key advisers with hardline visions not usually endorsed by mainstream candidates have made specific promises in recent months which, in the wake of the election results, are being heralded as ending the “era of a Palestinian state.”

A year ago Trump began his race stating he was “neutral” on Israel. Quickly he shifted gears after catching flack from pro-Israel and Jewish groups traditionally aligned with the GOP. A more hardline Trump debuted at the AIPAC policy conference last March, where he made a commitment usually given by fringe Republican candidates and not frontrunners; Trump said he would move Israel’s capital to Jerusalem.

In his speech, Trump also cooled skeptical Jewish institutions that were displeased with his silence on the anti-Semitic voices fomenting alongside his rallies. His son-in-law Jared Kushner who is an Orthodox Jew was reported to have heavily contributed to the draft. Trump closed AIPAC by reminding his audience, “My daughter Ivanka is about to have a beautiful Jewish baby.”

Today, Trump’s stride has positioned him to be “the most pro-Israel candidate this nation has seen,” or so said one of the two men thought to be behind the about face, Trump Israel adviser David Friedman. Friedman was describing why Trump hired him in an interview on Monday with Your Voice radio, a station created to support the Trump campaign according to its website.

Listen to “INTERVIEW: David Friedman (11/7) “Co-Chairman, Trump Israel Advisory Committee”” on Spreaker.

Friedman has talked at length about his view against a Palestinian state and for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, but on Monday he said that Trump’s position was the same.

“We’re taking the view that the Israelis have just as much of a right if a much greater right to Judea and Samaria as the Palestinians, and when they sit down and talk to each other it will be on that basis. That is frankly, a unique position of Donald Trump and one that we are very proud of,” he said, using the religious Jewish term to designate the West Bank.

Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967 and since that time the official policy of every U.S. administration has been that these are occupied lands. Similarly, every U.S. administration has considered Israel’s capital Tel Aviv.

“It’s not just the commitment of an individual, it’s the commitment of an entire political party to support the state of Israel in ways that frankly Israel has not seen from this country before,” Friedman said.

“A Trump administration Israel relationship is going to look very different from an Obama administration,” Friedman said, conveying to Your Voice that Trump also intends to increase intelligence sharing between the U.S. and Israel, and wipe out the Obama-Netanyahu deal that capped U.S. aid to Israel at $38 billion over the next ten years.

Friedman says that number is too low and does not account for inflation.

Gaza, Friedman said, is not on the Trump to-do list. Friedman has previously alluded to Gaza no longer being a priority during a hot-mic lunch with a spokesperson for a settler organization we reported on a few weeks ago.

As for the Palestinians, their government should expect less from the U.S. under President Trump. Friedman added that Trump would immediately suspend direct assistance to the Palestinian Authority until it stops paying subsidies to the families of imprisoned or killed Palestinians who attack Israelis in nationalist crimes. This issue has been raised by Congress in the past but never became law. 

The financial loss of U.S. direct support to the Palestinian Authority is negligible. Although the Palestinian leadership is cash-strapped, most of the American aid is for USAID projects and not handed over to the Palestinians themselves. The Obama administration made further changes to how the U.S. gives funds to the Palestinian Authority. Now, the U.S. pays Palestinians creditors rather than give the money directly to the Palestinian government to manage and spend, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service earlier this year.

Moreover, the Palestinians have claimed since 2015 they no longer use funds from the West Bank government to finance the prisoner subsidies.

Before zooming into the campaign Friedman was Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer from his Atlantic City casino case and a partner at the same law firm handling Trump’s litigious row with the New York Times. He is one of two chairs to Trump’s Israel Advisory Committee, serving alongside Jason Greenblatt, a real estate lawyer and the chief legal officer of the Trump organization since 1997.

Neither Freidman nor Greenblatt have professional foreign policy experience. 

Friedman’s most relevant credentials include heading a Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces charity that raises funds for the Israeli military, and Greenblatt once attended a religious school in a West Bank settlement and has authored a tourist guide on family holidays in Israel. He supports 10-day trips for traveling parents and their children. 

In that sense, both Trump and his Israeli advisers are Washington outsiders.

In an interview with Orthodox outlet Yated Ne’eman in August, Greenblatt said he studied at a yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Alon Shuvot before attending university. If Trump ends up giving Greenblatt one of the more than 4,000 political appointments he is to make over the next 70-some days, he stands to become the most senior official in any U.S. administration to have lived in a settlement.

Whatever Trump’s Israel policy ends up being, it will likely be shaped more dominantly by his pick for Secretary of State. Newt Gingrich is the rumored frontrunner, according to cable reports and Politico‘s list of cabinet hopefuls. Gingrich has long championed moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and once called the Palestinians an “invented” people in an interview with the Jewish Channel while he was on the campaign trail for his own presidential bid in 2011.  

Both Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoned Trump today to congratulate him. Trump invited Netanyahu to Washington DC for a meeting “at the first opportunity.”

Netanyahu then made another call to former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wishing her well.

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“In an interview with Orthodox outlet Yated Ne’eman in August, Greenblatt said he studied at a yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Alon Shuvot before attending university. ”

That’s not quite the same as ‘once lived in a settlement’ (as if that carries a stigma).

The bottom line is under a Trump presidency, the Palestinian people are going to be marginalized like never before. If we thought the present and previous presidents, preferred to support their occupier, aid and arm it, under the new president, it seems all hopes for freedom and rights in their territories will lost. The zionist leader and Trump are similar in many ways, twisting arms and attacking those who “dare” speak out against them, seems to be the common factor.
Let us not forget they are also well known liars, who have conned their way to achieve their goals, devious, secretive, and always up to no good.

A more hardline Trump debuted at the AIPAC policy conference last March, where he made a commitment usually given by fringe Republican candidates and not frontrunners; Trump said he would move Israel’s capital to Jerusalem.

Sounds like deja vu.

Here’s George W Bush promising AIPAC in May 2000 that he would “begin the process of moving the U.S. ambassador to the city Israel has chosen as its capital,” a reference to Jerusalem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/23/us/bush-says-clinton-misstepped-in-israel.html

And here’s Barack Obama promising AIPAC in June 2008 that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”
http://www.nysun.com/national/obama-promises-undivided-jerusalem-as-israeli/79363/

And here’s Mitt Romney telling Israelis in July 2012 that “a nation has the capacity to choose its own capital city, and Jerusalem is Israel’s capital”, and promising to “follow the same policy we have had in the past, our embassy would be in the capital, and the timing of that is something [he] would want to work out with the government”.
http://thehill.com/policy/international/240905-romney-says-jerusalem-is-israels-capital-vows-to-move-us-embassy

The ZioZombies in the Land of Desecration must be for the moment delirious about the the outcome of the election. Not so sure about the Yahoo. @Jackdaw I call him that partly because for me he epitomizes Swift`s creature and partly because he can`t make up his mind about his own name – used to be a ” Ben Nitay ” in America when he didn`t want to be burdened by a name that Americans would find weird/foreign/vaguely threatening and his family name was I believe Miliekowsky. They say what`s in a name – well it is more a question of what`s in the mind of the person who keeps changing his name – trying to hide something,ashamed of something denying something ? Anyway back to the Yahoo , the self designated leader of all the Jews in all of the world and the problems he may have with Trump. I think these will emerge sooner rather than later because we have two super egos at play here and Donald is the one who will I believe soon put the Yahoo in his little place if he steps out of line by daring to question his views or comments ( as he was able to do in that squirming White House address to Obama ).

As for a Palestinian State – gone,all done and dusted,will never happen – not that it ever was going to happen. Hopefully soon the Palestinians in the West Bank will kick out Abbas and his cronies and start the process of campaigning for equal rights and citizenship. At some stage in the very near future the ZioZombies will be looking at what they have done and they will be the ones berating themselves for “never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity ” to facilitate the creation of a separate Palestinian state.

Trump’s election heralds coming of Messiah’ says Deri

This is it, the God of history has finally decided to give us what we got coming.