US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and White House Middle East Envoy Jason Greenblatt helped inaugurate a tunnel in an Israeli settlers’ archaeological dig under a Palestinian neighborhood in occupied Jerusalem. Friedman said the tunnel confirms the Jewish presence in ancient times in Jerusalem, and Palestinians responded with outrage to the American officials’ participation.
Israel’s threat of annexation is a crisis for liberal Zionists because it makes them confront a reality: There is not going to be a two-state solution. Yesterday Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street warned supporters: “Members of the Trump administration are opening the door to a one-state scenario where Palestinians will live as second-class citizens.” But that scenario exists right now, and liberal Zionists have done precious little to oppose it.
When J Street advocates for “Israel’s future as a democratic and Jewish homeland,” it is supporting a concept that has been a contradiction-in-terms since Israel’s establishment. Abba Solomon argues that J Street and Bernie Sanders too cannot face the fact that political Zionism means perpetual Jewish domination, or at best custody, of Palestinian lives.
After US Ambassador David Friedman said Israel has a right to annex parts of the West Bank, the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it may file a complaint with the International Criminal Court. “What reasoning could justify Friedman’s logic? International law prohibits the annexation of a land by force,” it said.
The deal of the century in the 1900s was the Balfour Declaration, which recognized Zionist colonization of Palestine, and Trump’s deal of the 21st century only continues that process, by giving Israel the right to annex portions of the West Bank and confine Palestinians to Bantustans.
Ambassador David Friedman’s religious remarks in Jerusalem Tuesday went well beyond his comment that Israel is “on the side of God.” Friedman likened the US-Israel relationship to the “altar” in the original Jewish temple in Jerusalem and called the embassy a “shrine” that people pray to and thank God for, and said the U.S. and Israel need to advance the relationship toward greater “holiness.”
Before Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017, he says he got calls from “presidents, dictators, prime minister, kings, queens– everybody” and didn’t take the calls. Similar pressure kept previous presidents from making the move, he told the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas yesterday, but moving the embassy made his biggest donors, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, very happy.
The US Government today folded the former US consulate in Jerusalem, which served Palestinians, into the Embassy led by ambassador and settler-advocate David Friedman in what Hanan Ashrawi of the PLO called “an act of political assault on Palestinian rights and identity.”
At the most fundamental level, all U.S. ambassadors share a common mission: to represent the national interests and policies of the United States. David Friedman, President Donald Trump’s nomination for ambassador to Israel, is unable to fulfill this basic obligation because his loyalties lie elsewhere, which is clear from his own statements and views.
On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders sent a one-page letter to David Friedman, President Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to Israel, asking the envoy-designee to explain his funding of a West Bank settlement and to consider repealing the tax-exempt status for charities financing settlements, like the one Friedman runs.