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Trump Nominated an Israeli Ambassador Who Is Pro-Israel – Why Is that Controversial?

By Mark Hemingway

To fill the position of U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Donald Trump has nominated David Friedman, an accomplished lawyer and an adviser to Trump on Israeli issues. Friedman is something of a political outsider, but in a Trumpian world, that may actually be an asset. And like Trump, he has something of an inclination toward hyperbole.

Earlier this year, Friedman called the left-wing Jewish group J-Street and its supporters “worse than kapos” for supporting a two-state solution in Israel. Kapos were Jews that worked with the Nazis inside concentration camps. However, the selection of Friedman is supported by former Democratic senator and vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, who can hardly be viewed as a radical by his fellow Democrats. Lieberman recently told CNN, “I think he will make clear [the ‘kapos’ remark is] one of the statements he regrets having made.”

At the end of the day, however, the real issue is not Friedman’s supposed lack of qualifications or his rhetoric. It’s that the anti-Israel left has become acclimated to having an outsize voice in the Obama administration, and they aren’t reacting well to the fact that Israel policy is about to change substantially. They oppose the selection of Friedman because he’s resolutely in favor of a strong Israel being a stabilizing force in the Middle East. Fits are being thrown about Friedman nonetheless. In the New York Post, Seth Mandel has a good run down of what’s going on:

“Having no experience in a given field seems to be, in the Trumpian universe, the greatest of virtues,” the New Yorker’s David Remnick sniped. Friedman, grumbled former Ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer, “is unsuitable to represent America in one of the most high-pressure diplomatic positions in the world.” But for sheer chutzpah, the reaction from Martin Indyk, who was Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Israel, takes the cake: “Bankruptcy law and involvement with settlements are not normally seen as an appropriate qualifications (sic) for the job.” Indyk has a history of bashing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the press, and he was also involved in the Clinton administration’s failed attempt to help Shimon Peres defeat Bibi in 1996. After that, Indyk wrote in his memoirs, “the mutual trust so critical to the ambassador’s role as a channel between the prime minister and the president was missing.” Lesson: Don’t be Martin Indyk. Less amusing, however, are the attacks on Friedman’s views, which boil down to Friedman essentially being too pro-Israel for the mainstream left’s tastes. Indyk hinted at one: that Friedman has supported Israeli settlements. Obsessive overreaction to settlements is what caused the Obama administration to set back the cause of peace by a decade, so no one should be mourning Friedman’s past support for Jews living in their ancestral land.

As the overreaction to Friedman illustrates, opposition to Trump’s nominees ought to amount to more serious concerns, more than disagreement with the nominee’s beliefs. Further, Friedman is just one in a long line of freak-outs over Trump nominees. It’s going to be hard to oppose any of Trump’s nominations if the left is busy hysterically opposing all of them at the same time.

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