Biblical Ambassador

On a chilly, December day in Jerusalem, as construction rumbled on outside the window, expanding the consulate into an embassy, Friedman explained that Jewish sages said the 10 spies’ sin, as opposed to Caleb and Joshua’s righteousness, was that “they lacked the vision and faith and confidence with regard to Israel.” He chose this painting, he said, because “I don’t want to have the sin of the spies, of not having confidence in the U.S. relationship with Israel.”

There’s another, more modern political lesson from the biblical story displayed in Friedman’s office. It’s one that the ambassador seems to have internalized: avoid the pitfalls of groupthink.

If there’s one thing that has characterized Friedman’s tenure so far, it is a total upending of conventional wisdom about America’s role as mediator between Israel and the Palestinians, and consequently of what the U.S. ambassador’s job is.

“I think our foreign policy — and this is not a critique of a particular party — with regard to the Palestinians has been a failure for a generation or more. It wasn’t ill-intentioned, but ill-conceived,” he said.

We don’t know what is in the Trump administration’s peace plan, which Friedman said will be released in the spring. But we do know that, in formulating it, Friedman, senior adviser Jared Kushner, and Jason Greenblatt, the special representative for international negotiations, have re-examined the two-state paradigm that was insisted on by the past three administrations.

[Related: Kushner withholding Israeli-Palestinian peace plan until Israel’s April elections]

The goal of the “ultimate deal,” as President Trump has called peace between Israel and the Palestinians, is to ensure security for Israel while granting greater autonomy and dignity to the Palestinians, including an improved economy and quality of life, Friedman explained. But he didn’t go so far as to call for a Palestinian state.

“There ought to be a means to get at least closer to a point where the Palestinians have more control over their lives in a way that doesn’t jeopardize Israel’s security,” he said. “We’re trying to find that perfect place to land, and ultimately, there will be some Israelis that view [the plan] as exceeding their maximum and some Palestinians for whom it doesn’t meet their minimum. But it will hopefully, if nothing else, provoke a serious discussion that hasn’t taken place in a long time.”

Pressed on the issue of Palestinian statehood, Friedman only said: “We’d like to see Palestinian autonomy improve significantly, as long as it doesn’t come at the risk of Israeli security. Where you slice that can be debated.”

Friedman’s predecessor, Daniel B. Shapiro, is skeptical about the shift. While he wouldn’t comment on Friedman’s work, Shapiro is an outspoken advocate of a two-state solution and is concerned about its possible abandonment.

“It’s hard to say whether [the Trump administration] has been more or less successful, because we don’t know what their goal is” before a peace plan is released, the former ambassador said. “If it’s a two-state solution and they’re unsuccessful as we were, that’s not a criticism. If the goal is to bury it, maybe they’re very successful, but I think it’s a bad choice that won’t serve Israeli and Palestinian interests in the long term.”

Friedman is also in the unique position of representing the U.S. to both Israel and the Palestinians. He said the previous arrangement, in which the ambassador spoke to Jerusalem and the American consul general in Jerusalem talked to the Palestinians in Ramallah, created an “artificial separation” hindering communication and workflow.

The Palestinian Authority cut direct, high-level ties when the Trump administration announced that the U.S. Embassy would be moved to Jerusalem, Israel’s capital. Friedman gets the Palestinian perspective secondhand from people who speak for the leadership, but admitted “it’s better to have people at the table.” He sought out business leaders and other nonpolitical figures in the West Bank to understand ways to improve Palestinians’ quality of life, instead of simply relying on “the narratives expressed daily in newspapers for 30 years, the same thing over and over again.”

“I’m happy to meet with Palestinians, even if they don’t agree with me or like me. Their thoughts and perspectives make me smarter, thoughtful, and more creative,” he said.

Friedman was instrumental in the historic embassy move from Tel Aviv last year, which he views not just as a symbolic recognition of what has been true for Jews for millennia, but a shift in the U.S. message to the region that “this is not a conflict where the Palestinians have a veto on progress. At some point … things will move forward with or without them. The U.S. is not going to ignore reality. We are not going to indulge the Palestinians in the fantasy that somehow Jerusalem can be disconnected from Israel or the Jewish people.”

The ambassador also criticized “UNESCO and other bodies pushing the false narrative that Jews are disconnected from Jerusalem.”

While the U.S. hopes to facilitate negotiations, “the idea that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel is a fact … a reality, not a negotiation point.” Its boundaries are negotiable, as is the question of whether the Palestinians will have a role in the city.

Friedman points out that Congress first voted to move the embassy in 1995 and reapproved it repeatedly. “This should have happened a long time ago. There was never a good reason not to move the embassy. It just took courage by the president.”

“I think the idea that one could approach this conflict with a sense of neutrality, that the Israelis have a bunch of arguments, and the Palestinians have a bunch of equally valid arguments, and those have to be resolved, is pretty insulting to Israel. The reason Israel holds the territory it holds today, in simple terms, is because it kept getting attacked, wars kept getting fought, and Israel kept winning. The reason Israel hasn’t given back all of it, and they gave back a lot, is because to give it away would be an existential risk to the country.”

Past administrations didn’t acknowledge this, Friedman said, but any other way of looking at the conflict is trying to make peace based on an “alternative reality.”

Michael Oren, the U.S.-born former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., noted Friedman’s distinct view, saying: “What’s different is he’s an advocate, not a classic diplomat. He is a patriotic American and loyal to his boss, but also a passionate advocate of Israel and the U.S.-Israel alliance.

“He is not diplomatic. He has become more diplomatic — there’s a learning curve — but I’ve never seen him retreat from a position. He is a very strong individual. I think he is not particularly radical in Israeli terms; he supports settlements, but also believes Israel should be Jewish and democratic.”

Friedman credits his willingness to look with fresh eyes and break with his predecessors partly to the fact that he comes from outside the foreign policy establishment.

“I’m not invested in any of the decisions that preceded me,” he admits. “There are people who have been hanging around this issue for the last generation. There aren’t that many of them, there are under 10 that really worked on it, in Republican and Democratic administrations, and they’re good people, well-intentioned. But they haven’t delivered.”

Friedman contends that this is due to the groupthink-inducing nature of the foreign policy establishment: “It’s very hard when you try to do something in the same way for 25 years, to say it isn’t working.”

By 25 years, he means back to the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians. The accords didn’t call for a Palestinian state, but they did set up the Palestinian Authority and security forces, institutions that were assumed to be the beginning of a state.

Much has changed since 1993. As Friedman pointed out, threats to Israel grew rather than shrank. There is constant rocket fire out of Gaza, which was taken over by Hamas, and Hezbollah amassed more than 100,000 rockets in Lebanon to shoot at Israel. Iran fills the leadership vacuum in Syria.

“Because I’m not invested in past attempts that have failed, I think I’m more willing to recognize with a clear vision how the world has changed. Just because something is obvious, doesn’t mean people are willing to recognize it. People bring a lot of baggage and ego to this job, and I don’t bring any of it,” Friedman said.

Friedman is suspicious of career politicians and government workers and sees an advantage in Kushner and Greenblatt being newcomers to negotiations. “In government, people aren’t always trustworthy. They have their own agendas and egos. They see opportunities in leaking stories that advance their goals; it’s a fact of life in every government. But Jared, Jason, and I have been working on the peace plan for almost two years now … and none of us is leveraging our spot for government jobs. I’m pretty sure this is my last government job.”

Like Trump, Friedman came to his position from a completely different world. Both came from the same one; Friedman has been Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer since 1994. The two are close, and Friedman has repeatedly told the story of how their friendship was cemented when Trump visited him while he was sitting shiva, the Jewish custom of mourning, for his father, even though there was a blizzard and it took Trump hours to get from Manhattan to Friedman’s home on Long Island.

That close relationship has helped their working relationship, which Friedman said he greatly values.

As for Trump’s view on Israel and the Palestinians, Friedman said: “He is nothing if not a cold realist when it comes to these kinds of issues, and I think you have to be one. The biggest danger in this part of the world is to be consumed with wishful thinking. You should see a better future down the road, but you can’t wish your way to that. You have to protect yourself along the way.”

There’s more to Friedman’s personal background that has a clear influence on how he does his job. He is the son of a rabbi who had his bar mitzvah at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and estimates that he visited Israel nearly 100 times before becoming ambassador. He has read the Israeli press every day for the past 20 years. He’s fluent in Hebrew and often gives interviews in Hebrew to the Israeli press. He’s not the first ambassador to do so, but it’s still something Israelis find endearing and don’t take for granted.

Friedman’s lifelong love affair with Israel has a political side. He was the head of American Friends of Bet El Institutions, which supports the West Bank settlement of Bet El and opposes a two-state solution, and he donated a building to the yeshiva in the town. He wrote a column for the far-right news website Arutz Sheva, based in Bet El, in which he repeatedly expressed support for settlements and argued they are legal. In one column, he called J Street, which lobbies to press Israel to enact a two-state solution and favored the Iran Deal, as “worse than kapos,” a reference to Jewish prisoner administrators in Nazi Germany. He apologized for the comment during his confirmation on Capitol Hill.

Friedman has also bucked the tradition of ambassadors not visiting the West Bank and has gone there repeatedly. He believes his connections to settlers “give me an important perspective … that has been ignored by most of my predecessors.” Without that perspective, “you don’t have the full picture.” Friedman acknowledges, though, that the settlement perspective is “certainly not the only one that matters.”

“It’s a mistake to think that because I have been a supporter of the settlement movement, that I am tone deaf to other points of view. I had much less exposure to the Arab community, which I have tried not only to understand better, but to empower more,” Friedman noted, pointing to work to support high-tech industry in Nazareth. He also said he became more familiar with the ultra-Orthodox community and the Israeli business community since becoming ambassador.

He’s avoided the mistake of the biblical spies. We may soon find out if that’s enough to produce the ultimate deal.

Lahav Harkov is the senior contributing editor of the Jerusalem Post.