Trump’s Daily Bankruptcy and the Ambassador to Israel

This article originally appeared on this site.

David Friedman, named by Donald Trump as his Ambassador to Israel, is ideologically to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu. David Friedman, named by Donald Trump as his Ambassador to Israel, is ideologically to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY BRADLEY C. BOWER / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY

Every morning since November 9th, you wake up and read the news and think, “This has got to be an issue of The Onion.” Because, while so much of the media, in ways subtle and broad, attempts to normalize the Trump ascendancy, while we are told that patriotism demands that we accept Trump and “give him a chance,” the President-elect acts in ways that leave even dystopian satire behind. His behavior has little to do with conservatism or libertarianism or populism; his mode is recklessness, a self-admiring belief that unpredictability is the path to national salvation.

And so every day brings at least one fresh outrage: the appointment of a national-security adviser whose temperament resembles those of the unhinged generals in “Dr. Strangelove”; a keeper of the environment who denies the science of climate change; a chief strategist and senior counselor who ran a Web site laced with racist poison and bogus “news”; an Attorney General who regards the Voting Rights Act as “intrusive” and once referred to a subordinate as “boy.”

It seems almost sadistic to go on. It’s the holiday season, after all. Suffice it to say that the appointments, contrary to Trump’s vow to “drain the swamp,” comprise a reinvention of the swamp, a new, improved version of the swamp, in which the super-wealthy and the oil and gas industries are vested with singular authority. All of this is set against a background of brewing scandals, myriad conflicts of interest, the gleeful humiliation of longstanding foes, and a President-elect who refuses to show even a measure of curiosity about the possibility that Russian intelligence agencies meddled in a national election.

But, rather than fog the mind and defeat the spirit with the litany of accumulated outrages, let’s concentrate on the outrage of the day: the appointment of a bankruptcy lawyer named David Friedman as Ambassador to Israel. Friedman writes regularly for Arutz Sheva, a pro-settler Web site that is available in English. After reading these columns, you might reasonably conclude that, if Israel decided it was in its interest to annex the West Bank, Friedman would heartily approve and help raise the flag. Ideologically, Friedman is to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu. His rhetoric, his viewpoints, and his prejudices are in sync with settler leaders in the government, and in the settlements themselves.

Read more stories from our year in review. Read more analysis of Trump’s Cabinet appointments.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has been a crucial adviser to the campaign and the transition, and he and his family have an intense interest in Israeli affairs. Their politics on the issue are distinctly right-wing. Kushner’s family foundation has, according to Israeli media reports, donated tens of thousands of dollars to West Bank institutions, despite the fact that the State Department has long regarded the settlements there as a barrier to peace in the region. In 2013, for instance, the Kushner family foundation gave twenty thousand dollars to the Beit El Yeshiva, a school in a particularly hard-right settlement. Friedman is the president of a foundation that raises money for institutions in Beit El.

Friedman is the son of the late Morris Friedman, a rabbi at Temple Hillel, a conservative synagogue in North Woodmere, Long Island. He graduated from Columbia and the New York University School of Law. His was a Republican family. Rabbi Friedman hosted Ronald Reagan at Temple Hillel, in 1984.

David Friedman, a partner at Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman LLP, did work for Trump related to his Atlantic City properties and struck up a friendship with him after Trump paid him a condolence call, in 2005, when Rabbi Friedman died. During the campaign, Friedman, who also has a home in Jerusalem, acted as an adviser to Trump on the Middle East and as a liaison with American supporters in Israel, assuring them that, as President, Trump would never pressure Israel on a settlement with the Palestinians and would move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Chaim Levinson, a veteran Israeli reporter, told me from Tel Aviv that the right wing, and particularly the settlers, are “thrilled” with the Friedman appointment. “But what does it mean?” Levinson said. “Does it mean that, for the first time, an American Ambassador is going to start visiting the settlements?”

In his columns for Arutz Sheva, Friedman writes with full reactionary fervor. President Obama, in his view, is guilty of “blatant anti-Semitism.” Obama’s sin, Friedman charges, is his failure to denounce terror and anti-Semitic propaganda in Palestinian circles. Which is the embodiment of fake news. Obama might (reasonably) yearn for the Israeli liberalism of an earlier time and have a distaste for the country’s movement toward religious nationalism, but to call him anti-Semitic is vile.

Friedman has described J Street, the liberal Zionist lobbying group, as comparable to the “Kapos during the Nazi regime.” The reference is to the prisoners forced to work as functionaries in the concentration camps.

“Finally, are J Street supporters really as bad as kapos? The answer, actually, is no,” Friedman wrote in Arutz Sheva. “They are far worse than kapos—Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps. The kapos faced extraordinary cruelty and who knows what any of us would have done under those circumstances to save a loved one? But J Street? They are just smug advocates of Israel’s destruction delivered from the comfort of their secure American sofas—it’s hard to imagine anyone worse.”

Asked about this piece of wisdom recently at the Saban Conference, in Washington, Friedman doubled down. “They’re not Jewish,” Friedman said of J Street, “and they’re not pro-Israel.”

They’re not Jewish. This is a calumny of the most disgusting order. But hardly a new one. Netanyahu, in the hope of solidifying his conservative and religious base, was once overheard whispering in the ear of the Sephardic leader and rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, “The left has forgotten what it is to be Jewish.” The question of Jewish identity has for centuries been a matter of debate and halakhah, Jewish law. It has never, to my knowledge, been a matter of bankruptcy law.

They’re not Jewish. When one read this morning in the paper that Friedman “has no experience in diplomacy,” one could only mutter, “No kidding.”

But having no experience in a given field seems to be, in the Trumpian universe, the greatest of virtues. The contempt for experience (as a marker of “élitism”) is parallel to the contempt for science, for fact, for restraint, for consideration, for decency, for a sense of the past.

On Thursday, I was interviewing former House Speaker Newt Gingrich about a nonpartisan initiative he has begun, along with two liberals, Patrick Kennedy and Van Jones, to battle the opioid epidemic. Inevitably, we began talking about Trump, whom Gingrich has supported ardently. I mentioned that we were talking on a day when the President-elect had found time, amid all the crises in the world, to tweet in fury not about the tragedy of Aleppo or the crimes of Dylann Roof but about the editor of Vanity Fair, who had published a negative review of one of Trump’s restaurants. (At the same time, Trump refuses to take daily intelligence briefings because, as the President-elect put it, “I’m, like, a smart person.”) Gingrich merely smiled and, without shame, compared Trump’s energy level and intelligence to that of Theodore Roosevelt. D.T. as T.R. We are expected to hear that and swallow it whole.

“What can you say about Trump?” Avishai Margalit, an Israeli philosopher and co-founder of Peace Now, told me. “Everything is an outlier. No one can predict anything. It’s not as if there is a deviation and you try to explain it. Everything is a deviation. You cannot rationalize it. It’s a family business, and they treat the White House as a family business, like Don Corleone. He doesn’t feel that he has to please anybody. You bully everyone and see what happens. The only thing you can say about Friedman’s appointment is that it’s not as if some other Ambassador would make a big difference. It doesn’t matter. There is no peace process, though Friedman may escalate things. The Palestinians have given up in any case. They have lost hope in any solution, and this is another nail in the coffin.”

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