Revenge is sweet
Articles on Trump’s MidEast policies and on David Friedman from JPost, Al Monitor and Haaretz
David Friedman, tipped to become US ambassador to Israel. He advocates Israel annexing the West Bank [Mondoweiss]. He was Trump’s Israel adviser during the campaign and is one ‘of the strongest advocates of the US-Israel alliance who have arisen in decades’. The son of economist Milton Friedman he is best known for his advocacy of ‘market anarchism’ i.e. removing all restrictions on actions in the market on the theory the actors will themselves moderate behaviours without state intervention.
Israel in the Trump era
If we play our cards right, like the American people, Israel stands to gain in ways we never dreamed of.
By Caroline B. Glick, JPost
November 12, 2016
What can we expect from President-elect Donald Trump’s administration?
The positions that Trump struck during the presidential campaign were sometimes inconsistent and even contradictory. So it is impossible to forecast precisely what he will do in office. But not everything is shrouded in mystery. Indeed, some important characteristics of his administration are already apparent.
First of all, President Barack Obama’s legacy will die the moment he leaves the White House on January 20. Republicans may not agree on much. But Trump and his party do agree that Obama’s policies must be abandoned and replaced. And they will work together to roll back all of Obama’s actions as president.
On the domestic policy front this means first and foremost that Obamacare will be repealed and replaced with health industry reforms that open the medical insurance market to competition.
With the support of the Republican-controlled Senate, Trump will end Obama’s push to reshape the US Supreme Court in the image of the activist, indeed, authoritarian Israeli Supreme Court. During his four-year term, Trump may appoint as many as four out of nine justices. In so doing he will shape the court for the next generation. Trump made clear during the race that the justices he selects will oppose the Obama-led leftist plan to transform the court into an imperial judiciary that determines social and cultural norms and legislates from the bench.
Trump will also clean out the Internal Revenue Service. Under Obama, the IRS became an instrument of political warfare. Conservative and right-wing pro-Israel groups were systematically discriminated against and targeted for abuse. It is possible to assume that Trump will fire the IRS officials who have been involved in this discriminatory abuse of power.
To be sure, much is still unclear about Trump’s foreign policy. But here, too, certain things are already known. Trump will vacate the US’s signature from the nuclear deal with Iran.
Trump will not be able to repair the damage the deal has already caused – at least not immediately. He will not be able to reimpose the multilateral and UN Security Council sanctions on Iran that the nuclear deal canceled. Such a move will require prolonged negotiations and their conclusion is far from assured.
Trump will likewise be unable to take back the billions of dollars that Iran has already received due to the abrogation of economic sanctions and through cash payoffs from the Obama administration.
At the same time, from his first day in office, Trump will change the trajectory of US policy toward Iran. He will oppose Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. He will oppose Iran’s rise to regional hegemony.
A second conclusion that it is already possible to draw about the Trump presidency is that Trump will be much more like the hands-off Ronald Reagan than the hands-on Obama. His past as a businessman along with his lack of governmental or political experience will lead Trump to set general policy guidelines and goals and delegate responsibility for crafting suitable policies and programs to his cabinet secretaries and advisers.
This means that personnel will very much be policy in the Trump administration. Whereas Obama’s cabinet members and advisers have been more or less interchangeable since Obama himself determined everything from the details of his policies to the ways that the policies would be sold to the public (or hidden from the public), and implemented, Trump’s pick of advisers will be strategically significant.
Clearly it is too early to know who Trump’s advisers and cabinet members will be. But there is good reason for Israel to be encouraged by the advisers who have worked with Trump during the campaign.
Vice President-elect Mike Pence is one of the most pro-Israel policy-makers in America. Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is an outspoken ally of Israel and of the US-Israel alliance.
Newt Gingrich campaign poster when a presidential candidate in 2012. ‘An outspoken ally of Israel and of the US-Israel alliance.’
Likewise, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, former senator Rick Santorum, retired general Mike Flynn, and former UN ambassador John Bolton are all extraordinary champions of the US alliance with Israel.
Trump’s Israel affairs advisers during the campaign, David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt, are also among the strongest advocates of the US-Israel alliance who have arisen in decades.
The striking friendliness of the Trump election team is even more notable when we consider what Israel would have faced from a Hillary Clinton administration. Clinton’s cabinet in waiting at the George Soros-funded and John Podesta- run Center for American Progress contained no serious advocates of the US-Israel alliance.
And her stable of advisers were not merely indifferent to Israel.
The WikiLeaks revelations from Podesta’s emails, like the correspondences published by Judicial Watch from Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, made clear that Clinton’s team included several advisers with deep-seated hostility if not animus toward Israelis and toward the Israeli government. The third thing that is already clear about the nature of the Trump administration is that it will not hesitate to abandon received wisdom on a host of issues and initiate policies that the bipartisan policy elites wouldn’t be caught dead even talking about.
Trump will set the terms of the ‘healing process’.
Trump’s victory was first and foremost a defeat for the American elite, what Prof. Angelo Codevilla memorably referred to as America’s “ruling class.”
Trump’s campaign did not merely target the Democratic establishment. He attacked the Republican establishment as well. True, in his victory speech Trump said that he intends to heal the rifts in American society – presumably starting with his own party. But at least one thing ought to be clear about that reunification. As the president-elect, Trump will set the terms of the healing process.
There is every reason to expect that at a minimum, Trump will not soon forgive the Republicans who refused to support and even opposed his presidential bid. Members of the Never Trump camp will be denied positions and influence over the Trump administration and sent into the political desert.
Another establishment that fell on its sword in this election is the American-Jewish establishment. Led by the Anti-Defamation League, the American-Jewish establishment, including its largest donors, stood almost as one in its support for Clinton. The members of the American- Jewish leadership placed their partisan preferences above their communal interests and responsibilities. In so doing they enfeebled the community in a manner that will be difficult to repair.
Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have antisemites in their ranks. The Jewish establishment ignored and pretended away the Democratic antisemites, even when they were burning Israeli flags at the Democratic convention. They said nothing when anti-Israel ravings that were at best borderline antisemitic of senior Clinton advisers like Thomas Pickering and Anne Marie Slaughter were published by Judicial Watch.
On the other hand, the Jewish establishment castigated Trump as antisemitic for the presence of antisemites like David Duke on the fringes of the Republican Party. Legitimate criticisms of anti-Israel financier George Soros were condemned as antisemitic while truly antisemitic assaults on Trump donor Sheldon Adelson by Clinton backers went unaddressed.
The consequence of the Jewish establishment’s almost total mobilization for Clinton is clear. The Trump White House won’t have an open door policy for those who falsely accused Trump of antisemitism. Jewish Americans are going to have to either oust the leaders of the groups that put their party before their community, or establish new organizations to defend their interests. Whatever path is chosen, the process of rebuilding the communal infrastructure the community’s leaders have wrecked will be long, difficult and expensive.
Unlike the American-Jewish community, for Israel, the defeat of the American establishment is a positive development. The American foreign policy elite’s default bipartisan position on Israel was bad for both Israel and for the health and reliability of its alliance with the US.
As I explained in my book The Israeli Solution – A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, there was a dismaying consistency in US policy toward Israel that ran from Bill Clinton’s administration through the George W. Bush administration and on to the Obama administration. At least since the Clinton years, the received wisdom of the American foreign policy elite has been that the US must seek to swiftly cause Israel to sign a deal with the PLO. The contours of the deal are similarly clear to all concerned. Israel must surrender control over all or most of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and transfer the areas, more or less Jew-free, to the PLO.
This bipartisan view is inherently hostile to Israel. It places all the responsibility for making peace on Israel. And as the sole responsible party, Israel is also the sole party that is guilty for the absence of peace. The flipside is similarly dismal. Palestinians are absolved of responsibility for terrorism, hatred and political warfare against Israel.
The anti-Israel hostility inherent in the two-state paradigm has brought on a situation where even pro-Israel US officials end up joining their anti-Israel colleagues in bearing down on Israel to act in ways that are inimical to both its national security and to the very concept of a US-Israel alliance. The foreign policy ruling class’s commitment to the two-state paradigm has blinded its members to Israel’s strategic importance to the US and caused them to see the US’s only stable ally in the region as a drag on US interests.
Many of Trump’s advisers, including Gingrich, who has been raised as a leading candidate to serve as either Trump’s White House chief of staff or as secretary of state, have rejected this received wisdom. In a Republican presidential debate in 2011, Gingrich referred to the Palestinians as an “invented people,” and noted that they indoctrinate their children to perceive Jews as subhuman and seek their annihilation. For his statement of fact, Gingrich was brutally assaulted by Democratic and Republican elites.
But he never rescinded his statement.
Trump’s election provides Israel with the first opportunity in 50 years to reshape its alliance with the US. This new alliance must be based on a common understanding and respect for what Israel has to offer the US as well as on the limits of what the US can offer Israel. The limits of US assistance are in large part the consequences of the many genies that Obama unleashed during the past eight years. And the opportunities will come more in areas related to Israel’s relations with the Palestinians and the political war being waged against it by the Europeans and the international Left than to the challenges posed by the ascendance of Islamism in the Middle East.
To be sure, Trump is inconsistent. But from what we do know we must recognize that his rise marks a deflection point in US history.
It is a rare moment where things that were unimaginable a month ago are possible. And if we play our cards right, like the American people, Israel stands to gain in ways we never dreamed of.
Caroline B. Glick was born in Chicago and made aliya to Israel in 1991, after receiving her BA in Political Science from Columbia University. She joined the IDF that summer and served as an officer for more than five years. As an IDF captain from 1994 to 1996, she served as coordinator of negotiations with the PLO in the office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. After leaving the IDF at the end of 1996, she worked as the assistant to the director general of the Israel Antiquities Authority. She then returned to geo-politics serving as assistant foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from 1997 to 1998.
In the summer of 2000 she returned to Israel and began writing at the Hebrew newspaper Makor Rishon; she served as chief diplomatic commentator and edited magazine supplements on strategic issues for Makor Rishon until March 2002 when she accepted the position of deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. …
Caroline’s writings have been published in numerous newspapers and online journals: in 2004, in addition to her work at the Post, she resumed writing for Makor Rishon as the paper’s lead columnist and commentator. Caroline is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and travels several times a year to Washington where she routinely briefs senior administration officials and members of Congress on issues of joint Israeli-American concern.
In its Israeli Independence Day supplement in 2003, Maariv named Caroline “The Most Prominent Woman in Israel.” In December 2005, she was awarded the Ben Hecht award for Middle East reporting from the Zionist Organization of America. In January 2006, she was awarded the Abramowitz Prize for Media Criticism by Israel Media Watch. In 2008, her first solo book, Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad was published by Gefen Publishers.
Email Caroline at caroline@carolineglick.com
Israelis reel from US election
Israelis felt extremely involved in the US presidential campaign, aware that their lives would be directly affected not only by the choice of president, but by the dramatic social changes taking place in American society.
By Mazal Mualem, trans. Danny Wool, Al Monitor
November 11, 2016
It was early morning on Nov. 9 when American news outlets began reporting that Republican candidate Donald Trump was about to be elected as the next president of the United States. The news sparked a frenzy of activity on Israeli social networks. Dozens of journalists broadcasting from the United States and also from studios in Israel skipped relentlessly between Twitter and Facebook, as did plenty of Israelis. They gave up on a full night’s sleep to take part in the heated online debates, trying to share in the experience of a historic event in the making.
All the attention was further proof of Israeli society’s enormous interest in the 2016 presidential election. On the night the votes were being counted, the heated, emotional debates that erupted between Israelis watching the American drama unfold made it seem as though the election was for the Knesset, not the White House. It was hard to ignore supporters of the Israeli right gloating online in response to some of the country’s leading journalists, who could not hide their shock and disappointment at Democrat Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
Trump’s surprising victory has dominated Israeli Facebook and Twitter feeds as well as WhatsApp groups since election night, dividing Israelis into left and right. The left is shocked and terrified, while the right feels like it won another round. It was as though they were watching a rerun of the press’ failure to predict Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu’s huge victory in the 2015 election.
Boaz Bismuth, the head of the foreign news desk for the free newspaper Israel Hayom, interviewed Trump during the campaign. He celebrated his own victory in an interview with Army Radio, speaking as if he were the only person to foresee the results. Between the lines, Bismuth delivered the message that the pundits he thinks identify with the left, who preferred to interview Clinton and President Barack Obama during the campaign, ignored the Republican candidate and coloured their coverage with their political desires.
Never before has Israeli media coverage of an American election been so intense and so involved. It wasn’t just the broadcast studios set up in the candidates’ headquarters and in New York’s Times Square, manned by the Israeli commercial networks’ top journalists. There was also a clear sense from their reports that most reporters and analysts preferred the Democratic candidate. Reflecting the spirit of the times in Israel, where even the prime minister draws a crude distinction between journalists from the left and the right, coverage of the US election was divided into camps by politicians and the public alike. Unlike the centre, which leaned toward Clinton, Netanyahu’s house newspaper, Israel Hayom, owned by his associate Sheldon Adelson, backed Trump. Its coverage of the election as a whole tended to favor him.
One of the reasons Israelis were so involved in this election campaign was undoubtedly the knowledge that the results would have far-reaching political and diplomatic ramifications for Israel. When most commentators and polls in the United States predicted an almost certain victory for Clinton, the Israeli media focused on thanticipated implications for Netanyahu’s right-wing government.
Until 2012, Israelis showed no exceptional interest in the US election. Then, Netanyahu broke the sacred rule to stay out of American politics. The prime minister supported previous Republican candidate Mitt Romney and had a bitter and well-publicized conflict with Obama throughout the president’s entire second term. While Netanyahu did not repeat his 2012 mistake and made a point of staying out of the election — publicly, at least — the taboo had already been shattered.
The extensive Israeli coverage of the election could be explained by the various TV channels’ fight for ratings, but it also reflected the sense among Israelis that these dramatic elections would have an impact on life here as well. While it is possible to dispute the content, which included timeworn cliches repeated again and again throughout the protracted broadcasts and an inability by professional journalists to hide their personal preferences, there is no doubt that this extensive coverage responded to a real need. Israelis, including those not particularly involved in politics in everyday life, felt that the choice of the next US president would directly impact them as well.
Beyond any political identification with Trump or Clinton and fascination with such a sensational, close struggle, Israelis were also intrigued by the changes taking place in American society. They realized that the social changes in Israel’s strongest and most important ally would impact them directly too.
In their in-depth reports about the campaign over the last few months, senior foreign correspondents like Arad Nir on Channel 2 and Channel 10’s Nadav Eyal provided Israelis with extensive, almost daily descriptions of the developments taking place in American society. The social networks offered Israelis a chance to express their thoughts about them and opened up the debate, but they also contributed to a more shallow discussion, as they are prone to do. The climax came when Trump became the messiah of the Israeli right based on his election promises — to relocate the US Embassy to Jerusalem, for instance.
No one has the slightest idea whether the 45th president of the United States will show any interest whatsoever in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, if he will turn a blind eye to construction in the settlements or decide to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem. Yet none of that is interfering with the Israeli right’s celebration. They are reacting to the Republican victory as if they themselves had just won.
Clinton supporters in Times Square watch aghast as the election results come in. Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images
What do we know about David Friedman, Trump’s top adviser on Israel?
Friedman, seemingly positioned on the far right of the Israeli political map, says Trump will stand by his promise to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
By Judy Maltz, Haaretz premium
November 11, 2016
He doesn’t believe that annexing the West Bank will compromise Israel’s Jewish or democratic character, and he doesn’t think the settlements are an obstacle to peace.
But the real question is how much influence will David Friedman, Donald Trump’s senior adviser on Israeli affairs, wield on Middle East policy once his boss steps into the White House. If it turns out to be substantial, that would mean a major break with longstanding U.S. policy in the region.
Where does Donald Trump stand on Israel?
Based on statements he has issued and columns he has penned, Friedman, an Orthodox bankruptcy lawyer, is positioned on the far right of the Israeli political map – more hardline in his views than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The 57-year-old, who hails from Long Island, has said the United States should not impose any solutions on Israel and that a bi-national state would not be a tragedy since the number of Palestinians living in the West Bank is largely exaggerated and that they do not pose a threat to the Jewish majority.
Friedman has challenged the widespread view that Israeli settlement activity is illegal and opposes a ban on construction activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem – particularly those places that would be part of a future agreement involving land swaps.
Friedman has been a columnist for two Israeli right-wing English-language media outlets: Arutz Sheva and The Jerusalem Post. He also serves as president of American Friends of Bet El Institutions, which financially supports the settlement enterprise.
About six months ago, Trump appointed Friedman and Jason Greenblatt, another of his attorneys, as co-chairmen of his Israel Advisory Committee. Friedman, however, has been the more public face of the duo.
A graduate of Columbia College and New York University Law School, he grew up in Woodmere, New York. His father, the late Morris Friedman, was the rabbi of Temple Hillel in North Woodmere, a Conservative congregation, and president of the New York Board of Rabbis.
The Friedman family has a history of personal connections to Republican presidential candidates: In 1984, barely a week before the national election, the Temple Hillel rabbi hosted the incumbent Ronald Reagan for Shabbat lunch at his home following a visit his synagogue. It was the first visit to a synagogue by a sitting president since the one made by George Washington in 1791 and reflected Reagan’s bid to woo Jewish voters in what was a Democratic enclave of Republican Long Island.
When asked by The New York Times to elaborate on the lunchtime preparations involved, Rabbi Friedman’s wife Addi, a high school English teacher, said: “I didn’t do anything different than I usually do for Shabbos, but I fussed a bit more. I was going to serve chicken soup and matzoh balls. But I don’t want to load the president up with heavy foods.”
Trump’s Israel adviser has been married for 35 years to Tammy Sand of Miami Beach, Florida. In addition to their home in Woodmere, they own a residence in the affluent Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbiyeh, where they typically spend the Jewish holidays along with their children and grandchildren twice a year.
Friedman heads the creditors’ rights and bankruptcy practice group at the New York law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman LLP. He has represented Trump in his investments in Atlantic City casinos, but the two did not strike up a personal friendship until 2005 when Trump came to pay Friedman a condolence call after his father died. “All of a sudden I’m sitting in my living room and I see flashing lights going off and sure enough Donald Trump showed up to make a shiva call,” Friedman told participants at a recent election event sponsored by the Manhattan Jewish Experience.
This summer, after Trump was nominated as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Friedman visited Israel, where he held a series of meetings with political leaders. In a video address delivered to a gathering of Trump supporters in Jerusalem a few weeks ago, Friedman promised that “a Trump administration will never pressure Israel into a two-state solution or any other solution that is against the will of the Israeli people” because “they know what’s best for themselves.” He also said that should he be elected president, Trump would be different from all his predecessors in that he would stand by his promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – and thereby formally recognize the city as Israel’s capital. Under Trump, Friedman pledged, there would be “no opportunity for mischief at the UN” because Trump would “order” his UN ambassador to veto every resolution hostile to Israel.
Friedman has, on various occasions during the campaign, been asked to respond to charges of antisemitism among Trump supporters. He has largely dismissed these allegations, insisting that hatred of Jews is far more prevalent among the Left.
Friedman delivered a particularly scathing attack on The New York Times, after a tape recently surfaced in which Trump was caught boasting about sexually assaulting women. “The New York Times ran with the story with all the journalistic integrity of the worst gossip rag,” Friedman wrote in a column in The Jerusalem Post. “If only the Times had reported on the Nazi death camps with the same fervor as its failed last-minute attempt to conjure up alleged victims of Donald Trump, imagine how many lives could have been saved.”