How an American Ambassador Fought Off the State Department to Make Peace between Israel and Arab Nations

Neither a career diplomat, nor a beltway insider, nor an important donor, David Friedman was chosen to be ambassador to Israel after having been Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. Friedman played a key role in moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and then in brokering the Abraham Accords. Reviewing Friedman’s memoir of his four-year diplomatic career, Seth Mandel writes:

Though Friedman’s knowledge of the region and its history matches or exceeds that of his predecessors, he was dismissed as “unqualified” because he did not go through the requisite brain-deadening reeducation by international-relations professors, whose Arabist affectations were frozen in amber sometime in the 1950s. Nor did Friedman spend his professional years in Foggy Bottom, absorbing groupthink and developing the approved posture of aggressive ignorance. Friedman, an Orthodox Jewish attorney from Long Island, . . . was not looking to ingratiate himself with what Harry Truman called “the striped-pants boys.” Past ambassadors saw him as a threat and came out against Friedman’s nomination. Democratic senators and congressmen disgraced themselves by questioning Friedman’s loyalty. And then Friedman did the very thing that his critics were terrified he might do: he succeeded.

Even when Friedman would convince the president to take a specific course of action, other advisers would try to tap on the brakes. A key goal of Friedman’s was to fulfill U.S. law and move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s actual capital, Jerusalem. There was plenty of internal resistance to this move, despite it being a common promise for presidential candidates to make. The only argument against recognizing Jerusalem as the capital was a manufactured fear of Palestinian violence. . . .

Democratic members of Congress and their stenographers in the press warned of an explosion of violence if the president followed through. But follow through he did, and the threats of violence proved empty. American policy on Jerusalem had been hostage to phantoms.

Read more at Washington Examiner

More about: Abraham Accords, Donald Trump, Jerusalem, State Department, US-Israel relations

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society