Last week, Thomas Nides, the American ambassador to Jerusalem, participated in an online discussion hosted by Americans for Peace Now—a self-styled “progressive Zionist” group whose primary goal is creating a Palestinian state and preventing Israeli Jews from living in the wrong places. Its official position, apparently shared by Nides, is that U.S. pressure on both sides is necessary to achieve peace. Jonathan Tobin comments on the proceedings:
Nides tossed diplomatic courtesy to the winds in the webinar in which he spoke of there being people in the current [Israeli] government to which he is accredited with whom he would not wish to have dinner. The former Democratic party operative, banker, and U.S. State Department official also vented his spleen about Israelis building homes in Jerusalem or those parts of the West Bank that he knows the Jewish state will never relinquish, even in a theoretical peace deal. In addition to calling such construction “stupid” and “infuriating,” his devotion to restoring the pre-1967 “Green Line” extends to the point of refusing to visit not only Jewish communities in the [West Bank], but even the tunnels under the Western Wall in Jerusalem, a stand that validates the disingenuous Arab claim that efforts to restore and reaffirm the sacred site’s Jewish history are somehow a provocation.
Instead of working to widen the circle of peace between Israel and the neighboring Arab states or promoting warmer relations with the U.S., Nides indicated that his main agenda was helping the Palestinians. He seemed primarily focused on the idea that granting the brutally tyrannical and corrupt Palestinian Authority formal sovereignty was the only thing that mattered.
But in this respect, writes Tobin, Nides resembles most of his predecessors:
Unlike those sent to virtually every other country on the planet, American ambassadors to Israel are not there to foster better relations between the two governments. Instead, they act as imperial proconsuls whose task is to order client states around. Instead of helping Israel, they have sought to treat its democratically elected governments as wayward children who don’t know what’s best for them and to impose harmful policies on them regardless of the will of the Israeli people.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/an-envoy-from-a-failed-past-points-towards-a-problematic-future/