David Friedman, choice for envoy to Israel, is hostile to 2-state

He is president of the American fund-raising arm for a yeshiva in a settlement deep in the West Bank headed by a militant rabbi who has called for Israeli soldiers to refuse orders to evacuate settlers.

He writes a column for a right-wing Israeli news site in which he has accused President Obama of “blatant anti-Semitism,” dismissed the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, likened a liberal American-Jewish group to “kapos” who cooperated with the Nazis, and said American Jewish leaders “failed” Israel on the Iran nuclear deal according to The New York Times on Saturday.

He also supports United Hatzalah, an Israeli emergency medical services group that prides itself on integrating Arab and Druze volunteers; helped build a $42 million village for disabled children — Bedouin and Jewish — in the Negev Desert; and is known as an affable host of large holiday meals at the penthouse apartment he owns in a well-heeled Jerusalem neighborhood.

Now, David M. Friedman, an Orthodox Jewish bankruptcy lawyer from Long Island, is Donald J. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, despite his lack of diplomatic experience and frequent statements that flout decades of bipartisan American policy.

“Bankruptcy law and involvement with settlements are not normally seen as an appropriate qualifications for the job,” one of its former occupants, Martin S. Indyk, said on Friday. “But then these are not normal times.”

Mr. Friedman, 58, has done legal work for Mr. Trump since at least 2001, when he handled negotiations with bondholders on Mr. Trump’s struggling casinos in Atlantic City. Mr. Friedman represented Mr. Trump’s personal interests in the bankruptcies of the casinos in 2004, 2009 and 2014.

Their relationship was cemented in 2005, friends said, when Mr. Trump traveled three hours in a snowstorm to pay a condolence call on Mr. Friedman after the death of his father, a prominent Long Island rabbi.

“He was very taken by Trump spending almost all day just to pay the shiva,” said Yossi Kahana, one of the two friends who described the visit, using the Hebrew term for the week of mourning. “Barely any people came, and here is Trump, coming and sitting with him and talking about things that are important to both of them, their values, their fathers and their legacies.”

Mr. Friedman did not respond to an interview request made to his office.

A person close to the Trump transition who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the ambassadorship had been negotiated directly between the two men over many months. Mr. Friedman, who donated a total of $50,000 to the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee in 2016, according to federal election records, had been openly saying even before the election that the job — one of the most sensitive and high profile in the diplomatic corps — would be his, according to friends.

Israel’s conservative settlement supporters and their American backers rejoiced at the selection, while believers in a Palestinian state and the American-brokered peace process were perplexed and close to despair. Mr. Friedman is a staunch opponent of basic tenets of Washington’s longstanding approach to much of the ambassadorial portfolio.

Source: MENA