Sledgehammer

In one of his many witty moments the great Middle East historian Bernard Lewis, then still a professor at the University of London, was asked in an interview during his first visit to the United States to comment on a scandal that erupted during the confirmation hearings of a political appointee as US ambassador to Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka). Lewis responded by saying that “some of your Ministers are plenipotentiary and some of your Ambassadors are extraordinary.” Several decades later, David Friedman became yet another extraordinary US ambassador when he was appointed by Donald Trump to be his ambassador to Israel. David Friedman was a successful bankruptcy lawyer and he must have rendered very helpful advice to a businessman who went through a stormy business career before being elected president of the United States. David Friedman is an Orthodox Jew and a fervent supporter of Israel and specifically so of the settler movement and the right-wing in Israeli politics. His memoir, Sledgehammer, offers his version of his tenure in Israel.Friedman is not modest about his career as a lawyer and as a diplomat. The title Sledgehammer is revealing. According to Friedman, it is a metaphor reflecting his mission and Trump’s policy with regard to Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: breaking with a sledgehammer the conventions that had governed US policy toward these issues for decades. As he tells it, he used the sledgehammer to break a plasterboard ceremonial wall during a ceremony in the City of David in Jerusalem.As ambassador Friedman focused on Prime Minister Netanyahu, and on the Israeli right-wing, particularly the settler movement. In his memoir he argues that Israelis had the right to settle in the West Bank (as he would put it “Judea and Samaria”), and “Palestinian independence presents its own series of potentially existential risks to Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians themselves” (34). In the same spirit he writes, “I was convinced of one thing: The increasingly progressive positions developing within American political circles that Israel could and should surrender the entirety of Judea and Samaria in exchange for a naked promise of peace could lead to catastrophic results” (34). He proudly takes credit for his share in Donald Trump’s several decisions taken in support of Israel such as the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the transfer of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and the recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.The recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights merits a closer look. In 1981 Menachem Begin extended Israeli law to the Golan Heights but he deliberately refrained from annexing them. Between 1992 and 2011 several Israeli prime ministers, including Benjamin Netanyahu (twice), negotiated a peace agreement with Syria and offered a hypothetical conditional agreement to full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan in return for a satisfactory package of peace and security. The Syrian civil war of 2011 and its aftermath removed the prospect of Syrian-Israeli peace from the agenda, at least for the time being. But Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights was made in the context of Israel’s domestic politics. Benjamin Netanyahu, by then deeply enmeshed in his trial and seeking reelection, needed all the support he could get and Trump’s decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty in the Golan was made in order to help Netanyahu win the elections. Friedman writes thatWell, so what is the reader to make of it? There was never “a stated” White House policy to help Netanyahu to win the elections, but the ambassador and maybe others in the Trump administration believed that it would be better for Netanyahu to win the elections, and therefore helping him with a recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights would be an appropriate step to be taken by the White House. This is just one example out of many spread throughout Friedman’s book admitting openly that he meddled in Israeli domestic politics. Needless to say, this was matched by Netanyahu’s own meddling in American politics.Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan met with international criticism and in another unusual step, on May 14, 2019, the secretary of state, Michael Pompeo, and Ambassador David Friedman wrote an op-ed that was published in the Wall Street Journal, under the title “International Law Backs the Trump Golan Policy.”1 The authors tried to argue that “President Trump’s Golan proclamation is entirely consistent with Resolution 242.” Among other arguments they stated that “Damascus has for 52 years rejected the negotiating framework of Resolution 242.” But the secretary of state and the ambassador neglected to mention that between 1992 and 2011 Syria and Israel negotiated intermittently for a peace deal. True, both Hafez and Bashar al-Asad were difficult partners to these negotiations, but they did conduct serious, sometimes genuine negotiations, including twice with Netanyahu himself.Friedman’s account of the period’s most important development, the signing of the Abraham Accords in September 2020, is yet again misleading. The Abraham Accords, Donald Trump’s most important foreign policy achievement, was in fact an unintended outcome of his quest for an Israeli-Palestinian deal, the so-called Deal of the Century. The Trump plan, revealed in January 2020, was heavily tilted toward Israel but it included elements unacceptable to the radical Israeli Right such as the establishment of a Palestinian state and a swap whereby Israel would keep 30 percent of the West Bank but would also offer a sizeable piece of land in the Negev in order to expand the Gaza Strip.In the following months, Netanyahu tried to enhance his support of the settlers and the radical right wing by trying to annex part of the 30 percent to Israel prior to the signing of an agreement with the Palestinians (who rejected the Trump plan). All efforts to move forward the Trump plan were also blocked by Benny Gantz and Gabi Ashkenazi who joined the unity-rotation government with Netanyahu and served as defense minister and foreign minister, respectively. Ambassador Friedman joined Netanyahu and tried to promote the annexation plan. But this very point was used by the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to Washington, Yousef Al Otaiba, who proposed a different deal to the Trump administration: His country would make peace and normalization with Israel in return for an Israeli agreement not to annex West Bank territory under the Trump plan and a US agreement to relax its qualitative military edge commitments to Israel that prevented the UAE from acquiring the United States’s F-35 combat aircraft and Predator drones. Preventing Israeli annexation of West Bank territory would legitimize the UAE’s normalization with Israel in domestic and Arab public opinions. Indeed, on this basis the Abraham Accords were negotiated and signed in the summer and early fall of 2020. The main actor on the US side in this process was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who throughout the period maintained a good relationship with several Arab countries including the Emirates and Saudi Arabia. In the bureaucratic warfare inside the administration, Kushner was able to overcome Friedman. But the reader of Friedman’s memoir will not find a real reflection of this chain of events in Friedman’s book

Ancient history · Archaeology · Geography · Middle East · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

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