RUTHFULLY YOURS

This afternoon several non-permanent members of the UN Security Council will submit a resolution that declares all settlements illegal under international law and demands that the country cease construction in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and other territories captured in the 1967 Middle East war. There is nothing new about such wildly unbalanced resolutions at the UN, of course—except this time, the Obama Administration will reportedly refrain from using the U.S. veto and will rather abstain from the vote, breaking with decades of American statesmanship that has protected its strategic Middle East ally from the legal consequences of UN rhetoric.

The resolution was authored by Egypt, which shelved the draft after the Netanyahu government reached out to the transition team of President-elect Donald Trump, which then pressured Cairo to drop the resolution. Venezuela, Malaysia, Senegal, and New Zealand say that if Egypt doesn’t push forward, they will. The resolution will permanently enshrine as a matter of international law that the Western Wall is “occupied Palestinian territory,” and that Jews building homes in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is illegal. One prominent member of the pro-Israel community in Washington called the resolution “a nuclear bomb.”

The Obama Administration is already briefing friendly press organizations that they’re showing no animus toward the Jewish state in refusing to veto the resolution. Rather, it’s “tough love”: for an Israel that seems not to have the will or vision to take chances for peace.

That’s not how Israel sees it. As a senior Israeli official in Jerusalem told Tablet: “President Obama and Secretary Kerry are behind this shameful move against Israel at the UN. The US administration secretly cooked up with the Palestinians an extreme anti Israeli resolution behind Israel’s back which would be a tailwind for terror and boycotts and effectively make the Western Wall occupied Palestinian territory. President Obama could declare his willingness to veto this resolution in an instant but instead is pushing it. This is an abandonment of Israel which breaks decades of US policy of protecting Israel at the UN and undermines the prospects of working with the next administration of advancing peace.”

In a sense, the UN vote is a perfect bookend to Obama’s Presidency. A man who came to office promising to put “daylight” between the United States and Israel, has done exactly that by breaking with decades of American policy. It is also seeking—contrary to established tradition and practice, which strictly prohibit such lame-duck actions—to tie the hands of the next White House, which has already made its pro-Israel posture clear.

No doubt that many of those critical of the U.S.-Israel relationship will defend and applaud the administration’s action, even as the effects of the resolution are obscene. So what if it enshrines in international law the fact that Jews can’t build homes or have sovereign access to their holy sites in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people for more than 3000 years? Israel, as Kerry said, is too prosperous to care about peace with the Palestinians. Maybe some hardship will shake some sense into the Jewish State—which after all, could easily have made a just and secure peace with the Palestinian leadership at any time over the past two decades, if that’s what it wanted to do. Accounts to the contrary, from Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, say, or left-wing Israeli politicians like former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the late Shimon Peres, are simply propaganda generated by the pro-Israel Lobby, whose wings the President has thankfully clipped.

Ten years ago, a guy from Queens made a trip out during a snowstorm to pay a condolence call to a guy on Long Island on the passing of a Rabbi who was also his father. The guy from Queens is now President-elect and the man he was visiting became his close adviser and his choice for ambassador to Israel.

Last week, Trump gave his pro-Israel Jewish supporters an early Chanukah gift. He picked an ambassador who actually likes the Jewish State and hates Islamic terrorists.

It’s supposed to be the other way around.

Ambassador Dan Shapiro, Obama’s emissary to the country he hated almost as much as America, had denounced Israel on the day that a Jewish mother of six who died protecting her children from an Islamic terrorist encouraged to kill Jews by the Palestinian Authority, was being buried.

Shapiro has warned that our backing for Israel is contingent on Israel’s support for a PA-Hamas Islamic terror state inside its own borders and that Netanyahu’s lack of enthusiasm for that terror state “raises questions about Israel’s real intentions.”

But Trump has decided to go with David Friedman, a friend of Israel, instead of an enemy. And the enemies of the Jewish State are united in their fury against Ambassador David Friedman.

“J Street is vehemently opposed to the nomination of David Friedman to be Ambassador to Israel.” the Soros funded anti-Israel group declared. Friedman has been a longtime critic of the hate group, comparing its support for Islamic terror against Israel to its key funder’s Nazi collaborating past.

The head of J Street is so upset that he appears to have found religion. “Lord help friends of Israel if someone like David Friedman is making US policy on Israel rather than John Kerry,” Jeremy ben Ami whined.

The Lord just might be helping Israel by sending Kerry back to Nantucket and David Friedman to Jerusalem. The anti-Israel media was already sputtering early this month when Friedman skipped Kerry’s rant against Israel to attend an event for the Israeli town of Beit El (Bethel or House of God) where Judah Maccabee had his command center in the battle against Antiochus IV that gave us Chanukah.

Our next ambassador chose the House of God and the Maccabees over John Forbes Kerry.

This article by Anne Bayefsky originally appeared on Washington Examiner.

U.S. companies are in for a shock as President Obama takes aim once again at Israel in the final month of his presidency. In the coming days, he is expected to direct his team at the United Nations to vote for U.S. funding of “BDS,” the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign aimed at financially ruining Israel and smearing the companies with which it does business.

The vote concerns the U.N. budget that is currently being negotiated and scheduled to be finalized this week. One of the line items provides funding for the implementation of a Human Rights Council resolution adopted in March. The resolution calls for the creation of a blacklist of companies around the world doing any business, directly or indirectly, connected to Israeli settlements. In effect, it launches a U.N.-sponsored BDS movement. Since the General Assembly holds the purse strings for the Human Rights Council’s operations, the time has come to allocate the money to pay for it.

With Obama’s U.N. diplomats sitting on their hands while the funding scheme is being hotly debated, American taxpayers can expect to find themselves funding BDS in the very near future, with American businesses caught in the crosshairs.

Israeli settlements consist of Jews living peaceful, productive lives on disputed territory whose ownership, by existing agreement, is to be determined through negotiations. This Jewish presence on Arab-claimed territory is offensive to a deeply anti-Semitic enemy that seeks to guarantee that land swapped in an eventual deal to create a Palestinian state will be Jew-free.

In the context of a Palestinian policy of ethnic cleansing, these Jewish farms, enterprises and schools are an “obstacle to peace,” to use the preferred verbiage of the United Nations and the Obama administration. The fact that Jews have repeatedly been moved in advance of a negotiated end to hostilities by their own government for the sake of peace, only to have those hopes dashed time and again, is simply dismissed.

Palestinian statehood demands should be taken seriously only within the context of bilateral negotiations with the Government of Israel. American attention should be paid to the non-democratic excesses of Palestinian leadership – and U.S. economic support and general support for the PA should be attached to improvements in press freedom, human rights and economic opportunity supported by the PA government.

President-elect Trump’s choice of David Friedman as Ambassador to Israel appears to be an excellent decision. It has already brought howls of protest from people invested heavily in the Oslo and subsequent accords, the “peace process” and the concept of the United States as an “evenhanded” broker between Israelis and Palestinians. Friedman, an Oslo-skeptic, has said he believes that, “Notwithstanding ‘agreements’ reached at Camp David, Oslo, Wye Plantation and elsewhere, neither Yasser Arafat nor Mahmoud Abbas ever had any intentions to observe the minimal conditions required of a two-state solution.”

On the other hand, he said of Israel that he would work “tirelessly to strengthen the unbreakable bond between our two countries,” correcting the relationship between two democratic, transparent, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, free market, countries — one large and one small. Israel goes from an impediment to American interests in the Middle East to a partner in a vital region — innovative, experienced, and successful.

It is worthwhile to review the parameters of the Oslo Process, negotiated in 1993 without the participation of the U.S., but adopted formally by President Clinton, because its underlying assumptions are about to be challenged.

Donald Trump’s choice for ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, has helped raise millions of dollars for a prominent West Bank settlement, a connection that could complicate the president-elect’s promised effort to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Mr. Friedman and his family have longstanding connections to the settlement, Beit El, a large and politically active settlement that has benefited from extensive support from the U.S. Mr. Trump’s personal foundation also has donated to the settlement, whose name is sometimes spelled Bet El.

Mr. Friedman heads an organization named Bet El Institutions, which aids the settlement. He also leads the organization’s U.S.-registered charity, the American Friends of Bet El Yeshiva Center.

From 2010 through 2014, the nonprofit center raised nearly $10 million in gifts and contributions for schools, education initiatives and a news organization in the settlement, according to the latest U.S. tax filings posted on Guidestar.org, a website that displays data on nonprofits.

The center also has been supported by donations from the family of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The Trump transition team, Messrs. Friedman and Kushner didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The connections with Beit El could be a lightning rod in any peace talks, which stalled during President Barack Obama’s tenure, as Palestinians seek to establish a future state on land where settlements such as Beit El are located.

DAVID FRIEDMAN avidly supports expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, unequivocally rejects a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and strongly believes the US embassy in Israel should be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Those positions put Friedman — Donald Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer and close friend — sharply at odds with the US foreign-policy establishment and entrenched conventional wisdom. So when the president-elect announced on Thursday that Friedman was his choice to be the next ambassador to Israel, alarm bells started clanging.

J Street, the left-wing Jewish activist group, called Friedman “a horrible choice” for ambassador, and launched a campaign to block his confirmation in the Senate. Democratic Representative Jerrold Nadler, denouncing Friedman’s “extreme views,” said the nomination “underscores, yet again, the extremist agenda of Donald Trump.” Americans for Peace Now blasted the pick as “a destabilizing move” that “adds fuel to the Israeli-Palestinian fire.” In an editorial, the New York Times labeled Friedman’s views “dangerous,” “extremist,” and “reckless.”

To be sure, Friedman is no diplomat, and his language has not always been diplomatic. In a now-infamous column in June, he smeared J Street’s Jewish supporters as “worse than kapos,” a reference to Jews in the Nazi death camps who cooperated with the SS. That was a repugnant analogy, for which Friedman should be ashamed.

What horrifies Friedman’s critics, though, isn’t his choice of words. It is his readiness to slay the long-lived sacred cows of US policy in the Middle East — above all, the egregiously misnamed Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” and its delusional goal of a “two-state solution.”

For decades, American administrations have leaned on Israel to accommodate their Palestinian foes, in the belief that the key to a lasting peace can be forged with Israeli concessions and goodwill gestures. Under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, Washington’s emphasis has been on cajoling, exhorting, and pressuring Israeli leaders to accede to Palestinian demands. It has become a central plank of US policy that the way to neutralize Palestinian hostility is through Israeli compromise, retreat, and forbearance.

But appeasement has not achieved peace. Israel has gone to extraordinary lengths in its desire to end the conflict — from agreeing to the creation of the Palestinian Authority, to offering shared control of Jerusalem, to expelling Jews from the Gaza Strip and handing the entire territory to the Palestinians. The results have been catastrophic. Palestinian society is more rejectionist than ever. Opinion polls consistently show large majorities of Palestinians rejecting the legitimacy of any Jewish state in the region. As recently as last week, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey reported that 65 percent of Palestinians do not support a two-state solution to the conflict.

President-elect Trump’s choice for ambassador to Israel, the attorney David Friedman, has been received in some quarters with contempt and disbelief. Mr. Friedman’s presumed failings are said to be many. As a lawyer, he has no diplomatic or foreign policy experience. He is a right-wing “extremist,” supposedly because he supports expanding settlements and moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

At its core, criticism of Mr. Friedman reflects the erroneous notion that only professionally trained diplomats can do the job. That is simply false. Modern diplomacy—which I experienced as Canada’s ambassador to Israel—is an anachronistic system of entitlement and privilege aligned with the aristocratic sensibilities of the late 19th century. The “foreign service” model that prevails today was the institutional response to a surfeit of well-bred, indolent men needing something to do. So they were sent abroad to underwrite fancy parties and salons, in the name of the King, Queen or Republic.

Two world wars made a hash of the old order, but Western diplomats have held fast to their entitlements. They indulge a posh lifestyle that mostly disappeared from the private sector as governance standards were enhanced. It is difficult to explain layers of servants and personal drivers to shareholders, never mind taxpayers.

Diplomats used to be important emissaries for their governments. Today that role is greatly diminished. Communication is instant and world leaders are overexposed, like rock stars on MTV. Forty years ago presidents and prime ministers might have attended one international meeting each year; today they are on a summit treadmill. They phone one another and cultivate personal relationships. Diplomats are often sidelined and left to churn out reports that circulate in a bureaucratic vortex.

Diplomacy still turns on the exercise of geopolitical power, as it always has, and on trade, which has changed completely in 50 years. Yet tradition-bound foreign services disdain the sullied world of commerce. In their world view, they—and they alone—are destined to solve the great issues of our time. As a result, there is a notable deficit of business acumen, one of the key elements of modern diplomacy, in many foreign services. Private-sector talent and experience are desperately needed but maligned when recruited.

I know neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Friedman other than through the media. But I do know that Mr. Friedman has been selected to represent America’s democratically elected president. He will serve at the pleasure of Mr. Trump and represent the president’s policies. Mr. Friedman is not anointed to go rogue and indulge in personal fantasies.