President-elect Donald Trump’s
nominee for US ambassador to Israel is the head of an organization that is
being sued by Palestinians for its role in the theft of their land for
settlements and other Israeli war crimes.
Announcing the nomination, the
Trump transition team said
that David Friedman would serve from Jerusalem, “Israel’s eternal capital” –
signaling that the new administration intends to move the US embassy to the
city from its current location in Tel Aviv.
Friedman is being described as
“more extreme” even than the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu.
As the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz
reports,
Friedman has called President Barack Obama an “anti-Semite” and labeled
supporters of the liberal Zionist lobby group J Street as “kapos” – a term used
to describe Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in the death camps.
Friedman supports the
outright annexation of the occupied West Bank and has argued that absorbing the
Palestinian population would not threaten Israel’s status as a Jewish-ruled
state because, allegedly, “Nobody really knows how many Palestinians live
there.”
Lawsuit
A bankruptcy lawyer, Friedman
is president
of American Friends of
Bet El Yeshiva Center, a nonprofit organization that raises about $2
million a year, mostly for the Beit El settlement,
north of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
This is one of a group of
organizations and individuals currently
being sued for $34.5 billion by Palestinians who accuse them of financing
and profiting from Israel’s settlements.
The lawsuit argues
that directly supporting Israeli settlements with tax-exempt charitable funds
amounts to money laundering and tax fraud and aids and abets crimes including
theft of Palestinian property, home demolitions, maiming, murder, ethnic
cleansing and even genocide.
The lawsuit alleges that
American Friends of Bet El Yeshiva Center has raised large amounts of money
from its annual dinners and then “knowingly sent those monies overseas to
promote and encourage criminal activity, i.e., wholesale violence directed at
Palestinians, arms trafficking and theft of private property.”
The lawsuit also names as
defendants US tycoons Sheldon Adelson,
Haim Saban and
Oracle founder Lawrence Ellison.
“Stunned”
“I was personally stunned by
the nomination,” Martin McMahon, the lead attorney in the lawsuit, told The Electronic
Intifada. “In any diplomatic post both countries are served when the ambassador
has rapport and credibility and is viewed as a neutral referee.”
Friedman, McMahon noted, is
opposed by a significant number of Jewish Americans. “They support a two-state
solution which US Secretary of State John Kerry has said is near impossible to
achieve as a result of illegal land confiscation which Friedman has financed
for 10 years at least,” McMahon stated.
“[Friedman’s] Beit El
settlement continues stealing Palestinian property,” McMahon said, noting that
even the World Zionist Organization ceased land transactions related to Beit El
because of the amount of forged and
fraudulent documents involved.
Sniper school
The plaintiffs in the case are
20 individuals and five village councils who say they are victims of these
crimes.
They include the Palestinian
activist Bassem al-Tamimi who has been jailed for his nonviolent resistance to
the Israeli occupation, the author Susan Abulhawa and Hiba Barghouti, whose
Palestinian American brother Abdelrahman Barghouthi was killed by the Israeli
army during a visit to the West Bank.
The lawsuit states that Beit
El “operates a sniper school with US taxpayer financial assistance in which it
trains settlers in the use of sniper scopes, automatic weapons and military
tactics to be used against their Palestinian neighbors.”
According to Haaretz,
the Beit El settlement’s yeshiva – or Jewish religious school – is “headed by a
militant rabbi who has urged Israeli soldiers to disobey orders to evacuate
settlements and who has argued that homosexual tendencies arise from eating
certain foods.”
It adds that the
organization’s donor base “includes the family foundation of the parents of
Jared Kushner, President-elect Donald Trump’s son-in-law,” who is expected to
play a significant role in the new administration.
The Bet El organization makes
no secret of Friedman’s role. In a Facebook
post on Friday it congratulated him on his nomination and said that in his
position as president, Friedman “has been a pioneer philanthropist and builder
of Jewish institutions and housing projects in Judea and Samaria,” the term
Israel uses for the occupied West Bank.
The group’s 2016 annual dinner
featured
keynote speeches by Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United
Nations, and John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN who is tipped
for a senior role in Trump’s foreign policy team.
Friedman was in the top-level
dinner committee for the 2016 gala, typically signalling that he made a
significant personal donation.
McMahon told The Electronic
Intifada that the judge had recently lifted a stay on the lawsuit. The next
step will be for the defendants to argue that the judge should dismiss it,
while the plaintiffs will argue that it should go ahead. He expects a decision
on whether the case can proceed around March.
