Dan Shapiro, President Obama’s
ambassador to Israel
David Friedman with Donald and Ivanka Trump
By Larry Gordon
What a wonderful controversial position to be in. David Friedman, a resident of the Five Towns, is nominated as the next U.S. ambassador to Israel, and the extreme left believes that the Middle East sky is falling and that,
foremost among a sea of appointments, this appointment needs to be vigorously challenged.
There is little room for doubt that the leftists in the New Israel Fund and J Street feel particularly emboldened by the fact that Mr. Friedman is an Orthodox Jew, the son of a prominent rabbi, and a man who wears a kippah. Now if those critics of Israel and U.S.–Israel policy wore head coverings like that, they would have to reach under them to scratch their heads to try to figure out what is going on here.
It’s one thing for them if the ambassador of Israel to the U.S. wears a yarmulke, as Ambassador Ron Dermer does, but it is an entirely different matter of concern for them if the U.S. ambassador to Israel is a kippah-wearer as David Friedman is.
The left has pledged to oppose his appointment, as it is the one issue—according to them—that endangers the long-sought-after illusive formula of a two-state solution. Now anyone who knows anything about today’s Middle East understands that a two-state solution as once envisioned by the Oslo Accords or Camp David Accords essentially is no longer relevant. The core obstacle to the peace process has been Arab obduracy and intransigence and the inability to commit to living side by side with a Jewish state.
So Friedman’s positions on these matters do not reflect anything but the reality on the ground. And furthermore, when David Friedman is confirmed as the U.S. ambassador to Israel, that does not mean it is under his purview to do anything but execute policy developed by the incoming Trump administration. In other words, folks, David Friedman will not be making U.S.–Israel policy; rather, he will just be carrying it out. But when you read or hear about the J Street and NIF protests, you would think that the man will be sitting up nights crafting new ideas and directions in U.S.–Israel policies on his own.
The New York Times, a paper that has abandoned objective journalism to become a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, said in an editorial last week that they feel that Mr. Friedman is “not fit” to be the ambassador to Israel. You will no doubt recall that the Times said the same thing about Donald Trump repeatedly throughout the presidential campaign, that he was not fit or did not have the temperament to be president. Clearly the New York Times saying or writing something is meaning less to readers than ever before. After all, who died and left the Times in charge or the moral arbiter of what is best for this country?
Things have become so jaded and even journalistically corrupted to the point where their critique of the Friedman appointment leads one to believe that the appointment is in the best interests of U.S.–Israel relations.
The election of Mr. Trump signals a great many things, amongst them the expressed desire of the American public to benefit from innovative and creative thinking. At the same time, with the Friedman appointment, something unusual and even extraordinary is taking place. It is as if in appointing an Orthodox Jew to this type of post, the president-elect is siding with the positions commonly identified with Torah-observant Jews in Israel who are commonly identified with the political right.
For some reason the Times and J Street have no problem asking that Friedman be disqualified because of his religious affiliations and beliefs. Would any of those entities do the same with any other appointed diplomat because of their religion, color, or personal beliefs? That is seriously unlikely, with the exception, apparently, of when we are dealing with an Orthodox Jew and Israel.
We are still almost a month away from the Trump inauguration and the impact of a future new day is already being felt around the world. David Friedman as U.S. ambassador to Israel represents new thinking that will result in a safer and more secure Israel and a U.S. policy that is no longer rooted in old thought processes that have been repeatedly proven to be unworkable. It seems that “change we can believe in” is actually beginning to mean something substantive.
Bloomingburg
And Lawrence
Not to come across as overly sensitive, but there seems to an absurd double-standard of sorts that is nonchalantly applied when it comes to Orthodox Jews moving into positions of power. And this formulation may be at work in the above-referenced David Friedman ambassadorial appointment situation as well as to another story that has a Satmar residential community evolving in the upstate town of Bloomingburg, New York, a hamlet that you pass on your way up to the Catskills.
This comes to the fore this week for several reasons. Amongst them is the cover story in last week’s Forward that, as usual, covers Orthodox Jewish success with heavy doses of scrutiny and derision wherever possible.
So the population of the Satmar enclaves in Williamsburg and in Monroe is speedily growing and these communities are plainly running out of room. The move into the otherwise sleepy village of Bloomingburg may not have been received well—for traditionally prejudicial reasons—except for the fact that it was done legally and properly and, as your children sometimes say to you, “It’s a free country.”
The Bloomingburg story has elements of controversy cooked into it, but the item that caught my attention last week was a quick drive-by reference to the Five Towns and specifically the Village of Lawrence in the context of Orthodox Jewish ascension to power in local government—as if there were something unclean and wrong about this reality that has come about in some communities.
A paragraph in the Forward piece says: “Since 2012, Bloomingburg has been a battleground, the latest front in a multipronged conflict playing out across New York and New Jersey, as ultra-Orthodox communities seek room to grow. Upstate in Kiryat Joel, in the suburbs around New Square and Monsey, in Lakewood and Lawrence, and even in the heart of Brooklyn, Orthodox groups have clashed with their neighbors over expansion plans and control of local government.”
As far as I can tell, here in Lawrence and probably in the other communities mentioned, no one surrounded the Village Hall with tanks, there were no armed assaults or insurgencies, and no hostile takeovers. All that these communities had were legal democratic elections that placed in office people elected by the majority of voters. Where does this nutty idea come from that if Orthodox Jews exercise their constitutional rights there is something off-balance or strange about it?
Additionally absurd is that these assertions are presented without any objections emanating from any sources; the criticism is repeated over and over again with the assumption that there just might be something wrong about an Orthodox Jew being a mayor of a village or a member of a town board.
Perhaps the vision of an Orthodox Jew serving as mayor or congressman has an air of a man-bites-dog story to it, but that should no longer be the case in 2016. Expressing objections to this type of Jewish ascension to power plays into old and tired prejudices that make for juicy copy in newspapers and news websites but, time and again, all it does is try to turn the clock back and reverse the progress that ethnic communities in this country have made over the last 50 years.
I don’t know about Bloomingburg, but Lawrence, while probably mostly Jewish today, is still a heterogeneous community with a town board that is composed of Orthodox Jews elected to manage local government and that does so with a clarity and openness that serve all the residents of the village well. This idea, which papers like the Forward enjoy advancing, that Jews in local government only favor Jews and Jewish communities is as patently absurd as it is insulting. But the insulting part of the equation unfortunately seems to be the objective, at least in the Bloomingburg story.
Comments for Larry Gordon are welcome at editor@5tjt.com.