The pro-settlement Israeli right does not appear overly concerned by the prospect that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have to relocate from his office to a jail cell, following police investigations against him. Nor are these occupation deniers losing sleep over an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan being cooked up by President Donald Trump that would disrupt their plans to annex East Jerusalem and West Bank lands to Israel. They have placed their trust elsewhere, and it’s not in the Almighty. As long as David Friedman occupies the office of the US ambassador in Tel Aviv — soon to be in Jerusalem — they need not worry. Since Trump’s former attorney was given the plum diplomatic assignment, the platform of the pro-settlement HaBayit HaYehudi party has become White House policy.

In his role as the president’s gatekeeper to the Israeli arena, Friedman has taken it upon himself to ensure that White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt do not take seriously the boss’s talk of achieving the “ultimate deal” between Israelis and Palestinians. For Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer, the Arabs went bankrupt in 1967. Moreover, as far as he is concerned, anyone who goes bankrupt should be grateful for any offer that keeps him from being thrown out into the street. Friedman has become the scourge of the State Department and National Security Council. A US official who attends meetings of the US peace team told Al-Monitor that when Friedman is in the room, Greenblatt aligns to the right, but when Friedman is absent from the forum, Greenblatt allows himself to present balanced and logical views.

In the discussions over moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Friedman trumped the Middle East affairs professionals at the State Department and defense agencies. These professionals objected to moving up the date of the move, as they did to Trump’s Dec. 6 declaration recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. These senior officials warned that such a move at this time would embarrass Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and distance him further from the negotiating table. Friedman also vanquished Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who demanded in September that Israel give back $75 million in US aid that Congress approved during the Barack Obama administration.

These days, State Department officials are running a rearguard battle against Friedman’s pressure to erase the term “occupied territories” from official American documents and reports, chief among them the annual human rights report, when referring to the lands Israel took over in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Obviously, Friedman — a Jew who served for years as chair of Friends of the Beit El settlement — believes that Beit El is part of the Jewish State. In July he invited the heads of the West Bank settlement movement, known for opposing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the annual July 4 embassy party. Representatives of Israeli peace organizations were not accorded a similar courtesy, given that Friedman views members of such liberal groups as J Street and others that favor the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as “worse than kapos," the Jews who were forced to help the Nazis during the Holocaust.