US ambassador to Israel David M. Friedman said Israel has a right to annex parts of the West Bank after Netanyahu threatened to do so. So-called liberal Zionists like J Street are up in arms because such an assertion of colonial rights against Palestinians exposes the fraudulence of the bantustate solution for Palestinians, something US policy & liberal Zionists have always used to mask their support for colonialism, apartheid, & a Jewish-only state. But annexing the West Bank is the logic of the Oslo Accords which legitimize occupation & expropriation of Palestine.
Ambassadors don’t make policy. Friedman is voicing & executing US policy formulated by the White House, the State Department, & the Pentagon. He was chosen to be ambassador because US policy toward Palestinians is no longer hiding behind the bantustate charade. The policy shift to more open aggression is most likely in response to increasing international support for Palestinians, opposition to Israeli genocide, & US & Israeli fear of the tsunamic force of the Arab Spring uprisings.
Friedman was a bankruptcy lawyer with no more knowledge of diplomacy or politics than real estate agent Jared Kushner who Trump put in charge of the treacherous US-brokered peace process that created the Oslo Accords. Their rabid uncompromising Zionism makes them appropriate for the aggressive shift in US policy toward Palestinians. Kushner’s real estate company has millions of dollars of financial ties to & investments in Israel, including in the West Bank settlements. Friedman, who has long openly opposed a bantustate solution, serves as a volunteer president to raise money for the nationalist Beit El settlement near Ramallah. A school in that settlement is named after his Zionist father who was an ardent advocate for the settler movement. His daughter is a settler in the West Bank in one of the 131 Zionist settlements which Netanyahu will be trying to annex.
In response to more aggressive US policy toward Palestinians, we must more consistently & more massively organize international opposition to stand with Palestinians against colonialism, apartheid, & genocide.
(Montage of Friedman from the Forward)