By Rami Chris Robbins, JNS
What Huckabee, Rubio and Witkoff can learn from their predecessors when it comes to Israel and the Middle East.
President-elect Donald Trump announced the appointment of Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel and Steve Witkoff, a Bronx, N.Y.-born, Jewish real-estate investor, to be the U.S. Middle East envoy. He is expected to appoint Marco Rubio as the U.S. secretary of state. All three men have a record of full-throated support for America’s strategic alliance with Israel.
With Trump’s prior Abraham Accords dream team being partially (or totally) replaced, it makes sense to review what made them successful during Trump’s first term, as they created a recipe that Rubio, Witkoff and Huckabee can follow and improve upon.
When U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt started working for the Trump administration in January 2017, they faced one of America’s most ossified bureaucracies: The U.S. State Department.
For a generation, the State Department presided over deadlocked Middle East peace negotiations, bloody Islamic terrorism and regional conflict. The terror would spill onto our shores several times, most prominently on Sept. 11, 2001.
Trump, the disrupter tried something new. He started assembling a team even before his inauguration day. He tapped attorneys Friedman and Greenblatt, and named his son-in-law, Jared Kushner—a real-estate mogul with a business and law degree—as his senior adviser. Trump also welcomed Aryeh Lightstone, a young rabbi, as Friedman’s senior adviser, and Avi Berkowitz, a yeshivah graduate turned Harvard-trained lawyer, as special assistant to the president.
Unless you count Friedman’s occasional opinion article for the solidly conservative Arutz Sheva newspaper in Jerusalem, the entire group lacked diplomatic and foreign-policy experience.
They were not unsupervised. A few pros guided them when necessary. They included then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, senior director for the National Security Council Robert Greenway and U.S. Gen. Miguel Correa.
The team started with a failure analysis. What was behind the generation-long stalemate between Israel, its neighbors and the Palestinian Authority?
According to Friedman and Greenblatt, the impasse was due to two discredited mantras that had attained groupthink status in the State Department and among diplomats around the world. One was that peace with the P.A. was a prerequisite to regional peace. The second was that Israel must give up territory simply to earn recognition and the right to peacefully coexist with Arab neighbors.
Trump’s team recognized that these assumptions were obstacles and not pathways to peace. Further, the mantras gave the P.A. veto power, bringing progress to a halt, as Greenblatt explained in his memoir, In the Path of Abraham.
Once they disconnected from this mythology, the team had clarity. Real peace partners trade peace for peace. It occurs for its own sake.
When it was clear that the P.A. was neither willing nor qualified, the team pivoted. Emboldened by positive overtures from Gulf states—ones that resulted from a diplomatic arbitrage strategy—they turned to countries in the Persian Gulf, and later Africa, for potential partners.
Peace with Israel turned out to be a compelling value proposition. Israeli markets, technology, agribusiness, water tech and innovation make the Startup Nation the best dance partner in the area. The Sunni Arab states also shared a national security concern with Israel: defending against Iranian aggression and expansion.
Turning prospects into customers also required the dream team to challenge the rules again. “How are peace deals different from other business deals?” the team asked. A deal starts with decision-makers spending time with one another and their advisers. They are strictly private, not public affairs. Privacy and secrecy are key to building trust.
Gone was the spectacle of the public Middle East peace summit, named after the cities or opulent venues that played host to them: Madrid, Oslo, Camp David, Taba, Wye River, Sharm-el-Sheikh, Geneva, Annapolis, Washington. These summits spanned decades. They created hundreds of committees. They spawned millions of pages of useless documents. They enriched a new class of professional peace “processers,” the ones who helped bring the world the Oslo Accords.
In stark contrast, as Lightstone recounts in his memoir, Let My People Know, Trump’s team hashed out a complete set of investment and banking agreements in Dubai after dinner with their eager Emirati hosts. How? They pulled an all-nighter.
The first wave of the Abraham Accords included five signers. The team wrapped it up in less than six months. Thus, a small group of foreign-policy amateurs from the private sector achieved what a cruise ship full of rudderless State Department staff could not in a generation.
For Huckabee’s benefit, let’s also discuss specific and successful steps Friedman took at his post in Israel.
Friedman discarded parts of the State Department’s rulebook that had been written specifically to constrain the action of political appointees abroad. His desire to overturn some rules and policies was rooted in the fact that they were inappropriate for Israel. Israel is not an ordinary posting; it is a strategic ally of the United States. Israeli young men and women fight and die trying to defeat (or at least contain) groups that the same State Department has designated terrorist organizations. Some of these groups have been murdering Americans since the 1960s.
U.S. policies therefore must be supportive of Israel, not “nuanced.” America should not be an “honest broker.” It is in the national interest of the United States to make common cause with Israel and defeat common enemies.
Friedman reversed the rule that generally prohibited State Department employees from traveling to Judea and Samaria, the historic birthplace of the Jewish people. Friedman and Lightstone held meetings there, met with the heads of regional councils and made condolence calls to the families of terror victims.
Friedman was the first ambassador to refuse to certify left-wing, NGO “echo chamber” reports critical of Israel. These are usually bald-faced libels against the Jewish state from mostly left-wing NGOs, some that have a history of Jew-hatred and coddling terrorists.
Friedman visited Israeli archaeological sites, arguing that the United States should be highlighting, not hiding, Israel’s history which ties it to the land. He helped register the City of David in Jerusalem with the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad and famously attended its grand opening, sledgehammer in hand.
He helped fix flawed designation-of-origin rules that prohibited companies in Judea and Samaria from labeling their wares as “Made in Israel.” Friedman enforced violations of the Taylor Force Act by the P.A., and his work led to the decertification and closure of the Palestinian mission in Washington. He also boldly confronted NGOs and “journalists” who libeled the United States and Israel.
All of this sent the right message. America stands with its strategic ally. A strong Israel is an attractive peace partner.
What, then, should be next for Rubio, Witkoff and Huckabee?
• Create the next dream team. Find smart novices with business backgrounds, and get the job done. Keep the careerists out of peacemaking. “Sledgehammers” like Friedman and doers like Greenblatt are what America needs.
• Extend the Abraham Accords. It is time to get back to work expanding the Abraham Accords. Turn it into the most powerful block of nations in the Middle East.
• Ensure sovereignty. Ambiguity over Israel’s borders helps no one. Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria is the only real choice for Jews, Muslims, Druze and Christians. This will be a complicated problem to solve.
• Freedom of the skies. It is time to normalize aviation to and from Israel. It will save the planet tens of millions of wasted manhours spent circumnavigating antisemitic nations and save hundreds of millions of gallons of jet fuel. If a nation denies the United States and Israeli airlines overflight and landing privileges, both their national airline and any other air carriers that service their country should face harsh financial penalties. Let’s show them how expensive boycotts can be.
• State Department human resources. While most State Department staff are dedicated and patriotic, many remain loyal to the old mantras. A small number are outright anti-Israel. If you cannot pass George Gilder’s famous Israel Test, you should work at the Bureau of Land Management, where you are unlikely to get Jews killed.
• Defrock malign NGOs. The dream team should end the U.S. State Department’s dependence upon NGO reports entirely, unless human-rights abuses have been investigated and confirmed by Israel’s independent judiciary.
May the next four years bring more peace, more winning and more prosperity to America and Israel, and may the new dream team accomplish even more than the last.
