FOR a new American president to pick an ambassador with no experience in trade, cultural or any other form of diplomacy is not particularly remarkable. These appointments tend to be rewards for loyalty, friendship and financial backing during the campaign. What is most unusual, however, is to appoint someone who is pronouncedly undiplomatic and espouses extremist views on the politics of the country he will be sent to. Yet that is what the president-elect, Donald Trump, did on December 16th by choosing David Friedman, his bankruptcy lawyer and campaign adviser, as America’s next ambassador to Israel.

Mr Friedman has questioned the need for a two-state solution, a long-sought resolve of the conflict, hitherto backed by American policymakers, whereby Israel and Palestine would co-exist side-by-side. He compared supporters of J Street, a liberal Zionist lobby critical of some of Israel’s policies, to kapos—Jews forced to work as functionaries in concentration camps—during the Nazi regime, adding that they were far worse, because kapos were threatened with extraordinary cruelty if they didn’t collaborate with the Nazis. He subsequently elaborated that supporters of J Street were not Jewish and not pro-Israel.

On December 16th J Street released a statement saying it was vehemently opposed to Mr Friedman’s nomination: “Friedman has consistently aligned himself with some of the most irresponsible charges and conspiracy theories of the far-right, Islamophobic fringe in this country." The statement pointed out that Mr Friedman has called President Barack Obama an anti-Semite and spread the conspiracy theory that Huma Abedin, an aide to Hillary Clinton, has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. 

During the campaign the president-elect sent contradictory signals about his plans for the Middle East. He made conservative supporters of Israel nervous by suggesting that he would be “neutral” in efforts to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians and by fudging his views on the status of Jerusalem, a divided city with holy sites revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. But in March, in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Mr Trump cast himself as staunchly pro-Israel, citing as evidence his role as Grand Marshal of the 2004 “Salute to Israel” parade in New York and his daughter Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism upon her marriage to Jared Kushner, the son of another real-estate tycoon. He denounced the United Nations as an anti-Israel opponent of democracy and said he would “dismantle the disastrous deal” struck by Mr Obama to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He even pledged that he would move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, calling it “the eternal capital of the Jewish people”.

Mr Friedman took Mr Trump at his word. In a statement on December 16th he said that he looked forward to doing his new job from the American embassy in Jerusalem. Since the 1960s America’s embassy (as well as the embassies of nearly all other countries with diplomatic representation) has been located in Tel Aviv because both Israelis and Palestinians consider Jerusalem their rightful capital. The Jerusalem Embassy Act, passed by Congress in 1995, required America to move its embassy to Jerusalem by December 1999 and to recognise the city as capital of Israel. But the act contains a clause that allows presidents to delay its implementation indefinitely “if the move presents national security concerns”. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Mr Obama wisely invoked this clause. The risk of a move provoking anti-American violence in the region and beyond is considered too great. 

Mr Friedman also endorses continued Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory and even the annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank. Every American administration since 1967 has considered Jewish settlements in the West Bank illegitimate. Yet America’s future ambassador is head of the American Friends of Bet El Institutions, an organisation that supports settlements in the West Bank just outside Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian National Authority. The family charity of Mr Kushner has made a generous donation to Bet El.

Mr Friedman’s appointment caught most Israeli experts by surprise. He makes Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s right-wing premier, seem like a “leftwing defeatist”, commented Chemi Shalev, a columnist for Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper. “From where Friedman stands, most Israelis, never mind most American Jews, are more or less traitors.”