Chapter One: "I Have My Candidate"

The U.S. Embassy in Israel never had a true political appointee, from outside the professional foreign policy world, before President Trump nominated David Friedman to serve as his ambassador to Israel. That nomination was a shock to the system. Friedman was not a known personality in Washington, D.C., but his writings and charitable involvement left no doubt that he would be unapologetically pro-Israel. It was even more of a shock when I was appointed as his senior advisor.

There are fewer than ten politically appointed special advisors posted to our embassies around the world at any point in time. It takes substantial resources to train, house, and secure American personnel abroad. In the case of career foreign service professionals, this is a sunk cost, but for political appointees it is an expenditure to be carefully meted out where necessary. Political appointments are normally reserved for the highest-profile and busiest posts abroad. For the U.S. Embassy in Israel to receive two political appointees before ambassadors had been nominated to most of our major allies was unprecedented. These appointments signaled that there was going to be a new direction in Middle East policy. In fact, my embassy job would give me an inside perspective on a breakthrough in the region, culminating in the four Abraham Accords signed between September 15 and December 23, 2020.

The way I came to be appointed gave me a clue about how the soil was being tilled for a realignment of Middle East policy. On February 9, 2017, David and I were on the Accela heading from Washington back to our homes on Long Island after an exhausting day of meetings with members of Congress. Our last meeting had been with Senator Bernie Sanders, and we weren’t in great spirits when we boarded the train. As the car rocked back and forth, we talked intermittently about the day’s meetings, checked our phones, and dozed a little.

Then David mentioned his meeting with President Trump earlier that day. “The president wants me to work closely with Jared Kushner on the Mideast peace team,” he said. “It would be a great honor, but I’d need to bring someone with me to repair the U.S.-Israel relationship that’s been gravely injured over the past eight years. The president also said I could choose whomever I wanted, but that person would need to get to work quickly.”

“Do you have a short list of candidates you want to interview?” I asked. “If so, I could be helpful setting them up.”

“I have my candidate. It’s you.”

David had been a friend and mentor for almost a decade. His wife, Tammy, was one of the very first people to welcome my wife and me to our community on Long Island when we moved there ten years earlier. During the Republican primaries of 2016, David and I had a friendly rivalry, as I favored Marco Rubio while he supported his good friend Donald Trump. After Trump’s victory, I was anxious to do everything I could to help David become the ambassador to Israel, and I offered my assistance in the confirmation process. He accepted, and I’m really not sure why, since many of his friends have relationships in the U.S. Senate similar to mine, and I spent the better part of two months traveling back and forth from Long Island to D.C. with David for his Senate confirmation and State Department onboarding. I was not-so-secretly hoping for an opportunity to work with David at the embassy, but I doubted that there was actually an appropriate position for me. When he offered me a job assisting him, I doubted that I was the right person for it.

“Thank you for this opportunity,” I said to David. “It’s extremely humbling to be considered.” I promised to discuss it with my wife, Estee, and get back to him in a day or two.

It was two days later when I went to David’s house with a pit in my stomach. I told them that serving as his advisor could be the best job in the world, but the timing wasn’t great for my family. More importantly, I suggested that he find someone better qualified for the position.

“Why aren’t you ‘qualified’?” he asked.

I explained my thinking: “You and I agree on almost everything. We are unapologetically pro-Israel. We are conservatives. We know the relationship needs to be repaired. And we both saw very clearly the foolishness of the Iran deal and the ‘peace’ processes.” I noted that David had a big challenge ahead of him and that I might only compound the difficulty. “The world already discounts you for being the son of a rabbi and an Orthodox Jew. You will be cementing their worst fears by hiring someone who is an Orthodox rabbi, and someone who wears a kippah at all times. Why don’t you hire someone else who agrees with us—there are plenty of others—and ideally, someone who is ...” I hesitated before saying, “not as Jewish.”

David thought for a few moments, and then replied with words that echo in my head to this day: “I don’t know what job you think you were offered. If you think I offered a job representing the United States of America to the State of Israel in which being a rabbi and an Orthodox Jew is a disqualification, then I offered the position to the wrong person. But if you want a job representing the United States of America being proud of who you are, knowing who you are, supporting what you believe in, that is the job I am offering, and I hope it is the one you will take.”