WASHINGTON _ President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday said he plans to nominate as ambassador to Israel his lawyer, a hard-liner on the Middle East who has voiced opposition to decades of U.S. policy in the region.
David Friedman, who served as one of Trump's main advisers on Israel during the campaign, vowed to perform as a "rock-solid partner" to Israel's conservative leadership.
He has been quoted recently expressing doubt about the so-called two-state solution, the existence of an Israeli and a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace, which has been the basis of U.S. policy for decades and the framework for peace negotiations in that part of the world.
"To blindly embrace a two-state solution because it's been an American policy for the past 25 years is not something he's going to do," Friedman said in a recent interview with the Israeli website Ynet.
He added that Trump believed the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine was simply not working.
In the announcement of his appointment, Friedman also upended another U.S. tenet, saying he looked forward to being able to "strengthen the unbreakable bond" between the United States and Israel "from the U.S. Embassy in Israel's eternal capital, Jerusalem."
The United States, like almost every other country in the world, maintains its embassy in Tel Aviv and does not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel because part of the city is also claimed by the Palestinians. The U.S. position is that the status of Jerusalem should be settled in negotiations.
Trump has said he would move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Previous presidential candidates have at times made a similar promise, but no president has ever done it out of concern that the move would inflame tensions in an already volatile region.
"I think one of (Trump's) first acts is going to be to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel," Friedman said in the Ynet interview although he added that the actual move of the embassy might not happen right away.
Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer, represented Trump in cases involving his Atlantic City casinos. He has been a columnist for two conservative publications in Israel. An Orthodox Jew, he is the son of a prominent rabbi from New York's Long Island.
