DC Insider spoke with Lara Friedman, President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, to get closer insight into the progress of the so-called ‘deal of the century,’ and how policymakers are reacting in Washington.

“This is a brazen violation of Americans’ right to free speech,” Foundation for Middle East Peace president Lara Friedman writes at the group’s website. “It is also a McCarthyistic tactic of required self-reporting designed to enable – and legitimize – the U.S. government in building a list of Americans tracking their political views/activities.”

“They’re working openly, and have been for years, to argue there is no distinction between Israel and settlements, that all the land was given to them by God, and that making a distinction between settlements and Israel is anti-Semitic,” said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a liberal think tank whose work focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The Trump administration has not announced any change in U.S. policy when it comes to entry of Palestinians to the United States,” said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and a former U.S. foreign service officer in Jerusalem. “One [denial] could be just a random happenstance, two could be a coincidence. Three, it’s reasonable to ask whether or not there hasn’t been a de facto shift in U.S. policy that is denying visas to Palestinians to come to the U.S. based on their political views, which would be deeply troubling.”

The Foundation for Middle East Peace published a chart listing the 17 states whose anti-boycott laws or implementing guidelines penalize businesses that boycott Israel or the territories controlled by Israel, a phrase that applies to the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami and Foundation for Middle East Peace President Lara Friedman in conversation with Todd Gitlin. They discuss what BDS is and isn’t — and offer strategies for responding to this very polarizing issue.

The Lawfare Blog quotes Lara Friedman’s analysis of anti-BDS legislation in Congress: “The purpose of the [Combating BDS Act] is to give political and legal cover to, and encouragement for, state laws that violate the First Amendment of the Constitution.”

Lara Friedman, director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, was a diplomat at the consulate from 1992 to 1994. She told Al-Monitor that the move, coupled with the closure of the Palestinian mission in Washington, signified the United States’ “formal de-recognition” of the Palestinians as a people.“It relegates them — for the first time in history — to the status of an internal Israeli issue, to be reported and understood exclusively through the lens of the US-Israel relationship. In so doing, this move will make the situation on the ground worse, will make the possibility of peace more remote and will further isolate the US in its self-imposed bubble of bad policies shaped not by the facts or expert, apolitical analysis, or even by US interests, but instead by the agenda of a handful of messianic ideologues,” she added.

Omar’s and Tlaib’s ascendancy within the Democratic Party, alongside Bernie Sanders and other progressives who reject bundled donor or corporate money, “challenges the entire structure on which AIPAC’s influence is based,” noted Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a left-leaning Washington-based think tank.

“This could certainly be successful,” Friedman said. “But let’s be clear: if AIPAC believes that a new group selling same old AIPAC hasbara is going to resonate with Americans who today are voting both with their ballots and their wallets to support candidates who are truly progressive — including when it comes to Israel-Palestine issues — then it suggests that AIPAC is out of touch or in denial about what is happening at the grassroots level in this country.”

opies of declassified United States government cables, chronicling the Baruch Goldstein massacre of 29 Muslim worshipers in Hebron in 1994 and its aftermath, have been tucked away in a box under the desk Lara Friedman.