Lara Friedman discusses the Israel-Palestine conflict and obstacles standing in the way of negotiations for possible peace agreements. Friedman is a Washington Insider, Middle East expert, and president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

“Foundation for Middle East Peace President Lara Friedman points out that a proposed Arizona amendment could potentially trample on free speech and target critics of Israel.

“Folks, they are going to make it a hate crime to meaningfully criticize/protest Israel,” tweeted Friedman.
As Friedman notes, the legislation would revise statutes relating to crime reporting, but the amendment has ramifications that go far beyond data collection…”

Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, expressed concern about false accusations of anti-Semitism and spurious charges of ties to terrorist organizations being used to silence the Palestinian solidarity movement. Organizations ranging from news outlets to civil society groups have been silenced by social media corporations and slammed with frivolous lawsuits over such allegations, she noted. “It’s an enormously powerful weapon that I don’t think people are effectively grappling with,” she cautioned.

The latest episode of The President’s Inbox is live. This week, I sat down with Michael Doran, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, to talk about the future of the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Here are three takeaways from our conversation:

“Although both the Deutch and Lankford bills purport to ‘fix’ the law, critics say they both fall short. ‘In the name of finding justice for American victims of terror, both ‘fixes’ are predicated on the view that, in order for the aid issue to be resolved, some other hook must be found or created to ensure that [the Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act’s] fundamental objective is still served: Enabling the PLO and PA to be sued out of existence in US courts,’ said Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced today that the US government will no longer hold the position that settlements built in the West Bank are necessarily illegal, saying the decision recognizes reality on the ground…“I don’t think it is a coincidence that this is happening days after the European Court of Justice ruling on labeling,” Lara Friedman, executive director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, told Al-Monitor from Tel Aviv today. “That is clear. The substantive impact will depend on what flesh we put on the bones” of the decision, Friedman continued. “The President, the State Department can tell Customs and Border to change our policy on labeling [of goods produced from the settlements].”

“The president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Lara Friedman, also spoke at the conference titled “The United States, Israel & Palestine: An Assessment,” as part of a panel that also included University of Maryland Professor Shibley Telhami and former U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem Jake Walles. Friedman stressed the importance of running a reality check by looking at the facts and being realistically strategic. The first certainty is that the Trump team’s promises, stances, and actions on the Israel-Palestine conflict have been almost perfectly aligned, unlike on other issues. “This administration is chaotic and reckless and constantly doing random things on the Middle East, but on Israel-Palestine, they have been coherent, and cogent, and consistent,” she said. But being coherent and producing sound policy are two different things…

Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace explains to VOA the predicament Jordan could face should Israel try to annex this area bordering the kingdom…Declaring annexation really takes away the pretense. It rips away the fig (leaf) that there could be, or that people want there to be, a political solution on the West Bank and Gaza that resolves the claims of the Palestinians. For Arab neighbors, this has different levels of threat involved,” said Friedman. “For Gulf countries, this is an issue of the symbolism of Jerusalem, the symbolism of the Palestinian struggle which is certainly less of a hot issue than it has been in past years, but for the ‘street,’ based on polling, it appears not to have gone away. But for Jordan, this is an immediate existential threat on its border. For Lebanon, which has a population of Palestinian refugees that, simply for Lebanese demographic reasons, cannot be accommodated, it is an existential problem. And for Egypt as well. It’s the argument: What do you do with Gaza? Do we make it Egypt’s problem? Egypt doesn’t want Gaza. At the point where Israel starts announcing annexation and ripping away even the pretense of a political process for those three countries in particular, this becomes an immediate and domestic existential issue.

In a Twitter thread, Lara Friedman of the think tank Foundation for Middle East Peace said the attempt to define working with the PA as support to terrorism would be an attempt at “tarring” all agencies that engage with it. She wrote: “the entire humanitarian/civil society sector is in the crosshairs.”

But Foundation for Middle East Peace president Lara Friedman said Netanyahu’s pledge should be taken seriously. “I don’t think he’s made any promise nearly as clear as this,” she said. Nevertheless, a White House official said after Netanyahu’s announcement that there was no change in American policy against West Bank annexation.