Welcome to FMEP’s Weekly Settlement Report, covering everything you need to know about Israeli settlement activity this week. To subscribe to this report, please click…

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.

Welcome to FMEP’s Weekly Settlement Report, covering everything you need to know about Israeli settlement activity this week. To subscribe to this report, please click…

Copies of declassified United States government cables, chronicling the Baruch Goldstein massacre of 29 Muslim worshipers in Hebron in 1994 and the wounding of more than 125 others, have been tucked away in a box under the desk of former diplomat Lara Friedman. On that fateful day of February 25, Friedman, who would later work for the left-wing organization Peace Now and today runs the Washington-based Foundation for Middle East Peace, was a foreign service officer at the US Consulate General in Jerusalem.