In Al-Monitor, FMEP President Lara Friedman explains, “Boycotting settlement products is not a boycott of Israel. It’s about differentiating between the West Bank and Israel.”

On President Trump’s recent statement on settlements, FMEP’s Lara Friedman said, “He didn’t raise the issue of settlements, he was asked about it and gave a word salad response that implies nothing. It’s like rolling in place. There was nothing that indicated that there will be any pressure on Israel in response to the settlements.”

Today, 10 months into the Trump Administration’s tenure in office and six months after David Friedman took up his post as U.S. ambassador to Israel, things are going exactly as one should have expected, if one had taken seriously both Friedman’s special role and his extensive record of policy statements made over the course of the 2016 campaign and in the years preceding it.

“Under normal circumstances you would expect someone who has a background of activism related to Israel to be working very hard to take a step back from that to show that he can be a credible mediator. Not only is that not the case, it’s the opposite,” FMEP’s Lara Friedman tells ProPublica.

FMEP’s Lara Friedman talks to the Intercept about the Feinstein letter urging Netanyahu not to demolish the Palestinian Bedouin villages of Susiya and Khan Al-Ahmar.

“There is wiggle room in the law — both on the PLO mission and the aid — for an administration to either certify or decertify depending what it wants to do,” Lara Friedman tells Jewish Insider.

FMEP’s Lara Friedman talks to Al-Monitor about the Trump administration’s decision to allow the PLO mission in Washington, DC to operate as long as it “limit its activities to those related to achieving a lasting, comprehensive peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.”

“It sure looks like this is being used as a tactic to force [the Palestinians] to the negotiating table on terms determined by the United States, Saudis and Israelis,” said Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

Lara Friedman, an expert in US law regarding Israelis and Palestinians and the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said that when she heard Abbas’s speech at the UN this year, she immediately understood it might have repercussions. Friedman has for years followed closely all news and legislation on Capitol Hill that relates to Israeli-Palestinian issues. While reading the December 2015 foreign ops bill that added the ICC provision, she recalled thinking, “Holy crap, where did this come from?” She wasn’t sure if anyone else had noticed the ticking time bomb planted silently into the bill. Should the PLO mission in DC be closed, she said, it would take the US relationship with the Palestinians back 30 years. Friedman surmised that may be what the provision’s authors intended: moving the clock back to the pre-Oslo era, when the idea of a Palestinian state was more or less unthinkable in Washington.

“In tandem with efforts to [legislate] against boycotts of Israel and settlements, [Kenneth] Marcus has long been a vocal advocate of efforts, unsuccessful so far, to pass laws at both the federal and state level defining activism targeting Israel as anti-Semitism, and imposing a gag rule on such activism,” Lara Friedman told the Intercept.