“It fits in with what people like Haley have been saying,” Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a nonprofit opposed to Israeli settlements in the West Bank, told Al-Monitor. “This doesn’t come out of nowhere. People who see this as a positive thing will see this as one more tool in the president’s arsenal to use.”

“The only concrete thing ‘softened’ by the new text is the removal of jail time for violations,” said Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a nonprofit opposed to Israel’s West Bank settlements. The bill, she said, was also tweaked “so that the law does not necessarily apply to individuals if they are acting in an exclusively personal, private capacity.”

“We have seen a wave of legislation in US states and efforts at the federal level … to define any differentiation between the two as boycotting Israel and to seek ways to use US law to either sanction people doing that to punish them or to prevent them from doing it,” said Lara Friedman, president of the Washington, DC-based Foundation for Middle East Peace.

“As a liberal Zionist, I fiercely defend Israel’s right to exist, its right to security, and its legitimacy as a member of the community of nations,” writes Lara Friedman, President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. “I also fiercely care about what kind of state Israel exists as and the values it embodies. I want to see Israel flourish as a liberal democracy that fully implements the rule of law, adheres to international norms, and respects the civil and human rights of all peoples living under its authority.”

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.