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June 12, 2017 3:14 pm
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Jason Greenblatt, Israel’s Fearless Friend in the White House

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avatar by Shmuley Boteach

Opinion

US diplomatic envoy Jason Greenblatt and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting in Jerusalem earlier this year. Photo: Kobi Gideon / GPO via Netanyahu’s Twitter account.

Less than six months into his job as President Donald Trump’s adviser on international negotiations and chief Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt is already feeling heat.

Following his trips to the Middle East in March and May, some in the pro-Israel community have already begun accusing Greenblatt of coming under the influence of left-leaning, wing-tipped bureaucrats at the State Department.

They point to Jason’s meetings with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who they believe (as do I) is not a true partner in peace. They take issue with Trump’s failure to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. They question Jason’s relationship with Tzipi Livni and Ronald Lauder. And they intimate he is slowly falling for a decades-old European campaign for a two-state solution.

The criticisms don’t stop at policy. In the Israeli press, some even criticized Jason for not wearing a yarmulke. Even Reuters mentioned it in March.

But I know Jason. And it bothers me to see a good man defamed.

So here are the facts.

On the yarmulke issue, there has already been way too much frum-shaming aimed at members of the Trump administration. It is downright disgusting. I am a proud Jew and believe in external manifestations of Jewishness. But the constant attempts to humiliate Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump about travel on Shabbat, and now Jason about a yarmulke, subvert basic norms of Jewish decency and punish those in the administration who are observant. Rather than being proud of their Orthodoxy, we seek to prove their hypocrisy. The Mishna in Ethics of our Fathers is clear: judge everyone favorably. Shame on us that we don’t.

Jason Greenblatt is a devout and observant Jew. Whether he wears a kippah is not the public’s business. Plenty of other generally kippah-clad Orthodox Jews opted not to wear yarmulkes while serving in their official capacities — among them former US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer, ex-President Barack Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew, or even the famously Orthodox retired Senator Joe Lieberman. While I absolutely believe in wearing a yarmulke, sitting with a magnifying glass to examine who does and doesn’t wear one is the condescension of the self-commissioned purity police for whom faith is nothing but a game of never-ending condemnation. We don’t live in Iran. So let’s stop this disgusting display of judgment.

I consider Jason a friend and saw him recently in the White House again to talk about Israel. He is a good and God-fearing person, a man of genuine humility with a deep moral center. And he is dedicated in heart, body, and soul to America, his Jewishness and Israel.

His critics have told only one side of the story. Here is a figure at the center of Middle East policy in an administration that has preached to the Arab states that they must finally stop all funding of terror, that has forcefully challenged UN bias against Israel, that is working to contain and isolate genocidal Iran, that put Israel on the itinerary of the president’s first trip abroad, that had the president make the first-ever visit by the leader of the free world to the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, that has reversed the non-stop hostility displayed by the Obama administration toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that celebrated Israel Independence Day with the vice president of the United States attending the first-ever White House celebration of the occasion. And let us not forget that the Trump administration demonstrated morality and humanity in attacking the air force of Syrian mass murderer Bashar Assad after he gassed innocent Arab children, something President Obama categorically refused to do. And for all that, Jason, who is helping to shape all these policies, is being attacked for not doing more.

Mind you, I believe he could do more, and that he should do more. I believe the administration should be telling Mahmoud Abbas that there will be no negotiations until the Palestinian Authority immediately ceases all payments to terrorists and their families. I believe that a Palestinian state would quickly be overtaken by Hamas and pose an existential threat to Israel. And I believe that the Trump administration has a moral obligation to bomb the recently-revealed Syrian crematoria, where tens of thousands of bodies have already been burned.

Those are incredibly serious issues, ones which I hope Jason will carefully consider before moving forward.

But for all of that, the Trump administration has thus far shown incredible friendship to Israel and Greenblatt, Kushner and David Friedman, along, of course, with the president, deserve enormous credit.

Jason has played a pivotal role in reversing the previous administration’s hostility toward Israel. He is a hero for doing so and we owe him our thanks.

When it comes to Middle East policy, particularly in how it pertains to Israel, the Trump administration has not been perfect. Neither was the administration of George W. Bush, who was the best friend Israel ever had in the Oval Office prior to Trump. The Trump administration could have moved the embassy, and still should. Many in the administration, including Trump himself, still seem to believe that the two-state solution can bring peace.

But what they haven’t done is peddle the deeply-flawed policies of the Obama State Department. On the contrary, Jason and all those in the Trump administration’s foreign policy wing have taken huge steps to perfect American policy in the Middle East, make it clear to American allies that there will be no tolerance for terrorist sympathy or funding and that the demonizing of Israel will make you an anathema to America.

The best proof came last week.

For years under the Obama administration, Qatar was allowed to freely fund some of the most brutal terrorists in the Middle East, including and especially Israel’s arch-enemy Hamas, whose leader the Gulf emirate hosted for over a decade and to whom it promised a billion dollars in 2014. Housing the largest US air base in the Middle East, Qatar seemed to always get a pass from its American tenants.

Until now.

Following Trump’s meeting with the Saudi King Salman in Riyadh last month, Qatar’s neighbors finally had the American support they needed to take action and reign in the evil kingdom.

And indeed, just last week, the sheikhs of Qatar were finally made to pay for the incalculable cash flows they have been providing to terrorists across the Middle East and to the thugs in Iran. Following its payment of a billion dollar ransom to Iran, Qatar found itself cut off both diplomatically and physically from almost of all of its most crucial allies, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt. Saudi Arabia even locked its borders with Qatar, preventing the import of 40% of the nation’s food, making prices soar. Qatar’s state-sponsored news outlet, known for its bitter hostility to Israel, suffered crippling cyber attacks and was forced to shut down its website.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir made it pretty simple. For Qatar to win over its friends again, all it needed to do was cut ties with Islamist terror groups Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Finally, someone said it. This would, in all likelihood, not have occurred without the Trump administration.

President Trump took credit for the actions taken against Qatar, tweeting that his trip to the Middle East was “already paying off.” And the truth is, while these moves were taken by Arab states, they could not have happened without a presidential go-ahead, which explains why they happened only now.

This wasn’t the first time Trump took Middle Eastern nations to task for their support of terror. He did the same with Iran, against whom he has taken a long-awaited hard line, a u-turn from Obama’s generous nuclear deal which gave the terror state $150 billion, the legitimization of its nuclear program and the right to build nuclear bombs legitimately in just over a decade.

At the UN, too, US Ambassador Nikki Haley has completely reversed the decline of American support for Israel. Last week, she called out the UN Human Rights Council, which she claimed “whitewashes brutality” and reserves its criticism exclusively for the State of Israel. She even threatened to pull American funding for the Geneva-based body. On Wednesday, while on a trip to Israel, Haley told President Reuven Rivlin: “I have never taken kindly to bullies and the UN has bullied Israel for a very long time and we are not going to let that happen anymore.” It’s clearly a new day for Israel at the UN.

I have been honest to Jason about my disagreements with administration policy. But for the enormous progress he and his team have already made, they deserve credit, our thanks and our patience.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi,” whom the Washington Post calls “the most famous rabbi in America,” is the international bestselling author of 30 books, including his most recent “The Israel Warrior.” Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

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