The US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, has made a second dramatic intervention in US Middle East policy, suggesting that only 2% of the West Bank is occupied by Israel and that the international community always intended for Israel to keep some of the land it seized during the six-day war in 1967.
The comments, made in an interview with the news channel Israeli Walla, came a day after rightwing Israeli politicians celebrated 50 years of Israeli settlement building, prompting condemnation by Palestinian officials.
“I think the settlements are part of Israel,” Friedman said, in comments that seem at odds with decades of US foreign policy.
“I think that was always the expectation when resolution 242 was adopted in 1967,” he said, referring to the UN security council resolution made at the end of the six-day war, when Israeli forces occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Friedman, a former personal lawyer of Donald Trump who had no experience in diplomacy before his appointment, was regarded as a strong supporter of Jewish settlement before he was named as ambassador.
“The idea was that Israel would be entitled to secure borders,” he told Israeli Walla. “The existing borders, the 1967 borders, were viewed by everybody as not secure, so Israel would retain a meaningful portion of the West Bank, and it would return that which it didn’t need for peace and security. So there was always supposed to be some notion of expansion into the West Bank, but not necessarily expansion into the entire West Bank.
“And I think that’s exactly what Israel has done. I mean, they’re only occupying 2% of the West Bank. There is important nationalistic, historical [and] religious significance to those settlements, and I think the settlers view themselves as Israelis and Israel views the settlers as Israelis.”
Resolution 242 demanded the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” while “emphasising the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”.
While the figure of 2% has been used in the past by Israeli officials to define occupation as the physical footprint of settlement buildings, “area C” – the part of the West Bank under Israeli administrative and security control – accounts for 60% of the West Bank.
In addition, reports compiled by the UN and NGOs suggest up to 39% of all land in the occupied West Bank is under the control of Jewish municipalities, local authorities and regional councils, with Israel effectively prohibiting Palestinian construction and development there.
Nabil Shaath, an adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said: “Sometimes ambassadors can be ignorant and sometimes they can be biased but this is completely ignorant, not just of US policy but the fact that the occupation refers to the whole of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It also shows a complete ignorance of resolution 242, in which there is no reference to settlements.
“If this is a preview of President Trump’s ultimate deal, I shudder, but we have a situation where decision-making capability and soundness of judgment is totally lacking.”
Another Palestinian official said: “Israel occupies 100% of the West Bank. If I was a US citizen I would be extremely concerned that my ambassador in Israel is using his position to try to emphasise the importance of settlements to Israel.”
It is the second time in as many months that Friedman has courted controversy with his views on Israel’s occupation and Jewish settlements, after he referred to “the alleged occupation” in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.
There is mounting concern among Palestinian officials over what they see as a bias towards Israel in the Trump administration’s much-vaunted hopes for a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, not least over the White House’s continuing refusal to commit itself to a two-state solution.
Before taking up his post, Friedman had voiced opposition to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis. He had also called Barack Obama an antisemite and suggested US Jews who opposed the Israeli occupation of the West Bank were worse than kapos, Nazi-era prisoners who served as concentration camp guards.
When he was announced as ambassador-designate, liberal Jewish groups in the US denounced Friedman’s appointment as reckless, describing him as the least experienced choice ever for a US ambassador to Israel.
