Sledgehammer: How Breaking with the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East

By David Friedman

The Trump administration’s peace agreements in the Middle East were the greatest foreign policy accomplishment in decades. Now, for the first time, his ambassador to Israel explains how they pulled it off.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity. For decades, the U.S. State Department called it diplomacy.

David Friedman was an outside candidate when President Trump appointed him U.S. ambassador to Israel. He took office to find U.S.-Israel policy stuck in stalemate. For years, accepted wisdom was that extensive experience and detailed knowledge of Middle Eastern history and culture were necessary to negotiate treaties. In truth, Friedman realized, all parties played on that accepted wisdom to stall—expecting to get a better deal further down the road.

Tossing the State Department playbook aside and incorporating insights from his many years as a negotiator in the American private sector, Friedman and a small team with no prior diplomatic experience revamped American diplomacy to project “peace through strength.” He emphasized the importance of leverage, the key to any good negotiation. After painstaking, behind-the-scenes work, the Abraham Accords were signed: a historic series of peace deals between Israel and the five Muslim nations.

In Sledgehammer, Friedman tells the true story of how the Abraham Accords came about. He takes us from the Oval Office to the highest echelons of power in the Middle East, putting us at the table during the intense negotiations that led to this historic breakthrough. The inside story of arguably the greatest achievement of the Trump Administration, Sledgehammer is an important, inspiring account of the hard, hopeful work necessary to bring long overdue—and lasting—peace to one of the most turbulent and tragic regions of the globe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Feb 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9780063098121

David Friedman

David Friedman served as the United States Ambassador to Israel from 2017 to 2021. Under his leadership, the United States made unprecedented diplomatic advances, including moving its Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and, of course, brokering the Abraham Accords. For his efforts, Friedman was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and received the National Security Medal. He lives with his wife Tammy in Jerusalem.

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Dedication

I wrote this book for several reasons: to advocate for a strong US-Israel relationship, to provide historical context for the Abraham Accords, to move American foreign policy away from decades of wooden and mistaken theories, and to acknowledge the Divine force that I believe guided my path.

Far more important, I wrote this book for several people: my children, my grandchildren, and my incredible, devoted wife.

This book is for Daniel, Jana, Meira, Chaim Meir, Leora, Shmuel Moshe, Jacob, Danielle, Isla, Alex, Henry, Aliza, Eli, Olivia, Aiden, Julian, Talia, Sam, and Katie. It is for you and, God willing, the additional children and grandchildren that you will bring into the world. Especially for those yet to be born who may not get to know me very well, here is a glimpse of what I care about and what motivates me. But it is only a small glimpse. My love for all of you is a far greater motivation; it’s just a lot harder to put into 250 pages.

To my beautiful wife, Tammy, I owe you everything. Our forty years of marriage have gone by in a blink, and I know and pray that the best is yet to come. You hold my heart and I never want it back. Thank you, thank you so very much.

Epigraph

Pray for the peace in Jerusalem, they shall prosper that love thee.

—Psalms 122:6

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: Sledgehammer—Birth of a Metaphor

1. Donald and Me

2. Israel and Me

3. The Trump Campaign

4. Confirmation Controversy

5. Battling the State Department

6. Trump in Jerusalem

7. The Daunting Challenges of Daily Life

8. If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem

9. How to Build an Embassy in Three Months for Half a Million Bucks

10. Countering False Narratives

11. Saving Unknown Lives

12. Undividing Jerusalem

13. Peace: From the Outside In

14. The Storms before the Storm

15. A Vision for Peace

16. The Abraham Accords

17. Peace Progresses

18. Cleaning Up

Epilogue: Peace Is Possible

Acknowledgments

Appendix: The Abraham Accords Declaration

Index

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Sledgehammer

Birth of a Metaphor

The prophets Isaiah and Micah each use identical words to describe the ultimate in diplomacy: They shall beat their swords into plowshares. Converting the equipment of war into tools of peace is the goal of every American member of the foreign service. But most overlook the fact that the prophets didn’t use the phrase convert their swords, they used the word beat (a more literal interpretation of the Hebrew would be crush). The prophets suggested a less-than-delicate approach to peacemaking might be necessary, something requiring more than a scalpel or a file. Perhaps even a sledgehammer.

As US ambassador to Israel, that was my approach. It led to a once-in-a-generation series of peace agreements between Israel and five Muslim countries. This book tells the story of how those peace agreements—the Abraham Accords—came to be.

I didn’t choose this sledgehammer metaphor; it chose me. It began fifteen years ago with a burst sewage pipe in the City of David, an eleven-acre ridge just south of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The City of David, one of the most archaeologically excavated sites in the world, is Jerusalem central—the very place where the kings of the Bible ruled and the prophets of the Bible preached.

Local plumbers were called in to determine the source of the water break. As they excavated the terrain, they realized that there was something unusual below street level. As often happens in Jerusalem, this prompted a call to the Jerusalem Municipality, which in turn resulted in a rushed visit from the Israel Antiquities Authority. As the experts examined the hole in the ground, they realized that they had stumbled upon a discovery of literally biblical proportions—they had uncovered the ancient steps leading to the Pool of Siloam.

The Pool of Siloam was originally built by Hezekiah, king of Judah, in the eighth century BCE, and fed by the Gihon Spring through the Siloam Tunnel. Hezekiah built the water tunnel to ensure an adequate water supply to the ancient City of Jerusalem, especially in the event of a threatened siege from Judah’s enemies to the north. The Babylonians apparently destroyed the pool at the end of the sixth century BCE, but the Hasmoneans rebuilt it. King Herod enhanced it about two hundred years later.

Archaeologists and scientists concurred that this discovery was the Pool of Siloam. The pool was the public bath where Jewish pilgrims would purify themselves before ascending to the Temple. According to Christian tradition, the Pool of Siloam is where the New Testament records that Jesus cured a blind man.

Discovery of the Pool of Siloam prompted a follow-up inquiry as to how the pilgrims ascended to the Temple once they had cleansed themselves. Further excavation then revealed something even more amazing: an almost perfectly preserved flagstone road ascending directly from the Pool of Siloam to the southern entrance of the Temple Mount, its construction attributed to Pontius Pilate in the year 30—a few years before the crucifixion of Jesus and approximately forty years before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans and the subsequent expulsion of the Jews. It was indeed a significant archaeological find with great spiritual significance to Christians and Jews alike.

Palestinian opposition to this project, however, was intense. They protested that the archaeologists were weakening the foundations of homes in the City of David community, although little evidence supported this claim. What really agitated Palestinian leadership was the impending reality that their favorite narrative that Jews had no historical connection to ancient Jerusalem was about to be further discredited and exposed as a lie. Even though Jerusalem is mentioned more than six hundred times in the Old Testament and not once in the Koran, decades of Palestinian leadership successfully had espoused the argument that Jerusalem is holy only to Muslims and Christians but not to Jews. This was always a self-contradictory argument, since if Jerusalem was holy to Christians, it is because Jesus prayed there as a Jew. Although this falsehood was accepted by UNESCO and other international organizations, the City of David excavations, along with other projects throughout Jerusalem, were creating scientific proof that, to the contrary, ancient biblical Jerusalem was real, it was vibrant, it was Jewish, and sites mentioned in both the Old and New Testaments do exist.

By 2019, nearly half of the ancient street from the Pool of Siloam to the Temple had been excavated. I was given a rare opportunity to view this thoroughfare, dubbed the Pilgrimage Road, early that year. What I saw was astounding: ancient flagstone steps matching exactly the steps at the southern entrance to the Temple Mount.

I’ve been to countless museums displaying Jerusalem antiquities. But to me, the Pilgrimage Road was very different from those displays behind glass cases. Those were merely a shard of glass, a piece of clay, or a shred of parchment. The Pilgrimage Road presented a unique opportunity to immerse oneself in a world destroyed some two thousand years ago and walk the steps of thousands of Jews who made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year for the major festivals—including the historical Jesus. Walking the Pilgrimage Road was an opportunity to feel the anticipation of the pilgrims as they prepared for a deeply spiritual experience. It was a way to step back in time into the world of the Bible.

The world of the Bible is not just significant to me because I am Jewish. I am an American deeply concerned that we as a nation have become untethered from our founding principles. This world of the Bible was the world drawn upon by our Founders in creating the great American Republic. The Declaration of Independence, perhaps the most profound document since the Bible, contained the guarantee to every person of unalienable rights endowed by our Creator. These rights weren’t just a good idea that found their roots in the political discourse of Thomas Hobbes or John Locke or the Federalist Papers or the Magna Carta—or even the Code of Hammurabi. These unalienable rights endowed by God were his will as revealed in the Bible. And the word of God, as described by the prophet Isaiah, was first expressed in the City of David: For out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem (Isaiah 2:3).

The City of David—the center of Jewish life in the days of the Bible—thus meant as much to me as an American as it did as a Jew, and I was determined to make sure that American political leaders were exposed to this great monument to our Judeo-Christian heritage. On January 15, 2021, just days before I left office, I formally recognized the City of David as an American heritage site. It was a fitting final act.

But in early 2019, even after we moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and after the United States had withdrawn from UNESCO, the City of David remained off-limits within our State Department. It was considered too controversial then to celebrate Israel’s ancient connection to Jerusalem.

I pushed back on this flawed thinking and ultimately prevailed. In conjunction with the City of David, the US embassy in Jerusalem scheduled a ceremony to observe the opening of the Pilgrimage Road for June 30, 2019. On that day, I hosted a delegation of US ambassadors from several European nations, along with US Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt and Senator Lindsey Graham. It was a peaceful, meaningful, and uplifting ceremony. Since that date, almost every visiting American dignitary has visited the City of David with great fascination, leaving the site with even greater inspiration.

Ceremonial openings, of course, often involve some physical act to symbolize the achievement. At the City of David, a plasterboard ceremonial wall was constructed and I was given a sledgehammer to break through to the path of the Pilgrimage Road. After I took a few whacks, the remainder of the US delegation followed in kind until the wall was down, and we were clear to begin the march up the ancient road.

Needless to say, the plasterboard was not load-bearing and had no effect on the structural integrity of the houses some sixty feet to the surface.

Nevertheless, the picture of me wielding a sledgehammer was widely distributed throughout the worldwide media. One reporter after another saw this event as purposely designed, and highly likely, to provoke violence. I was assailed for my lack of diplomatic sensitivity. Reporters who should have known better adopted the false narrative that I had embarked upon a personal quest to destroy Palestinian homes. The New York Times, one of my fiercest critics well before I took office, published the headline, U.S. ENVOY SWINGS SLEDGEHAMMER IN EAST JERUSALEM, AND A METAPHOR IS BORN.

I had expected no violence and there was none.

Palestinian and American pundits feigned outrage, but no one on the ground really doubted the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish people. Asked by the media that day why I swung a sledgehammer, I replied, It was the appropriate tool to open a ceremonial wall leading to an underground excavation. If we were opening a bridge, we probably would have used something else.

I was too glib in giving that answer. The truth is that a sledgehammer was exactly the tool needed that day in June 2019, and it was a metaphorical sledgehammer that was required, and that I wielded, throughout my four years as the US ambassador to Israel.

Sledgehammer is a book about what happens when the United States stops listening to the diplomatic elite and challenges the parties to look past the grievances of their grandparents in favor of the opportunities available to their grandchildren. We’ll look at events big and small, from Fourth of July parties to wrangling over the embassy in Jerusalem, in order to explore two ideas.

The first is America’s support for Israel. You have probably heard that if US support for Israel is not balanced with support for Palestinian interests, the entire region will destabilize. How the Muslim world views our support for Israel is something we consistently get wrong. We misread the signals they send. We make assumptions that don’t turn out to be true. We ascribe motivations that don’t exist.

The United States’ special relationship with Israel appears to the elites as a diplomatic challenge, but it is actually a source of great strength. It’s not an obstacle to be overcome; it’s the fulcrum from which we can move the world. With Iran a greater concern for most Middle Eastern countries than Israel, we saw our diplomatic initiatives regarding Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and elsewhere as providing assurances to Israel and the moderate Sunni nations that Israel could count on US support, which in turn would serve to curb Iranian adventurism. It is Iran, not Israel, that threatens the region.

The focus on the practical concerns about Iran hints at a second, deeper issue: Everyone wants tangible results, not empty promises. The essence of classical diplomacy is polite ambiguity. But the core of real diplomacy is trust. And trust is built with actions, not words.

For the Arab world, trust was created by restoring our support for moderate Islam, instead of radicals, and extracting enough movement from Israel toward the Palestinians such that the Arab countries could justify their actions and not be perceived as betraying the Palestinian cause. Putting out the president’s vision for peace demonstrated that Israel was willing to make territorial compromises that gave cover to the Arab states and that Israel was willing to negotiate peace (even if the Palestinians rejected the deal). There also needed to be a deferral by Israel of its sovereignty declaration over parts of Judea and Samaria, again, to show that Palestinian interests were being given appropriate consideration.

For Israel, trust was created by finally recognizing many of its core principles—regarding Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the fact that communities in Judea and Samaria were not illegal and that plans for sovereignty over those communities would come in due course. There also was the need to convince the Israeli right that peace with Arab states was worth the delayed realization of territorial claims. There were lots of needles to thread, but I think we succeeded where others had failed. We did so because all the players trusted us.

What I saw when I first faced confirmation by the Senate in March 2017 was a US policy toward Israel that was fundamentally broken and devoid of trust. It was broken in its failure to recognize the existential risks confronting this tiny nation; it was broken in its ignorance of the deeply held beliefs of so many Israeli people regarding the sanctity of their biblical homeland; it was broken in its failure to comprehend the strategic interests that Israel serves and its vital assistance in protecting the American homeland; it was broken in its wooden and outdated interpretation of international law; and it was broken in its misreading of all the signals with regard to how to advance peace.

Just days after I was nominated, the Obama White House permitted the United Nations Security Council to adopt Resolution 2334, a resolution that held even the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, to be illegally occupied territory. It was a stunning betrayal of Israel during the waning lame-duck period of an exiting administration. It had the predictable effect of leaving Israelis and Palestinians more apart than ever—and people like me angry and bewildered.

The US-Israel policy that existed when we took office was simply beyond repair. It was dominated by self-proclaimed experts with no real-world negotiating experience who were perfectly content to repeat the same failed approach time and time again in the futile hope of a different outcome.

We all know the adage that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity; the State Department calls it diplomacy.

I had a very different view of diplomacy. I had no interest in spending taxpayer money repeating failed strategies. Like a broken bone that had set without proper medical treatment, US-Israel policy could be fixed only by breaking it and allowing it to set properly. It required nothing less than that proverbial sledgehammer to get this right.

Make no mistake, I wasn’t looking to be provocative or to cause confrontation. As I told my colleagues time and time again, this was the Middle East and things work differently here. To start a conflict, project weakness; to make peace, project strength. I had no doubt that taking a sledgehammer to old and failed US policies—policies that had only extended the violence and misery of people in the region—was the right path to peace.

My views were shared by my colleagues, Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, Steven Mnuchin, Nikki Haley, Robert O’Brien, Jason Greenblatt, Avi Berkowitz, and, of course, my boss, President Trump. Peace through strength was our mantra, and our foundational premise was that America would be an honest broker for peace only if it stood with its allies, adhered to its values, respected the truth, and honored its heritage.

IT TOOK A SLEDGEHAMMER TO IMPLEMENT THAT POLICY BUT, IN THE end, we were proven right: We created the Abraham Accords between Israel and four Muslim nations. We normalized relations as well between Israel and Kosovo, a Muslim nation in Europe.

The sledgehammer did not result in the predicted explosion of violence. Rather, it resulted in an explosion of peace.

1

Donald and Me

Donald Trump and I first met at his office in Trump Tower in 2004 to discuss his New Jersey casinos. I enjoyed our first meeting. He was funny, smart, and strategic. Atlantic City had already proven to be a great investment for Donald—he had raised hundreds of millions of dollars in debt against three casino properties and had used a good deal of those funds to invest personally in New York City real estate just before values took off. He was, as they say in the casino business, already playing with the house’s money. But there were legal complexities that needed to be addressed.

Donald and I had been introduced by Howard Lorber, a close friend of Donald and part of a group of businessmen trying to save Western Union. I had handled the Chapter 11 case for Western Union, doing everything I could to keep at bay a group of aggressive creditors led by Carl Icahn and Leon Black, who had their sights on ownership of Western Union at a steep discount. I worked with Howard and his partner, Bennett LeBow, to keep Western Union in bankruptcy just long enough for the value of its new money-transfer business to replace its old telegram business, which had gone the way of the kerosene lamp. By 1994, they ended up selling the company, paying off all the creditors, and returning hundreds of millions to Mr. LeBow and Mr. Lorber.

Howard Lorber went on to become one of New York’s leading real estate players and maintained a close friendship with Donald Trump. When the Trump casinos in Atlantic City began to experience reduced cash flow in the early 2000s, Howard enthusiastically recommended that Donald and I speak. If not for Howard, I don’t know that I ever would have met Donald Trump and I certainly would not have taken the path that forms the subject of this book.

As we were chatting in his office in 2004, Donald told me that the best lawyer he ever used was Roy Cohn, the notorious sidekick to Senator McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt in the 1950s, who had become a fixer for many high-profile clients. I told Donald that I was nothing like Roy Cohn. I didn’t have a personal relationship with a single judge and I played by all the rules. What I brought to the table was simply a very smart guy who would outwork and outthink the opposition. I’m not sure if that resonated with him as much as the fact that just before we met, The American Lawyer, a magazine known for comparing the income levels of major law firms, had named my firm the most profitable in the country. Whatever the reason, I was hired on the spot.

Many have questioned Donald Trump’s business acumen given the bankruptcies of his Atlantic City casinos. The evidence is otherwise. No one could have made money in Atlantic City in the last fifteen years. Morgan Stanley lost over $900 million on its Revel project; Carl Icahn and Caesars lost fortunes as well. Between intense competition arising from new casinos opening in New York and Philadelphia and cheap flights to the Caribbean, coupled with the failure of local officials to create a welcoming environment, Atlantic City had become the loss leader for the gaming industry. No lawyer could make Atlantic City profitable, but I would try to extricate Donald as cleanly as possible from a hornet’s nest of angry creditors.

Before I even got started, I suffered a terrible loss. The greatest man I had ever known, my father, passed away. We were extremely close and I depended upon him for his wisdom and advice. A practicing rabbi for more than fifty years in one of the largest Conservative congregations in the United States, Rabbi Morris Friedman had the stature, the commanding presence, and the intelligence to be an outstanding trial lawyer and to command an income of ten to twenty times what he earned from the pulpit. But he dedicated his life to teaching and advancing the values of Judaism, and that calling gave him great satisfaction.

In the Jewish tradition, I observed seven days of shiva (literally translated as seven) or mourning for my father. During that period, my house was packed with friends and family offering consolation to my mother, my sister, my brother, and me. The last day of mourning saw a blizzard come to our small Long Island community. The phone rang off the hook as friend after friend, many living just a few blocks away, called to apologize for waiting until the last day and not being able to navigate the weather for an in-person visit.

Late in the afternoon that day, the house was almost empty. Out of the corner of my eye I saw some commotion in the foyer and even a hint of flash photography. Seconds later, into the living room walked Donald Trump, having spent four hours in his limo driving the twenty-five miles from midtown Manhattan.

I was surprised to see him. I would have been surprised to have seen anyone brave the weather but especially someone whom I had known only briefly. He spent over an hour with me as we shared stories of our respective fathers. He clearly revered his father, especially his acumen as a builder. He recounted how difficult it was to break into