Listen to America’s Roundtable Interview with Ambassador David Friedman via:
Apple | Spotify | Fireside
Relevant link: https://americasroundtable.fireside.fm/ambassador-david-friedman-book-sledgehammer-abraham-accords
The Honorable David Melech Friedman, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel (2017- 2021), joins America’s Roundtable Radio co-hosts Natasha Srdoc and Joel Anand Samy for a conversation about his newly released book titled “Sledgehammer: How Breaking with the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East.” The same week it was released, the book topped Amazon’s list of “Movers and Shakers” and “Top New Releases.” | https://www.sledgehammerbook.com/
Under the leadership of Ambassador Friedman, the United States made unprecedented diplomatic advances, including moving U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and, of course, brokering the Abraham Accords.
Sledgehammer: How Breaking with the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East
The inside story of an extraordinary, once-in-a-generation victory: the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, Kosovo, and Morocco. 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.
Further reading and viewing via broadcast media:
The Washington Examiner: “The peacemaker vs. the striped pants boys”
