The President-elect's appointment of David Friedman, a pro-settlement bankruptcy lawyer, as the next U.S. ambassador to Israel "had a lot of weight in the president's thinking" about what to do next, one senior administration official told me. The official told me that the administration had been "alarmed" by many of Trump's appointments to his national-security team — notably the appointment of Michael Flynn as national-security adviser — but the selection of Friedman was "over the top."

"The last thing you want to do as you leave office is to pick a fight with the organized Jewish community, but Friedman is so beyond the pale," the adviser said. "He put his political and charitable support directly into the settlements; he compares Jews on the left to the kapos in the concentration camps — it just put it over the top." [The New Yorker]