Trump’s ambassador pick once teed him up for Israeli golf course

The location for a golf course that US President-elect Donald Trump once planned to build in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon was found by David Friedman, who has just been named as the next US ambassador to Israel, Channel 10 reported Monday.

Friedman, an Orthodox Jew and a bankruptcy lawyer who has previously worked for Trump, is a fluent Hebrew speaker and has extensive ties in Israel, most notably through his role as president of American Friends of Bet El Institutions, an organization that supports the large West Bank settlement of Beit El just outside Ramallah.

The planned golf course would have included “an 18-hole course, 650 hotel recreation units, a convention hall, country club, and commercial space,” according to a 2013 Globes article.

Trump wrote to former Ashkelon mayor Benny Vaknin in 2013 that “I am excited about the plans to build a world-class golf center along the beautiful Mediterranean coast,” adding: “I have great affection for Israel and its people, and I believe that Israel is a worthy place to be included in the list of communities which host Trump golf centers,” Globes reported at the time.

However, after Vaknin was defeated by Itamar Shimoni in the 2013 mayoral electoral contest, the plans for the project stalled due to the mounting legal problems faced by Shimoni, Channel 10 said in its report.

Vaknin provided a different account for why the golf course never came to fruition, telling Ynet in November that the Israel Land Administration had never given the necessary approval for the project to go ahead.