Whenever the name of an otherwise obscure official starts popping up in mainstream media reports that consistently paint him in an unfavorable light, savvy observers need to ask themselves why.
Is the individual a genuine problem whose bad behavior warrants this kind of scrutiny? Or rather, is there some other agenda at play? Is the official being targeted because of misconduct? Or is it because they are an obstacle to policies favored by establishment groupthink? Or are they connected to person(s) that the establishment dislikes and wishes to tarnish by a bogus case of guilt by association?
In the case of David Milstein, a senior advisor to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, the answer appears to be a combination of heresy against groupthink and personal connections. And though the impact of a tsunami of coverage of a heretofore largely unknown person will likely have a permanent impact on his career in public service, it isn’t hard to understand why he’s got a target on his back. And it has nothing to do with misconduct of any kind.
He won’t go along
Milstein has committed a grave offense, but his sin is not against the law, nor does it damage the interests of the United States. He’s guilty of opposing the efforts of those who want to blow up the relationship between Israel and the Trump administration that he serves. Add to that his refusal to go along with establishment thinking.
That especially concerns the consensus among liberal-minded foreign-service officers about Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria, and the “settler-violence” narrative that the Israeli left and their American allies (not to mention others who oppose the Jewish’s state’s existence altogether) have embraced. Which is to say, a lot of people inside the U.S. State Department and some who work in the U.S. embassy to Israel, along with their friends in the liberal media, want to discredit both the “settlers”—the hundreds of thousands of Jews who live in the heart of the Jewish homeland—and the government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Milstein hasn’t been playing ball, and they want him to pay for that.
He is being attacked as a proxy for two people the liberals in the foreign-policy establishment despise. One is Huckabee. The other is Fox News host Mark Levin, a prominent conservative voice and a friend of President Donald Trump. Milstein is his stepson.
It has created a perfect storm of factors that his critics hope will lead to his firing, if not something even worse.
This is deeply unfair to Milstein. There’s more at stake, however, than just his position and reputation, or even that of Huckabee and Levin.
How elites operate
This story is important not just because what’s happening to him is wrong, but because it illustrates how elites in the federal government and their allies in the press operate to silence and even criminalize dissent. Whether in or out of power, they believe that their opponents are illegitimate and that they must be not just stopped, but destroyed.
It’s not just that Milstein deserves to continue serving his country untainted by the kind of smears that have been tossed in his direction. It’s that the Trump administration cannot allow its political opponents, both inside and outside the government, to dictate policy or personnel in a manner designed to promote the sabotage of American interests and the U.S.-Israel alliance.
What has Milstein supposedly done?
Three weeks ago on Yom Kippur, Milstein first became the focus of mainstream media attention when Politico published an anonymously sourced hit piece aimed at alleging he was soliciting cash from members of the public. While the article presented the incident as an open-and-shut case of corrupt behavior, it also conceded that no laws were broken. Yet the point of the piece was that what he had done warranted the pulling of Milstein’s security clearance since he had become in the words of a quote from an unnamed person, a “walking counter-intel red flag.”
For all the huffing and puffing in the article about outrageous and supposedly dangerous conduct, there wasn’t all that much to it. As Levin revealed in a poston X, the solicitation of money was a mistaken email about wedding gifts. It turns out that Milstein is getting married and was responding to queries about where he and his bride were registered for gifts that friends and family could give them, as is customary.
The couple wasn’t registered at any store, so he suggested in an email apparently intended only for family and close friends that they could, as is also customary for weddings, give a cash gift. But he blundered and sent this missive to a broader list that likely included some embassy colleagues. This was then shared with Politico as evidence of a solicitation to accept bribes that would be both corrupt and subject Milstein to blackmail.
The story also tried to connect Milstein to convicted spy Jonathan Pollard because he had recently met with Huckabee.
The ambassador vouched for Milstein in his own post on X and made it clear that the staffer had nothing to do with Pollard’s visit to personally thank him for past courtesies, as well as dismissing the notion that it was in any way a secret.
If you think that this tale is pretty thin evidence of misconduct, then you’d be right. As federal corruption stories go, it’s less than a nothing burger, and despite the flurry of attention it created on social media from administration critics and foes of its pro-Israel policies, that’s as far as it went. After all, Milstein is someone who few outside of the world of conservative politics and pro-Israel advocacy have ever heard of until very recently; even within that rather limited universe, most people probably only had a vague sense of who he was. He has worked as a staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and one of Huckabee’s predecessors in Jerusalem, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.
Anti-Israel diplomats
Still, the significant fact about this story was its origins from within the State Department and the U.S. Embassy to Israel. That was further explained three weeks later when The New York Times published a bombshell report that not only led its homepage but also landed on the front page of its print edition.
That story centered on claims that Milstein has “suppressed and altered reports critical of Israel” coming from the embassy. The upshot was that he—acting either on his own or in concert with Huckabee—was seeking to skew the information flowing from the embassy so as to “present the Netanyahu government in a favorable light” and to avoid fueling any effort to portray it as acting in opposition to administration policy.
That sounds bad. Yet once you dig into it, you can see that what’s at play is not wrongful behavior but diplomats with an axe to grind.
The tell is the mention of something several paragraphs into the piece that speaks of Milstein seeking to approve “communications from the embassy section that handles Palestinian affairs.”
That section used to work in the former U.S. consulate in Jerusalem that was folded into the embassy a year after it was moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by Trump in 2018. Although it was located in the capital of the Jewish state up until then, that consulate was shut down as a separate entity since it was well known for operating as, for all intents and purposes, the U.S. embassy to the Palestinians Arabs. As such, those working in it generally acted in defense of not merely an anti-Israel agenda, but as active proponents of a two-state solution to the conflict and Palestinian statehood.
That advocacy carried on, even though a two-state solution is something the Palestinians have been consistently rejecting for the last century in favor of an outcome in which the Jewish state was destroyed and its people dispersed. It also involved open opposition to the presence of Jews in Judea and Samaria (which the State Department persisted in misnaming as the “West Bank”), their right to build homes as well as to defend themselves against a daily toll of Arab terrorism.
Palestinian statehood
That was to be expected prior to Trump becoming president and in the interregnum between his first and second terms when Joe Biden was president. This was also a time when the promotion of Palestinian statehood and the belief that Jewish communities in the territories were illegal was official American policy.
That’s not the case now, but many permanent State Department employees and diplomats who continue to work in U.S. embassies and consulates, including in Israel, are still drinking the two-state Kool-Aid. The notion of repeating the failed experiment in which Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005—and allowed the creation of a Hamas terror state there in the far larger and more strategic Judea and Samaria—is regarded by most Israelis as not so much ill-advised as insane. That was already true before the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks in Israeli communities in the south on Oct. 7, 2023. After that, it is nothing short of perverse for Americans to be trying to impose such a suicidal plan on their ally.
Like the Hamas-run enclave in Gaza, a Palestinian state elsewhere would simply be another terror state whose goal would be Israel’s destruction. It would further serve to destabilize neighboring moderate Arab governments, leading to a disaster not just for Israel but for U.S. interests as well.
In addition to still trying to preserve the notion of forcing Israel out of the territories, many staffers, with the aid of a small minority of left-wing Israelis, have been promoting the “settler-violence” narrative about Jews living there conducting pogroms against their Arab neighbors.
This flips the reality of life in the territories on its head. While some Jews have been guilty of violence—and labeled by Huckabee as “terrorists” who deserved prosecution—the overwhelming majority of incidents there are acts of violence and terror against Jews. Most such cases of “settler violence” are really about Jews defending themselves against terror or engaged in non-violent conduct in places where Palestinians and other enemies of Israel wish they weren’t allowed to go, such as Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.
That many embassy staffers working on Palestinian affairs still hold such views is not surprising since most come out of the same liberal academic institutions, think tanks and other bastions of foreign policy groupthink about Israel and the Palestinians shared by left-wing journalists, such as those who work at the Times.
They’re also angry that the current Israeli government has been willing to allow the Jews in the territories to build more homes and to expand their outposts in parts labeled as “Area C,” as referenced in the Oslo Accords. The article claims that Huckabee and Milstein’s refusal to designate such building activity as against U.S. policy contradicts Trump’s stated opposition to Israel annexing or extending its law to that area.
But that is untrue. Since Trump has signed off on an official change in policy that rightly rejects the notion that Israeli settlement in the territories is illegal (contrary to liberal conventional wisdom, international agreements guaranteed the Jewish right to “close settlement” in Judea and Samaria more than a century ago), there is no contradiction.
Enforcing Trump’s policies
It should be pointed out again that the sources claiming that Milstein had acted wrongly were anonymous embassy employees who are obviously upset that under Trump, the United States has rejected the two-state mantra and effort to demonize the Jewish presence in the territories.
Rather than acting to protect the Netanyahu government from the wrath of Trump, Milstein is, as the anti-Israel and anti-Trump Quincy Institute Washington think tank labeled him in 2025, “Trump’s pro-Israel enforcer.”
He’s serving as a check on diplomats and bureaucrats who are still acting as if Biden or Barack Obama were president. Under their administrations and many of their predecessors, the purpose of the ambassador and other U.S. diplomats in Israel was to act as imperial proconsuls whose jobs were to force the Jewish state to bend to the will of foreign dictates that undermined its security.
Whether some who work for the State Department or liberal media outlets agree with it or not, that is no longer U.S. policy.
It’s also possible that some working in the current administration have been seduced by the Tucker Carlson/groyper wing of the Republican Party and, for entirely different reasons—backing an isolationist U.S. foreign policy that would discard support for Israel and be indifferent to the increased power of anti-American Islamist states like Iran and its terrorist proxies—also wish to promote discord between Washington and Jerusalem.
Under Friedman and Huckabee, in addition to current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the embassy, which is now properly relocated in Israel’s capital, works to facilitate better relations and security cooperation between these democratic allies, not to promote conflict between them. And the old consulate that acted as a bastion of anti-Israel activity is no more.
It is clearly part of Milstein’s job to keep those who want to promote Palestinian statehood in check, rather than allow them to clog up the flow of reports from Jerusalem to the State Department with documents seeking to boost policies the administration opposes and fuel conflict with Israel’s democratically elected government. Doing so isn’t a violation of his oath as a U.S. official or an act of censorship. It’s actually what any responsible person in such a position at this time ought to be doing.
Seen from that perspective, the flurry of stories about Milstein has nothing to do with his alleged misconduct and everything to do with an attempt to thwart current U.S. policy.
But rather than resign and advocate a reversal of Trump and Rubio’s policies, some staffers—with the support of members of the U.S. foreign establishment at think tanks, universities and liberal media outlets—want to undermine it from within. And in order to accomplish this task, they are out to discredit someone who is actually doing his job to carry out current American policy, which just so happens to be far more rational as well as more attuned to what is best for the United States and its allies.
That Milstein is related to Levin and close to Huckabee makes him an even more attractive target. Still, that is no excuse for an anonymously sourced smear campaign aimed at undermining Trump’s and Rubio’s trust in them.
We can only hope that Trump and Rubio will, as Huckabee has already rightly done, stand up for a devoted public servant doing what is best for the United States and the administration.
This disturbing effort should serve as a warning to everyone who follows U.S. foreign policy about what depths the establishment will sink to enforce groupthink orthodoxy. Their pursuit of policies rooted in myths about the Middle East and the Palestinians that sane people know were proven to be failures decades ago isn’t just an obsession. They think it’s a license to destroy the reputation of anyone who stands in their way if it will make it easier for them to retake control of American foreign policy.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
