J Street's Jeremy on "Settlements"

Yisrael Medad
My Right Word
07 December '10

Charley Levine, who I well know, interviewed J Street's Jeremy Ben-Ami for Hadassah Magazine.

One issue is: was that giving a very invidious person who lies and acts subversively an unfair platfrom in a major Jewish organization's house-organ? Were the questions the best that could have been asked?

Another issue are the answers Jeremy provides.

I picked the one on Jewish civilian residential communities wherein live revenants, in portions of their historic patrimony sanctioned by international law to become their reconstituted national home:

Q. What is J Street’s position on settlements?

A. We have felt, J Street and me personally, that the focus on just the settlements and just the freeze is looking at a symptom rather than the underlying disease. J Street is all about assuring Israel’s long-term survival and security as a Jewish, democratic state. I don’t see how that is possible if Israelis and Jews continue to live over the Green Line with expanding numbers and jurisdiction over a majority of people who are not Jewish. Unless we figure out a way to separate from the Palestinian people and to draw a border that the world recognizes, the whole Zionist enterprise is finished. This is the more important question. Whether the bulldozers start working again over the Green Line is a tactical question, but the bigger one is: Will the government of Israel, the country as a whole, recognize that it is on a vehicle that is heading off a cliff? This may not happen today or next year, but at some point Israelis are going to wake up and see they are a minority in the geographic area they control, that they haven’t given rights to the majority, the country itself has become isolated from the rest of the world….

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