Tuesday, December 07, 2010

J Street's Jeremy on "Settlements"

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….

All of this will gradually happen. And one day everyone will ask, How did we get into this position? It is still not too late to make decisions to change course. I’d rather the discussion in Israel be what Tzipi Livni and even Ehud Barak are trying to get the focus to be—not yes or no to extending the settlement chill…for a few more months, but how to actually resolve the underlying conflict. Let’s get a border, let’s agree what settlements are staying with us, what land we are giving back, and let’s end this conflict. What do I think will actually happen? I think the focus will be on the freeze, that under pressure, the Israeli government will concede and will extend the freeze for another number of months so that the peace process might continue.

Besides that cute "settlement chill" turn-of-phrase, Jeremy makes unsubstantiated claims about political, military and demographic developments that are divorced from reality. He expresses his own wishful thinking and then, from those frameworks of conception, revisits the situation, applies them and draws his own pre-determined conclusions.

a. J Street has been quite focused on the issue of Jewish communities across the former Green Line armistice boundary, incouding running a campaign to investigate the matter of tax-exmpt status of charity funds directed our way.

b. J Streets actions, pronouncements and hype is all about decreasing Israel's ability to survive.

c. One can ask, if it can be proven that within X number of years, at current prognistications, that northern Israel or the nortern Negev could become 'minority-Jewish', would Jeremy demand its surrender to local Arabs or Beduin?

d. alternatively, if Israel can exist with 20% non-Jewish minority, why cannot "Palestine" exist with a 15% Jewish minority? Are there different understandings of democracy? Different standards, one for Jews, one for Arabs? And does that apply, as well, to the solutions suggested, including mass expulsion and destrcution of property?

e. Jeremy is BSing. It is not a question of whether the world will recognize some new border but whther the Arabs will.

f. On giving back land, since the principle Jeremy is enamored with is "giving back land", that is, territorial compromise, and since Israel is in possession of Judea and Samaria as a result of a defensive war (and we won't argue now whether the Gaza Disengagement proved this unworkable and illogical), why not demand an Arab yielding of territory? Why is the onus on Israel?

g. and as for "isolation", since Jeremy is aligned with forces who seek that goal specifically, his hypocrisy is only less than his hubris.

^

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