Two states not a ‘magic solution,‘ says J Street head

WASHINGTON — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump do not necessarily have to utter the words “two-state solution” or “Palestinian state” during Wednesday’s scheduled White House meeting in order to send out a pro-peace message, the head of the dovish lobbying group J-Street said Tuesday.

“These words are not magical,” Jeremy Ben-Ami said. “The end result that J Street favors is that the State of Israel should have borders and that those borders should be recognized by its neighbors and by the world.

“In a sense, the only state we’re really interested in is the State of Israel,” he said.

“We do believe that there should be a Palestinian state and relations between the State of Israel and all the states around it, but it is not absolutely necessary for Trump and Netanyahu to pledge allegiance to a “two-state solution,” he added.

Ben-Ami’s comments follow repeated attempts by right-wing Israeli politicians to sideline J Street or delegimitize its support for Israel.

The organization has stated its opposition to Israeli occupation of the West Bank and to American Jewish support of West Bank settlements.

During a breakfast briefing with Israeli reporters, Ben-Ami went on the offensive against Trump’s designated ambassador to Israel, David Friedman.

“His views on policy are outside the views of 50 years of American administrations from both parties,” Ben-Ami said, referring to Friedman’s staunch support for Israeli settlements.

Trump’s envoy pick made expanding the settlements a major endeavor of his adult life, raising “tens of millions of dollars” for that cause, the J-Street chief said.

“Secondly, he has absolutely no diplomatic and professional experience for this position. And thirdly, his temperament and disposition are entirely unsuited for the position of ambassador, where diplomacy is a requirement, not flame-throwing,” Ben-Ami told a dozen Israeli reporters, who arrived with Netanyahu’s delegation to the US on Monday night.

Friedman, whose Senate confirmation hearings are scheduled for Thursday, once said members of J-Street are “worse than kapos.” Kapos were prisoners in Nazi concentration camps charged with supervising other prisoners.

Ben-Ami also said he opposed moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — as Trump promised during his election campaign — because he worried it would prompt a “breakout of violence.”

Many Arab leaders had told the White House that the US Embassy’s relocation should only happen at the end of a political process that would determine the status of the city. “It shouldn’t happen at the beginning — that would probably end up killing the process and starting a new round of violence,” Ben- Ami said.

He added that while J Street used to focus only on political-diplomatic matters such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iranian nuclear deal, the organization had begun — since Trump’s election to the presidency — to weigh in on other matters of concern to the US Jewish community, such as the administration’s refugee policies or the omission of Jews from the White House’s statement on International Holocaust Day.

It was important to keep in mind that 75 percent of American Jews “vote for the Barack Obamas of this world and not the Donald Trumps of this world,” he said, positing that it was a fact often overlooked by the Israeli public.