Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Goldberg Interviews ATFP's Ibish

This is an excellent interview by Jeffrey Goldberg of the American Task Force for Palestine's Hussein Ibish. I've spoken positively about the ATFP before, and interviews like this help demonstrate why. Mr. Ibish is a clear and steadfast supporter of a peaceful, two-state solution, and it really comes through in this interview that he gets the conflict and he, from the position of a Palestinian advocate, gets the contours of the American Jewish community's stance regarding Israel. It's very true that with the exception of the ZOA on the right and JVP on the left [UPDATE: JVP emailed Mr. Ibish to say they are organizationally "agnostic" towards one states versus two states, and Mr. Ibish has corrected himself accordingly], pretty much every Jewish organization of substance is a supporter, in some way, of an end to the occupation and two states. It's also true that this represents a tremendous development in the positioning of the Jewish community compared to even two decades ago. And I particularly like that he aggressively goes after the one-state advocates -- be they Jewish or Palestinian -- as presenting a fundamentally unrealistic and unsustainable worldview.

It's a really good interview. The ATFP is really great organization.

UPDATE: Mr. Ibish sent me a very nice email, which also revealed he has a blog. How exciting! It is now on my blogroll (I briefly perused it -- it's quite good, unsurprisingly).

1 comment:

Matt said...

Interesting he describes JVP as "a one-state group all the way and without reservation." They don't describe themselves that way.