Liberal Zionists support Scarlett Johansson– and settlements. Why?

[Lauren Johnson]

If you watch the Super Bowl, you will see an ad for SodaStream, which is manufactured in Ma'ale Adumim, a huge settlement in sthe Occupied Territories. The "news" is about how Scarlett Johannsen ended her position as a spokesperson for Oxfam to continue shilling for SodaStream. Ma'ale Adumim is huge and it serves to split the West Bank into two huge blocks, north and south.

from Mondoweis:

There's a reason that the liberal Zionists are silent. They anticipate that within a couple of months Secretary of State John Kerry will announce a "framework" for negotiations toward a final-status agreement. And that framework "deal" is sure to suggest borders for a Palestinian entity that leave major settlement blocs like Ma'ale Adumim, where SodaStream has its factory inside the New Israel.

Right now J Street is rolling out a campaign of "town halls" for the two-state solution this winter and spring. Center-right Israelis will be speaking at these town halls. The main topics will be "borders," "security," "refugees" and "Jerusalem."

"Borders" means: the illegal settlements go to Israel. "Borders" means that anyone who criticizes Scarlett Johansson is undermining the two-state solution, as Scott Stringer said. I remember when J Street started, it said it was going to oppose the settlements and back Obama. But it scuttled that language in a hurry, when Obama got attacked for even mentioning the '67 borders, and the American Jewish leadership made clear that it was backing the Israeli government. Liberal Jewish leaders refused to buck the trend.

So that's why Eisner, Stringer, Bachman and other liberal Zionists are on Scarlett Johansson's side. They see this as a test of the all-new two state solution.
What is Ma'ale Adumim? Michael Ratner of Center for Constitutional Rights visited the settlement a few years ago and saw the death of the two state solution:
"You're seeing an area that's being ethnically cleansed… You're seeing the architecture of apartheid….I never had a sense of this until I saw it..an open and notorious taking of land, a pass system, an apartheid system…" "Once you see this, it [the two state solution] is completely ridiculous. It's three Bantustans in the West Bank, with Israel controlling everything."

Larry Derfner explains in Foreign Policy:

Besides, who says this settlement, the third most populous in the West Bank, isn't already a stake in the heart of a prospective Palestinian state, even without E-1? "Ma'aleh Adumim was established to break Palestinian contiguity," Benny Kashriel, the town's mayor since 1992, told the Jerusalem Report in 2004. "It is Jerusalem's connection to the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley [on the other side of the West Bank from Jerusalem]; if we weren't here, Palestinians could connect their villages and close off the roads."

A map the location of Ma'ale Adumim in relation to Jerusalem (North is up and South is down)



EDIT: Note that the area designated as E1 is that last small piece of land that allows passage of traffic north to south. The last I heard, the State of Israel wants to designate it as some kind of national park then just occupy it.

[URL="http://mondoweiss.net/2014/01/scarlett-johansson-settlements.html"]

[/URL]