An email sent out to the J-Street mailing list signed by their deputy Israel director, Eve Lifson, says:
Almost every day, my fellow Israelis are sent to guard wrecking crews.Young soldiers have to tell children and their parents that bulldozers have come for their family home. They hold back distraught relatives as jackhammers tear into bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms.It’s not the vision of defending our homeland that most young Israelis had in mind.The truth? Demolishing family homes to make way for settlements has nothing to do with Israel’s security, and everything to do with the right-wing’s efforts to entrench permanent control over occupied land.
The idea that Israel demolishes Palestinian homes in order to build Jewish communities in their place is rampant among anti-Israel social media activists, but it is a lie. Jewish communities are not built anywhere near existing Arab communities. (The only exception is Hebron, where Jews lived way before Arabs did, and which J-Street wants to ethnically cleanse today just as it was in 1929.)
There are only two reasons why Arab homes are demolished nowadays. Either the home was built without a permit, or it was the home of a terrorist and the demolition is meant to dissuade future attacks.
Before Israel withdrew from Gaza, it sometimes demolished homes to clear land for security purposes (as in the Rachel Corrie incident.)
Lifson lives in Israel, which means that either J-Street hires the most ignorant Israelis to work for them, or she is knowingly lying.
And Lifson isn't ignorant. She's been obsessed with Israeli home demolitions since she was in high school. She considers home demolitions to be part and parcel of what anti-Israel activists call "creeping annexation." It is only a short mental leap between that belief and telling people that Israel is building settlements on destroyed Palestinian villages.
Her hallucinations may be shared with many modern antisemites, but that doesn't make them true.
But if anti-Israel organizations cared about truth, they wouldn't have very much to say.
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