Dani Dayan, the YESHA settler council leader we met during Partners’ Israel Symposium last fall, is mentioned in a recent JTA article, along with other settler and pro-settler activists, lobbying Republicans against the renewed peace process. In this case, they’ve cultivated Republican opposition to the release of Palestinian prisoners.
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| Dayan (with hand raised) speaks to GOP leaders, June 27. |
This is Lilly Rivlin’s recollection of our meeting with Dayan, during last year’s Israel Symposium:
We met Dani Dayan, Chairman of the Yesha Council who argued against a two-state solution, as he wrote in the pages of the NY Times, that an independent Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan would be a “recipe for disaster,” a hotbed of extremism. He really rattled the group with his unabashedly, self-righteous position that God was on the side of the settlers, in spite of the fact that he defines himself as a secular person who believes in equal rights (says he had boycotted apartheid South Africa).
Dayan insists that Zionism is not colonialism. But does this argument hold beyond the Green Line? The world regards the Israeli presence there as a military occupation and Dayan can offer no perspective for peace. The two-state solution is not a solution, he says, no solution is possible. Like Ya’alon, he prefers “crisis management.” At best, over the long term, he hopes that the settler enterprise, even expanded from its present extensive boundaries, will be accommodated in some new arrangement involving Jordan. Dayan is hardly unique in offering Jordan as the Palestinian state. Unfortunately, neither the Jordanians nor the Palestinians seem to agree.
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Lilly Rivlin writes, and you quote her, that I said “God is in our side”.
I am positive I didn’t mention God in my presentation.
But who cares? Long life preconceptions and stereotypes.
Dani Dayan
We’re sorry if you were misrepresented. Lilly may have misquoted you, but since she’s not using quote marks, she may have only been metaphoric in her characterization of your talk. This is really about your political views and actions, not your religious philosophy.