Rep. Grayson penned an article for Huffington Post today, Looking For Your Ideas and Advice, and created a website where he wants the progressive community to write to him with their ideas about anything from peace to the economy. He will be forwarding all comments to the Progressive Caucus’ two new leaders Reps. Keith Ellison and Raul Grijalva. Though Rep. Grayson portrays himself as a progressive, on Palestine he is anything but. In an interview with Democracy Now in March of this year, he said the following about whether Israel should continue to ethnically cleanse East Jerusalem of its Palestinian inhabitants:
REP. ALAN GRAYSON: If you’re talking about areas in East Jerusalem, I don’t think it’s really conceivable that the Israelis will ever give up that land. I just don’t think that’s plausible. If you’re talking about areas like Ari’el, areas elsewhere on the West Bank, I think that that’s much more debatable. One could easily conceive of a two-state solution that allows Israel very little of that land. Even the Israelis’ own maps that were presented at Taba provided that only a tiny fraction of that land would end up in Israeli hands. For building outside of those areas, that seems to be unduly provocative. For building in an area that Israel is going to end up with anyway, under any conceivable form of peace, you know, that’s much less harmful.
On AIPAC, Iran and the war on Gaza, Rep. Grayson had the following to say:
GRAYSON: I met with Howard Kohr, the head of AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], twice last week.
PJV: And what was the gist of the conversation?
GRAYSON: The gist of the conversation was that Iran is a tremendous threat to Israel and needs to be stopped. And I agree with that.
PJV: And what about what is going on in the Gaza Strip; was there any conversation about that?
GRAYSON: Yes, we talked about that. I think what AIPAC often tries to do is to educate Members of Congress who frankly follow this a lot less closely than I do. In my case, I read Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post online four or five times a week, so I am pretty familiar with the circumstances and why the war took place. As a famous Israeli once said, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Rep. Grayson will be leaving Congress in January, but it’s still important that we take this opportunity to let him know exactly where the rest of the progressive anti-war community that elected him stands on these issues and to let the new leaders of the Progressive Caucus know that Progressive Except for Palestine is not the direction we want them to take.
