NOVANEWS
mondoweiss.net
On Tuesday, June 25th Israeli Knesset member Adi Koll spoke at the Jewish Community Services Building at an event hosted by the Philadelphia chapter of J Street. Koll is a member of Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party and perhaps best known for a recent Facebook post where she wrote, “There is nothing normal about life in Ramallah, and there is nothing normal about us letting this happen,” following a trip to the occupied territories.
Logic and prior experience could have suggested that there is very little new or unexpected to be gained from going to such an event. But finally having the luxury of time in the summer, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to hear from the MK who stirred up controversy over Facebook, and I’m glad I didn’t.
The newly-elected MK Koll started by telling us to lean in closer because the members of her party Yesh Atid “have a spark in the eye.” She proceeded to give the audience a short history of her new party and imparted some juicy gossip about the founder, Yair Lapid, and his daily beauty regimen. She talked about her involvement in the social “justice” movements sweeping Israel, concerned with everything from education to the cost of apartments in Tel Aviv, but strangely never their neighbors, the Palestinian people, living under Israel’s system of apartheid. She did reiterate that Israelis now just “ignore the Palestinian issue,” even as she claimed that 80% of them support the two-state solution.
As she finally moved to what we had all had come to hear her talk about, I could not help but begin to wonder what exactly that “spark” she mentioned actually was.
