The IPF is where Olmert made his infamous "we are tired" speech.
Anyway here are some details of the fellow:
David Elcott, Ph.D,...has traveled the world to help invigorate Jewish life and to promote Christian and Muslim understanding of Judaism..."God does not have only one blessing," Dr. Elcott once wrote. "As God's agents, we must work to bring the blessing of peace to all - Palestinians and Israelis, Jews, Muslims and Christians alike. To do less is a sin for which we all will be held accountable."
David Elcott has worked throughout his life to help other cultures understand the Jewish community. He also has assisted numerous religious communal organizations, social justice agencies, and international corporations to retool their missions and vision in response to new conditions and challenges of the 21st century...
...Dr. Elcott was the U.S. director of Interreligious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee,...instrumental in the creation of a broad-based Christian-Jewish coalition of national leaders, and succeeded in diverting an anti-Israel divestment campaign into positive advocacy for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Dr. Elcott has advised political and religious leaders worldwide...For 16 years prior to his time with DME, he was vice president of CLAL, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership...He is the author of "A Sacred Journey: The Jewish Quest for a Perfect World." He received a Ph.D. in Political Psychology and Middle East Studies from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Political Science from University of California, Los Angeles, among other degrees.
When I was a kid, Zionism was about our people returning after millennia to our home, a “land without a people for a people without a land.” And after the 1967 war, it was a glorious time when the Israeli David slew the Arab Goliath, and we now had the whole Land of Israel to ourselves.
The Zionist story, though, was getting more complicated...As a Zionist committed to justice for my people in our own land, I sought a righteous Israel that would be a “light unto nations.”
...The Zionist world seemed evenly divided between those who supported the settlers and those who called for a Palestinian state, between hawks and doves, those who wanted peace and those who wanted more land. The left was seen as naïve, the right as inhumane.
Those days are over. There is no right or left of consequence in the true Zionist camp. There are few among our people who continue to see the Palestinians as innocent victims of Israeli injustice. It is obvious that the 1967 occupation is not the root cause of the terror and violence perpetrated against Jews. Any naïve dovish commitment to a two-state solution based on a shared future of Palestinians and Israelis holding hands and living in peace has been shattered. Yet there also are few Zionist hawks...It is not dovish to return territories occupied by millions of Palestinians committed to Israel’s destruction if it provides for Israel’s security. It is not patriotic to force young Israelis to protect settlements surrounded by an irredentist Arab population. Such settlements undermine Israel’s ability to defend itself and its citizens.
and this:-
'Serious dollars' behind proposed Israel lobby'
"I think there are serious dollars on the table," was about as specific as Israel Policy Forum Executive Director David M. Elcott would be when asked recently about the outcome of an October meeting in New York intended to bring together top Jewish philanthropists and U.S. Israel policy activists to explore funding for a new pro-Israel lobby.
Initially characterized in the media as an alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, officials associated with the proposed lobbying coalition and with AIPAC later said it was incorrect to describe the proposed coalition as an "alternative" to AIPAC.
..."We are going forward with the next steps toward building a coalition that will bring together two groups that have never worked together," said Elcott. "Our hope is we are going to have the financial resources, the political clout and the prestige and the hype that goes with something like this," he added.
...Pressed on how much money may have been committed to the coalition effort, Elcott pointed to his organization's $2 million annual budget. "We need to spend a little bit more on this effort to try to end this conflict, so were looking for multiples of that," he said, still declining to be specific.
...Elcott believes that the way we talk about the conflict needs to change: "The old paradigm, dove-hawk, left-right, peace, are gone."
He assigned the Oslo accords to history's trash heap.
"The idea that we can achieve a peace settlement, that two peoples (Israelis and Palestinians) will come together, hold hands and sing 'Kumbaya' failed miserably," said Elcott. "You'd have to be unbelievably naïve to believe that the Palestinians are going to be our friends; We've seen enough evidence to know that a peace settlement, in the ways countries understand peace settlements, is not in the offing. So, Oslo failed in that sense."
...Elcott thinks the entire conversation needs to be reframed.
He described what he called "a pragmatic response" by asking, "What is going to better the security of the state of Israel?"
Then he posed a series of what-ifs that argued for abandoning tiny West Bank settlements "surrounded by 100,000 Palestinians," and dismantling the estimated 100 Jewish settlements that the Israeli government itself identifies as illegal under its own law.
"Is it patriotic to not dismantle them and therefore undermine the rule of law in Israel? Or is true patriotism and attempting to protect the integrity of the state of Israel—getting rid of those settlements?"
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