What If? Yes, What If.

Back in February 2001, Alisa Biran married Jeremy Daniel Ben-Ami, the son of the late Yitshaq Ben-Ami. Jeremy was the former policy director for Mark Green, the New York City public advocate and was the deputy manager of Mr. Green's mayoral campaign in New York. Early in the Clinton administration, Ben-Ami was the deputy domestic policy adviser at the White House. Jeremy's father was active in efforts to establish the state of Israel, having been a founder of the American Friends for a Jewish Palestine and other Zionist organizations.

He was also in the Irgun in the late 1930s and went to the US on the direction of Jabotinsky and David Raziel. I helped him as a research assistant to compose his autobiography, Years of Wrath, Days of Glory.

Jeremy, of course, now directs J-Street, that invidious organization set upon weakening Israel, forcing it to accede to diplomatic pressure that would undermine its security all in the name of a leftist radical vision of a false peace.

But let's return to how the young couple met:-

Through the daily e-mail messages they began exchanging, they discovered a great deal in common. Their fathers had moved to the United States from what was Palestine, and in the late 19th century, their families were among the early settlers of Petah Tikva, a town that today is a suburb of Tel Aviv. Both Ms. Biran and Mr. Ben-Ami grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where they attended Rodeph Sholom, and where the bride's father had prepared the bridegroom for his bar mitzvah.

Reflecting on nearly 120 years of interlocking family histories, Ms. Biran said, ''It's hard to imagine what our great-grandparents, who worked together in the fields of Palestine over 100 years ago, would have thought if someone had told them that in four generations their families would unite in yet another new country, thanks to a strange new invention called the Internet.''

Some of you will find that amazingly romantic.

And I? I find it strange that someone whose family and his wife's family established an "illegal settlement", as the Ottoman Turks and local Arabs would have said, and witnessed how it and others like it formed the state of Israel over a 60 year period could labor so hard and so viciously against that same process today.

In fact, Jeremy does provide a rationale, but one that fits my worldview, in writing about his father's efforts to get Jews out of Europe:-

At a meeting of Jewish leaders in the summer of 1939, Brandeis slapped down a suggestion that bringing Jews to Palestine in defiance of the British was “illegal.” “It may be considered illegal by Great Britain, but we Jews consider it to be legal,” Brandeis said.

It may seem odd that a venerated Supreme Court justice would endorse breaking the laws of an American ally. But the “Jewish Underground Railroad” that my father and others ran in Europe in the 1930s was based on the same moral principle that energized the original Underground Railroad, which helped black slaves illegally escape the South. Even a former Supreme Court Justice recognized that sometimes the stakes are so high that we must have the courage to act in accordance with our moral principles, even at the cost of violating the law.

Go figure out the son of this courageous man.