Jewish "developments" in YESHA - a la Miami

Reported

Israel should be describing Jewish communities beyond the Green Line as developments, not settlements, Carlos Gimenez, the recently elected mayor of Miami-Dade County, said on Friday.

Gimenez, on a six-day visit to Israel with four other mayors of large US cities as part of Project Interchange, an educational institute of the American Jewish Committee, said the reality of the settlements – as opposed to the stereotype that the word invokes – was what surprised him most during his first visit to the country.

“When you conjure up the word ‘settlement,’ you think about the Old West, pioneers and all that,” he said in an interview just after visiting Efrat in the West Bank.

“It is really more like a development, that is all it is,” he said. “Settlement is the wrong word to use. If you want to describe it to Americans, it is really a development.