http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=246202
“The four other mayors on the trip were Houston’s Annise Parker, St. Paul, Minnesota’s Christopher Coleman, Provo, Utah’s John Curtis, and Mark Mallory of Cincinnati, Ohio.The trip also included five other top municipal officials from those cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Miami, Florida and Portland, Oregon.”
Carlos Gimenez says Israeli reality is short-shrifted in 30-second sound bites; correct description is “developments.”
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.
“We spoke to someone who lived in a settlement. Just a normal person. Basically just someone who wants to live in a suburb. That’s it. Is there conflict there? Obviously. But [Efrat] is not what I thought it was going to be.”
With some 2.5 million people living in Miami-Dade country, Gimenez, 57, elected in June, is mayor of the eighth most populous county in the US. It is also the metropolitan area with one of America’s largest Jewish populations, one of the reasons he said he was keen on visiting Israel.