Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project is recognized worldwide as the authority on settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Please join us for a briefing call with Lior Amichai, the director of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch Project on Friday June 20 at 12:00pm Eastern Time.

Lior Amichai is a world renowned authority on West Bank settlements. He has been with Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project for the past two years. He spends his time collecting and analyzing data on settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem both on the ground and from the air. To view a new short video documenting the work of Lior and Settlement Watch, click here.

Lior will highlight current trends in West Bank settlement construction, talk about particular settlement hot-spots and comment on the current crisis stemming from the abduction of the three teens in the West Bank and its link to the settlement enterprise.

Listen here.

To receive a link of the recording, please email Katherine Cunningham at KCunningham@peacenow.org  APN will send you a link to the recording of the call as soon as it is available

The following article by Peace Now's Secretary General Yariv Oppenheimer, headlined The Bloody Shrapnel, was published in today's edition of the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth:

We had good reason to keep our fingers crossed during the negotiations in hope of a breakthrough; we had good reason to pull our hair out when the minister of housing kept issuing tenders for settlement construction; we had good reason to be angry when we saw the footage of the unjustified shooting in Bituniya; we had good reason to become angrier when the government ignored the Palestinian prisoners' hunger strike. It was obvious that the despair, the hate, the hostility and the anger on the Palestinian side would find their way out.

We knew that time is not on our side, and that this was a matter of crucial decisions and human lives.  Seven years of quiet, in which we could have improved our relations with the Palestinians and achieved a peace agreement, had been wasted.

Israel's occupation of the West Bank is indefensible

by Max Fisher

 There is a pleasant fiction in the United States and parts of Israel that the Israel-Palestine conflict exists in a sort of suspended animation, on pause and simply awaiting diplomatic resolution. But the truth is that the conflict, which over the decades has included several wars, countless terrorist attacks, and two Palestinian uprisings, never really goes away for most of the 12 million people in Israel and the Palestinian territories. And periodically it will escalate so rapidly, with such relatively slight provocation, and to such a level of severity, that the rest of us can't ignore what every Palestinian and many Israelis already know: the conflict may be quieter today than in the past, but it is still active, still destroying lives and communities, still scarring these two societies, every day.

Continue Reading

The Forward - June 3, 2014
APN's Lara Friedman quoted on the Palestinian unity government and U.S. Funding
http://forward.com/articles/199414/us-warms-to-palestinian-unity-as-israel-fumes/?p=all

New York Times - June 12, 2014
APN's Ori Nir letter to the editor commenting on Dani Dayan op-ed
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/opinion/abandon-the-two-state-solution.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0

Arutz 7 - June 8, 2014
Peace Now's Yartiv Oppenheimer exchanges Twitter jabs with settler leader Dani Dayan
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/181472#.U5tTPfldU71

San Diego Jewish World - June 12, 2014
APN condemns Israel's approval of 1,084 homes (reprinting of press release)
http://www.sdjewishworld.com/2014/06/12/apn-condemns-israels-approval-1084-homes/