In light of the Palestinian decision to seek membership in the International Criminal Court (ICC), and to pursue action in that body, and consistent with APN’s longstanding Board-adopted principles regarding the efforts of the Palestinians in the international arena, APN today articulated the following principles, adopted earlier this month by APN’s Board of Directors:
The Israeli prime minister has two main tasks, and he's failing at both.
Benjamin Netanyahu believes he has just one job, and that is to stop Iran from getting hold of nuclear weapons. He might argue that this description of his mission as Israel’s prime minister is too limiting, though such an argument would not be particularly credible. Israel’s very existence, he has argued, consistently, and at times convincingly, is predicated on stopping Iran, a country ruled by a regime that seeks both Israel’s annihilation and the means to carry it out.
Rabbi Esther L. Lederman is the associate rabbi of Temple Micah, in Washington, DC. She
travelled to Israel this December.
Before I left for Israel on a quick trip this past December, I told a colleague, “I am going to have my heart broken.” It had been six years since I had visited. Way too long, in my opinion. So off I went, expecting to return even more depressed about the state of affairs than when I left. I was wrong.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ohio Republican John Boehner, has issued an invitation for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress on March 3.
Speaker Boehner issued this invitation without coordinating with the White House, in violation of protocol – but he violated much more than that.
Recent developments demonstrate that the Netanyahu government continues to promote the settlement known as “E2” at
A-Nahla (Givat Eitam):
1. The Ministry of Housing has begun to plan the area for the settlement.
2. A new court decision regarding the status of the land is construed as partial approval of the land as state
land.
3. Israeli authorities have destroyed a Palestinian wheat field in the area designated for the settlement.
This is another in a series of reviews of new books on Middle Eastern affairs. We asked Dr. Gail Weigl, an APN volunteer and a professor of art history, to review Menachem Klein's new book on the history of relations between Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron.
Menachem Klein, Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron (Oxford, 2014), 290 pages. $30.00.
Menachem Klein’s Lives in Common is an extremely important, extremely difficult book. Important because it painstakingly charts the history of the state of Israel from the dream to the implementation of a concerted campaign to erase features of a defeated culture, which was an integral part of Israel’s birth. Difficult because the author’s penchant for amassing data in support of his arguments often renders the narrative overly complex and tedious. Nevertheless, this is a valuable book for anyone who loves or is concerned about Israel. It is a clear-eyed account of the breakdown of relations between Jewish and Arab inhabitants of what once was a Palestine in which the two communities lived as one.
After providing the overarching narrative, supported by both primary and secondary records and voices, Klein himself at the end of his “Epilogue” offers at best the tepid wish that interaction between “equal human beings” can “enable co-existence between nations and enable them to cope with past wounds.” (290) The “Epilogue” itself is useful for understanding the thematic shape of Lives in Common, and reading the “Epilogue” first might help the reader to grasp the outline of this often unwieldy account, its complexity perhaps a metaphor for the many-stranded threads of the conflict itself.