APN COVID REPORTS

#12 - Israel's second wave: can and will it be contained (June 26, 2020)

#11 - Palestinian Children Prisoners in Israel (May 26, 2020)

#10 - Israeli opinion during COVID-19 (May 13, 2020)

#9 - Upholding human rights in the courts (May 8, 2020)

#8 - What Israel can learn from countries with a similar incidence of the virus (May 6, 2020)

#7 - Israel and neighbors in the age of COVID-19 (May 1, 2020)

#6 - The pandemic’s economic effect on the West Bank (April 30, 2020)

#5 - Israel and Palestine: A snapshot in numbers (April 28, 2020)

#4 - How much is the new unity government actually about COVID-19? (April 27, 2020)

#3 - The situation in East Jerusalem (April 20, 2020)

#2 - The effect of defunding the World Health Organization on Israel and Palestine (April 16, 2020)

#1 - How accurate is Coronavirus reporting in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza? (April 14, 2020)

NEWS NOSH - "CORONA NEWS/QUICKEES"

APN's daily news review from Israel includes updates on coronavirus-related matters, currently including a special section for it

Americans for Peace Now (APN) extends its gratitude and appreciation to 191 members of the House of Representatives for the letter they sent to Israel's government, sharply criticizing its intention to annex parts of the West Bank and urging it to reconsider its unilateral annexation plan.

Israel’s peace camp this week lost one of its icons. Zeev Sternhell, one of the world’s leading scholars on fascism and one of Israel’s clearest anti-occupation and anti-settlements voices, died in Jerusalem at the age of 85.

Professor Sternhell was closely associated with Israel’s Peace Now movement and one of its first members.

In 2008, four months after winning the lucrative Israel Prize, he was the target of a violent hate crime. A pipe bomb planted at the doorstep of his Jerusalem home injured him. Next to the bomb and around Sternhell’s home, fliers were found promising a million shekels prize to anyone who would kill a Peace Now activist.

Years later, American-born Jewish terrorist Yaakov Teitel, now serving a life imprisonment sentence, admitted to planting the bomb.

In 2016, in a Haaretz op-ed, Sternhell publicly came to the defense of Americans for Peace Now and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem when he defended their appearance before the UN Security Council to talk about West Bank settlement construction and violations of Palestinian human rights.

To analyze the state of affairs among the Palestinian public and its leadership as Israel moves to annex large swathes of the West Bank, join APN’s Zoom webinar with leading Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki, the director of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.

Friday, June 26, 12:00 pm (Eastern)

REGISTER HERE

Pummeled by the Israeli occupation, Palestinian Authority diplomatic ineptness in the West Bank and Hamas governance incompetence in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian public is now facing the specter of West Bank annexation. Mahmoud Abbas’ PLO, utterly committed to two-state diplomacy with Israel, is hard-pressed to respond to this paradigm-changing move by the Israeli government.

This story by Oren Cohen, the former Palestinian affairs correspondent of the daily newspaper Hadashot, is a part of APN’s Virtual Dove series, a collection of stories told by practitioners in the field of Israeli-Palestinian relations, stories that highlight the human and the humanity in the conflict.

APN and fellow members of the Progressive Israel Network have sent the letter below to Alternate Prime Minister Gantz and Foreign Minister Ashkenazi, urging action to stop Israeli annexation in the West Bank.

Update: this action, now closed, ran in June 2020. 

With the blessing -- indeed the urging -- of Donald Trump’s White House, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the midst of preparations to annex vast swaths of the West Bank. A joint committee, manned by representatives of Netanyahu and Trump, and headed by Trump’s ambassador to Israel David Friedman, is working on a detailed map delineating the territory – as much as 30% of the West Bank – that Israel will claim as its own.

A group of members of the House of Representatives is signing a letter (click HERE to read the letter) to Prime Minister Netanyahu and his ministers of defense and foreign affairs urging them to reconsider this destructive measure.

Tell your member of Congress to join the letter!

CLICK to jump down to the Hadar Susskind letter

APN was one of the first organizations to publicly condemn the President of the Zionist Organization of America Mort Klein's racist tweets about Black Lives Matter. APN now joins with fellow member organizations of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in sending this letter to Mr. Klein, which concludes with:

"At this delicate and critical juncture in American history, Jews of all colors must stand up for black lives and against senseless hatred and divisive bigotry. It is time to find our common humanity, not to search for ways to keep us apart. There is no room for hate in organized Jewish life."

The Israeli government’s decision to annex large parts of the West Bank is now on the forefront of the political agenda in the public and in the Israeli Knesset. 

Listen to Knesset Member Merav Michaeli of Israel’s Labor Party, who is currently a member of the opposition, discuss annexation on this APN briefing call from Thursday, June 11. 

In her eight years in Israeli politics, following a successful career in television and print journalism, MK Michaeli has established herself as a clear, courageous progressive voice, focusing on peace, social justice, and women’s rights. One of Israel’s leading feminists, Michaeli has been socially active since the late 1990s, when she established a lobbying organization to assist and promote sexual violence victim centers across Israel. As a Knesset member, she has consistently speaks out against the occupation and against the Israeli government’s inaction in pursuit of an end to the occupation.