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--In his speech at the opening of the Knesset's winter session, opposition and Zionist Camp leader, MK Isaac Herzog, gave scathing criticism of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's leadership.**
Last week, Jewish Federations of North American (JFNA), an organization representing federations across the United States, opened the door, as a matter of formal policy, to taking Americans to visit Israeli settlements. These are the areas located east of the 1949 Armistice line separating Israel and the occupied territories (aka “the Green Line”) in which Israel has been actively settling its citizens since 1967. This decision, upending longstanding JFNA policy, doesn’t come in a vacuum. Rather, it comes in the context of a campaign to legitimize settlements in the eyes of American law and in the minds of American Jews – contrary to consistent U.S. law and policy since 1967 rejecting the legitimacy of both settlements and the occupation, and contrary to the vital interests of Israel.
Make no mistake: Settlements are the bricks-and-mortar expression of an ideology that prioritizes land over peace, and values the expansion of Israel’s borders over Israel’s democracy, over its security, and over good relations with the world. Generations of Israeli generals and security experts have concluded that a peace agreement with the Palestinians is vital to Israel’s security, and that such an agreement will have to be based on the Green Line, with limited border modifications agreed to by both sides. Continued Israeli settlement expansion and obfuscation of the Green Line threaten the achievement of such an agreement and undermine Israel’s security.
"It glorifies violence and desensitizes our children."
--Orthodox educator Shira Hecht-Knoller of the Drisha Institute for Jewish learning, on the video promoting a private modern Orthodox Jewish kids' sports camp in New York by showing children dressed as soldiers crawling through the mud to ambush the enemy and, at the end, an Israeli flag and a sign saying, 'Enlist Now.'**
APN Weekly Update - Help with our ad campaign, Yitzhak Rabin (z'l), Alpher, and a surprising Quote of the Week
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--In a conversation with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, a Palestinian doctor from Gaza, Dr. Izzeldin Abouelaish, compared fear of treatment of disease with Israeli fear of moving towards solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Dr. Abouelaish lost three of his daughters in the first Gaza war 2008-2009.**
--Chief Justice Miriam Naor struck back at Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked's attempt to curb the power of the High Court.**
--Opposition leader and Zionist Camp chief, Isaac Herzog, said at the commemoration rally marking 21 years since the murder of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.*
Ten thousand people came yesterday to Kikar Rabin in Tel Aviv to remember the former prime minister who was
assassinated as he worked for peace, moments after he sang "Shir LaShalom" (Song for peace), the lyrics of which
were found, blood-stained, in his pocket.