US ambassador to Israel David Friedman yesterday attended a business gathering at the West Bank settlement of Ariel. This is the first ever official visit by a sitting American ambassador to a West Bank settlement, breaking a longtime US policy that banned American ambassadors to Israel from crossing the Green Line and even more so from visiting West Bank settlements.
Washington, DC – Americans for Peace Now (APN) calls on the government of Israel to permit entry into Israel to Lara Alqasem, an American of Palestinian descent who received a student visa from an Israeli consulate in the US to undertake a master’s program at Hebrew University.
The Trump administration's latest measures against the Palestinians and their leadership are an attack on prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace. They are not only anti-Palestinian, but also anti-Israel and anti-peace. They do not serve America's national security interests – or Israel's.
The Trump administration's attack on Israel's Palestinian partner for peace negotiations, the Palestine Liberation Organization, is an attack on the framework for peace that the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships have created in the past quarter century. This framework was sustained with the blessing of the international community and the active support of past US administrations, Democratic and Republican, even under right-wing Israeli governments. This framework envisioned a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, living side-by-side with Israel in peace and security.
Ten Israelis – five Arab citizens and five Jewish peace activists – were victims of hate crimes over the weekend. All ten were hospitalized with cuts, lacerations, fractures, and other injuries of various severity after being attacked by Israeli Jews.
Americans for Peace Now (APN) condemns the decision by the Trump administration to slash $200 million in aid appropriated by Congress for humanitarian projects in the West Bank and Gaza. According to a leaked report, this action will shortly be followed by a Trump administration announcement that it will cut support for programs of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the West Bank, ask Israel to consider restricting UNRWA's activities there, and dramatically reduce the number of Palestinians the United States recognizes as refugees.
Professional investor and policy analyst Daniel J. Arbess is a financial expert focusing on macroeconomic, geopolitical and major industrial developments. He seems to be quite successful at that.
But last week he delved into a field that does not seem to be his forte. He wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal that presumes to give advice to young Palestinians. What’s Arbess’ advice? In his words, “Breaking free from their elders’ calcified thinking,” to “find the courage to move on” and integrate “into Israel’s thriving economy and culture of innovation.”
Israel’s new Nation-State Law is not only anti-democratic. It is also anti-peace. It hinders not only peace between Jews and non-Jews in Israel, but it also severely hampers prospects for future peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors.
Instead of echoing Israel’s Declaration of Independence by championing the pursuit of peace as a Jewish value of the Jewish state, the Nation-State Law asserts an aggressive, uncompromising, zero-sum attitude toward Israel’s relations with the Palestinians. The law’s exclusionary content and tone is directed at non-Jewish citizens of the state, but is understandably perceived by non-Israeli Palestinians as well as a law that as excludes them from a relationship based on equality with Israel.
Those who suggest a dead-on-arrival U.S. peace plan will be simply thrown into the dustbin of history and will have no long-term consequences are dangerously wrong. A defective plan could have catastrophic consequence.
An impending U.S. diplomatic initiative to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict used to make big headlines. Now, the Trump administration says its on the verge of issuing an "ultimate deal" plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - and hardly anyone seems to care.
Should we care? Absolutely. Not because the plan has a serious chance to succeed. It doesn’t. But because of the potentially catastrophic repercussions that a severely flawed plan would have.
What we know so far about this administration’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian question does not bode well for an effective peace plan.
Shaqued Morag is the newly appointed executive director of Israel’s peace movement Shalom Achshav (Peace Now). We at Shalom Acshav’s American sister organization are thrilled to welcome Shaqued into Peace Now’s extended family, and are wishing her b’hatzlakha, good luck and success in this important leadership role.
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President Trump’s Middle East team is preparing to release its Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. Reports regarding the content of the plan are unsettling. While we believe the United States has a vital role to play in bringing together Israelis and Palestinians to make peace, we view the Trump administration’s effort with grave concern. This paper offers guidelines to assess the prospects for success of a Trump peace plan by examining: 1) the current political context, 2) the essential requirements for a plan, and 3) the measures that should be taken to pave the way for negotiations.
