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.

Quote of the day:

"One doesn’t need to read 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' in order to be filled with feelings of discomfort and injustice by the fact that the team mediating between representatives of the nation-state of the Jewish people and representatives of the Palestinian people is comprised entirely of Jews."
--Carolina Landsmann writes in Haaretz of the hypocrisy of the right-wing, which accuses the left-wing of being 'PC' and which likes to portray itself as “telling it as it is,” but is silent about the make-up of the US team that drafted the Trump peace plan and offered itself as an objective, impartial, unbiased broker between Palestinians and Israelis. Landsmann writes that one of the Trump team members, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, is so pro-settler he "makes Bibi (Netanyahu) look like Ahmad Tibi."*

You Must Be Kidding: 
45 days of community service.
--The sentence an IDF soldier received for shooting and killing a Palestinian fisherman in Gaza in 2018.**

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.

1. Bills, Resolutions, & Letters
2. Hearings
3. On the Record

Produced by the Foundation for Middle East Peace in cooperation with Americans for Peace Now, where the Legislative Round-Up was conceived. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.

APN's daily news review from Israel 

Thursday June 18, 2020

Quote of the day:"It's called apartheid via salami tactics."
--Former Meretz Chairwoman Zahava Galon said of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's 'annexation in stages' proposal.*

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.

This conversation with award-winning Haaretz journalist Amira Hass serves as an introduction to the second installment of our Virtual Dove series of stories about Israeli-Palestinian relations told by practitioners in this field. The second part of the Virtual Dove features three Israeli correspondents who covered (or still cover) Palestinian affairs for Israeli news organizations.

LISTEN

APN's daily news review from Israel - Wednesday June 17, 2020

Quotes of the Day:

“The court is sending a clear message to law enforcement authorities today that there is no longer a basis for the many years of immunity that the state has granted to the heads of the settlement movement, who have done in the settlements whatever they have felt like, in violation of the law, and all of this to create facts on the ground that affect the future of all of Israel. We hope that the message is heard and that they finally a stop is put to the lawlessness in the settlements and outposts.”
--Peace Now responds after court orders the State to explain its failure to investigate illegal construction in West Bank settlement.*

"Fifty-three years of occupation since the Six Day War have fundamentally changed Israel. After more than 40 years of right-wing rule, Israelis identify and are identified more with ruling whites than with oppressed Blacks. Ethnocentrism, Jewish fundamentalism and hostility towards Palestinians, it seems, have spawned blatant racism towards minorities in general, as Israel’s own black minority of Ethiopian Jews can attest."
--Haaretz+ commentator Chemi Shalev writes about why Israelis backed the civil rights movement in America, but don't back the Black Lives Matter movement**

"Supporters of annexation want to strengthen Israel by reducing danger. They are trying to get rid of a chronic illness that we have been living with for more than 50 years, but the problem is that the medicine they offer could kill the patient, that is, the State of the Jewish people."
—Sallai Meridor, former Israeli ambassador to the US, former Jewish Agency chairman and a present-day settler, shares his view on annexation.***

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!