Had Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joined me and my APN colleagues on our West Bank study tour last week, we would have shown him how fraught with illegality and illegitimacy West Bank settlements are.

This episode, an edited recording of a conversation with Palestinian pollster and social scientist Khalil Shikaki, is another recording from APN’s 2019 study tour to Israel and the West Bank.

We met with Dr. Shikaki at his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah on November 12th. He reviewed trends in Palestinian public opinion in the past decade and offered some predictions of possible future scenarios in Palestinian society based on these trends.

Listen to the full episode

As American Jewish organizations deeply concerned about the future of Israel’s democracy, we are disturbed and saddened by the decision of the Israeli Supreme Court to uphold the Israeli government’s order to deport Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch’s Israel and Palestine Director.

Human Rights Watch plays an integral role in documenting and opposing human rights abuses wherever they take place around the world. Allowing human rights organizations like HRW to engage in this work is crucial for any democratic society. The Supreme Court’s decision helps fuel the Israeli right’s widening campaign of incitement and suppression against those who research and oppose the injustices of the occupation. It sets an unacceptable precedent for all groups and activists engaged in this essential work — whether Israeli citizens or non-citizens, Jewish or non-Jewish. As 23 Israeli civil society organizations wrote, the decision to allow for the deportation of Omar Shakir “severely harmed us all.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo today announced the Trump administration’s latest assault on prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace. In renouncing a 1978 letter by the State Department’s legal advisor and stating that “settlements are not per se illegal under international law,” the Trump administration is giving a green light to further settlement expansion and even to formal Israeli annexation of the West Bank.

Already, the effective endorsement of settlements by Trump’s “peace” team (including by former Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt who has referred to settlements as “neighborhoods and cities”) has led to a surge in settlement activity, as documented by APN’s Israeli sister-organization Peace Now.

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.

My name is Orly Halpern and I edit and write News Nosh, the daily review in English of the Hebrew media.

As a journalist who has reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many years, I know how helpful being able to read the local media is, the news items, the Op-Eds and the analysis, in order to get a fuller picture of what is happening on the ground and to get a pulse from the commentators. That requires not only knowledge of the local languages, but also time, a limited commodity for all.

Eight years ago, APN approached me while I was on maternity leave and asked me if I would be interested in writing a daily review of the four main Hebrew newspapers, with a focus on the the conflict, settlers, Arab-Israelis, diplomacy and security. I was thrilled at the opportunity to continue working in the news and at the same time stay at home with my child.

And so began News Nosh.