Anti-BDS laws gain momentum across US, but some say they go too far (JTA, 2/23/2016)

On February 24th, Congress sent HR 644, known as the “Customs Bill,” to President Obama's desk. As we has been reporting for the past year, this bill includes a provision that, while ostensibly about countering the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel, is in truth about legitimizing settlements and for the first time in history legislating U.S. support for and defense of Israel's settlement enterprise and the occupation that enables it. The provision achieves this by conflating Israel and the occupied territories, in effect requiring the U.S. to treat both as sovereign Israel.

As long predicted by APN, when President Obama signed HR 644 into law shortly after it reached his desk, he issued a signing statement observing (correctly) that the conflation of Israel and settlements contradicts longstanding U.S. foreign policy and violates the Executive's constitutional foreign policy prerogative, and declaring that this conflation would not be implemented.

As many question not only the viability but also the desirability of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one of the world’s leading experts on the conflict and on efforts to resolve it discussed the state of the two-state solution.

Dan Kurtzer, is the former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt and currently the S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Middle East policy studies at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

We suggest reading Ambassador Kurtzer’s recent Brookings essay on the two-state solution.

Listen here.

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.

This week, Alpher discusses former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s tenure as head of government; the ramifications of IDF Chief of the General Staff Gadi Eisenkot speaking out against excessive use of force by soldiers and police in dealing with knife attacks by Palestinian youth; and two key issues of domestic and international sensitivity that his comments point to.