Tel Aviv is enchanting. As I wandered through the artistic, sun-soaked streets of Neve Tzedek, walked on the glistening beaches of the Mediterranean, and meandered through its bustling downtown on my most recent visit to Israel, I became entranced. With its balance of relaxation and excitement, I couldn’t help but be lured in by the magic of the city.

However, I wasn’t in Israel for vacation. I was there as staff with Americans for Peace Now on its study tour to Israel and the West Bank to learn about the complexity of achieving a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Usually, the tour is based in Jerusalem, a contentious city that many consider the epicenter of the conflict. Though staying in Tel Aviv distanced us from the heart of the issue, it taught me an important lesson about the attitude of Israelis toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how difficult it is to persuade the Israeli public that the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip threatens Israel’s existence.

By obscuring the uniqueness of the Israeli colonialist regime, BDS is giving Israel an escape hatch; instead, boycott movement must focus on occupation and settlements, stop blurring lines between Israel and Territories.

If the BDS movement didn’t exist, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of occupation and settlement would have had to invent it. For contrary to the popular notion in Israel, on the international scene BDS is serving as one of the most effective factors in perpetuating the Palestinians’ national enslavement.

Both the boycott movement and the present Israeli government – as made clear in Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely’s fundamentalist speech to Israeli diplomats – are striving to imprint in international consciousness the inherent identification between the State of Israel and the Israeli military regime in the occupied territories, a single organic Israeli unit. Put another way: There is basic consent between the BDS movement and the Israeli government regarding the conception of the geopolitical space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, as a single state called Israel.

The dispute between the boycott movement and the occupation and settlement government has to do with the moral character of that single “Israel” between the river and the sea. While BDS describes it as a criminal colonialist entity whose international legitimacy is in doubt, the Israeli government sees it as a legitimate partner in the family of nations that gives just expression to the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.

Continue Reading.

Americans for Peace Now (APN) welcomes the Supreme Court ruling rejecting efforts by Congress and outside groups to wrest control from the Executive Branch over foreign policy-making by legislating the status of Jerusalem in isolation of the context of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

As an American Jewish, Zionist, pro-peace organization, APN was alone in the Jewish organizational world weighing in against the law in question, going so far as to submit an Amicus Brief  to the Supreme Court when it considered the case for the first time in 2011.

This week, Alpher discusses whether the past week’s BDS developments are a “strategic tsunami;” what does it mean for Israel that a pro-Kurdish party in Turkey has won enough votes to prevent the ruling AK Party from gaining a majority in parliament and President Erdogan from changing the constitution to give himself extensive executive powers; why the death of Tareq Aziz, foreign minister and deputy prime minister under Saddam Hussein, is a significant milestone in today’s Middle East; whether Assad’s regime is really threatened.