Washington, DC - Americans for Peace Now (APN) joins its Israeli sister organization, Israel's Peace Now movement, in strongly criticizing the government of Israel's issuing new tenders for 1,877 new housing units in settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Israel-Palestine pundits often seem to compete over who will be more skeptical, if not dismissive, of new diplomatic initiatives. Given past peace-making failures, they know that predictions of failure are their best bets.
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer got it wrong when they laid blame for the Iraq War on the "Israel Lobby" (in their book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy). However, a war with Iran could be a different story. As I warned back in March 2012, a much clearer line can be drawn between the efforts of U.S. Jewish groups and hawkish Iran policies. "For more than a decade," I wrote, "the same forces that Walt and Mearsheimer erroneously blamed for America's Iraq debacle have openly led efforts to convince Washington and the American people that war with Iran is necessary and inevitable."
APN's daily news review from Israel
Friday January 10, 2014
Quote of the day:
"Esh Kodesh is an outpost that serves as launching ground for severe unlawful activity, and as such... it creates severe friction that causes harm to people and their property, and therefore heavily burdens the security authorities."
-- Peace Now calls for the government to take down the illegal outpost and remove its settlers.**
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is known for the quip "If you can't solve a problem, enlarge it." Opponents of Israeli-Palestinian peace have their own spin on that quip, best summed up as, "If you don't want to solve a problem, pile on more problems." As a result, a valuable metric for gauging how seriously things are going in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts - or, at least, how worried anti-peace folks are getting that things are going seriously - has long been the extent to which opponents of peace are ginning up discredited, specious, or disingenuous arguments. And a look at current headlines indicates that opponents of peace are taking the Kerry peace effort very seriously, indeed.
Today, Peace Now's Settlement Watch issued the following update regarding new settlement-related developments in Hebron:
APN's daily news review from Israel
Thursday January 09, 2014
Quote of the day:
"The video shows that the army, which is supposed to protect the Palestinians in the West Bank, actually
served as backup for violent settlers."
--Israeli human rights organization, B'Tselem, said in a statement upon releasing video showing soldiers
accompanying settlers attacking Palestinians.**
Israel's Peace Now (Shalom Achshav) movement today sent a letter to the Israeli government, demanding that it enforce the law and remove Esh Kodesh, a West Bank settlement that was established in violation of Israeli law, whose residents have repeatedly attacked neighboring Palestinians.
APN's daily news review from Israel
Wednesday January 08, 2014
Quote of the day:
"I've met many Palestinians who hate Israel. But I've never met one who attributes that hatred to street signs or
textbooks. Instead, they talk about parents evicted from their homes, cousins jailed, lands taken, travel permits
denied."
--Peter Beinart asks who is inciting more, the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian
President.**
Op-ed: Instead of whining about Palestinian incitement, ministers should discuss state of incitement in Israel
On Sunday, Israel's cabinet dedicated its weekly meeting to an important issue. Not important - critical. Yossi Kuperwasser, the director-general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, found the time to attend the meeting and even brought along a presentation. Not just a presentation - an audio-visual presentation, with both images and sounds. Thanks to the presentation, songs in Arabic were played in a cabinet meeting for the first time in history.
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