Americans for Peace Now (APN) welcomes Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s round of talks today with senior Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian leaders in an effort to contain the current violence and reduce tensions at Jerusalem’s holy sites and beyond.

APN urges Secretary Blinken and the Biden administration to not stop at tension-reduction efforts, but to proactively work to pave a way toward Israeli-Palestinian peace.
APN’s President and CEO Hadar Susskind said: “We are witnessing an alarming escalation involving all the familiar sources of Israeli-Palestinian tension, from violence at Jerusalem’s holy sites to the Gaza Strip, through numerous friction points in the West Bank. It seems like all the ingredients are there for another all-out violent eruption, a replay of last May’s Gaza war and inter-communal violence inside Israel. Any US diplomatic involvement to halt the dangerous deterioration and prevent bloodshed is obviously welcome. But the current flareup in hostilities demonstrates that the Israeli government strategy of ‘conflict management,’ a strategy that the Biden administration seems to endorse, is insufficient. The festering 55-year-old occupation makes the conflict unmanageable.”

The occupation must end. The conflict must be resolved. The only way to resolve it is through diplomacy, and only the United States can help broker such diplomacy. That was true in the past and is still the case today. We know that conflict resolution diplomacy will not yield immediate Israeli-Palestinian peace. But we also know full well that the absence of such diplomacy, the absence of a political horizon, results in further despair, long-term instability, and bloodshed.”