As we approach this year’s Passover Seder, I’m writing to wish you all a happy holiday and to explain why your support — ongoing or first-time — is so important for Americans for Peace Now and Shalom Achshav. As a veteran of Israel’s strategic security establishment who currently, in semi-retirement, writes (compulsively! almost daily! weekly in my Q & A for APN!) about Israel-related security issues, I hope you will permit me in this connection a brief Pesach reminiscence.
Lately, my own research and writing efforts have taken me back to the events of Passover 2002. On March 27, Erev Pesach, a Hamas suicide bomber attacked several hundred people gathered for a Seder at the Park Hotel, near the beach in Netanya in central Israel. He killed 30 Israelis and maimed some 160 others.
Let’s help our brothers and sisters of Shalom Achshav put peace
on the agenda. Let’s help them make sure that one million Israelis see this film, and that these elections are
about the issues that really matter for Israel’s future.
As part of a group of non-Israeli academics assembled by Tel Aviv University, I visited
the Temple Mount in July 2017. On the next day, two Israeli border police officers were shot there in a
terror attack. I had the opportunity to make a condolence visit to Hurfeish, the Druze village in the
Galilee from which the two policemen (who were cousins) hailed. In the intimate setting of the room in which
female relatives were mourning, I told an aunt of the slain men that I was coming to work for the American
sister organization of Shalom Achshav and wanted to help in any way I could.
I am happy to see Shaqued Morag at the helm of Shalom Achschav, Israel’s Peace Now
movement, not only because of her proven management skills (and not only because I am always happy to
see talented women in positions of leadership and power), but because she is the face and spirit of the peace
movement’s new generation.
Shaqued and her cohort are forcefully demanding that Israel maintain the rule of law, end its
occupation of the West Bank, and allow both peoples — Israelis and Palestinians — to bequeath to their children
two states living side by side in peace and security.
On a wall at APN’s Washington office, there’s a Hanukkah poster that we produced years ago,
which says, “It’s not about the oil, it’s about the light.” The idea was that the true miracle of Hanukkah was
not the Maccabees finding an extra pint of oil, but their using it to generate the light needed at a time of
severe adversity.
