Update: this action, now closed, ran in October 2018.  

Thirty-four Senators and 112 House members recently released letters to the Trump administration calling on it to restore humanitarian funding to Palestinians, which President Trump has slashed in order to pressure the Palestinian leadership to acquiesce to his unannounced “peace plan.” As Israeli security officials have indicated, this funding is not only essential for Palestinians, it is also critically important for Israeli security.

Did your elected officials sign? Tell them where you stand.

The funding in question was passed by Congress, with bipartisan support, and included aid for:

• UNRWA, the UN agency which provides critical assistance to Palestinian refugees;
• Humanitarian programs administered by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the West Bank and Gaza;
• The East Jerusalem Hospital Network which provides essential care for many Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza; and
• People-to-people conflict mitigation programming which promotes coexistence, particularly among the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians.

Congress allocated this funding because it serves the US national interest in a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the face of Trump’s outrageous decision to cancel all non-security-related funding that benefits Palestinians, Congress must speak out.

Take action to thank your elected representatives if they signed these letters, or take them to task if they did not.

Dr. Debra Shushan, APN Policy and Government Relations Director, was recently in the Philadelphia area where she was the featured speaker at a J Street Philadelphia / J Street U event at Haverford College and guest at parlor parties. In her September 30 talk at Haverford entitled "Off the Table: Israeli-Palestinian Peace in the Trump-Netanyahu Era," she surveyed recent developments that threaten prospects for peace - from the rise of illiberal democracy in the US and Israel, to President Trump's efforts to take key issues off the negotiating table - as well as the work that APN and Shalom Achshav in Israel are doing to push back against this tide.

A J Street U leader called the talk "phenomenal" and welcomed further collaboration with APN. 

Educational advocacy is an important part of APN's work. If you are interested in inviting someone from APN's Speakers Bureau to your university, synagogue, church, parlor event, or other gathering, please contact apndc@peacenow.org. 

In conversation with Jafar Farah and Nabila Espanioly of the Mossawa Center, APN Political Director Debra Shushan moderated "The Nation-State Law: Implications for Democracy and Peace in Israel/Palestine" on September 27. Watch the video to see how Palestinian citizens of Israel are responding to the new Israeli law that has relegated them to second-class status -- and why they are taking their case abroad. 

 

The world laughed at Donald Trump yesterday. In response to his ludicrous assertion that in less than two years his administration “has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country” on the world arena, the assembled diplomatic representatives to the UN General Assembly did not conceal their amusement.

Trump earned the ridicule of the United Nations, in particular regarding his administration’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather than advancing peace, the Trump administration has caused more damage than any government in US history.

The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics today published data on construction starts in Israel and the West Bank, indicating that in the second quarter of 2018, 794 new apartments were built in the settlements, compared with only 279 in the first quarter. In the first half of 2018, construction began on 1,073 settlement housing units, compared to 870 in the first half of 2017. Peace Now: The Netanyahu government continues to destroy the chances for peace. Further construction in the settlements undermines Israel's interest in reaching a two-state solution, as such a solution will not be stable without a viable Palestinian state, which settlements increasingly threaten. Unfortunately, since Trump's election, we have seen a sharp increase in the approval of the plans and tenders, and now we are beginning to see the consequences of these approvals on the ground.

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.

The Trump administration's latest measures against the Palestinians and their leadership are an attack on prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace. They are not only anti-Palestinian, but also anti-Israel and anti-peace. They do not serve America's national security interests – or Israel's.

The Trump administration's attack on Israel's Palestinian partner for peace negotiations, the Palestine Liberation Organization, is an attack on the framework for peace that the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships have created in the past quarter century. This framework was sustained with the blessing of the international community and the active support of past US administrations, Democratic and Republican, even under right-wing Israeli governments. This framework envisioned a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, living side-by-side with Israel in peace and security.

There are no adults in the room, anonymous or not, diligently frustrating Trump's cruel, disastrous Mideast policy, only arsonists - Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman - dousing the house with kerosene

New revelations in recent days from inside the White House provide yet more evidence of the disaster unfolding at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

One of the most astonishing stories told in Bob Woodward’s new book, "Fear," is that of President Donald Trump’s senior economic adviser Gary Cohn, who reportedly swiped a letter from Trump’s desk which - had the president signed it - would have withdrawn the U.S. from a trade agreement with South Korea. (According to Cohn, Trump never realized it was missing.)

More amazing still is the complementary claim by an anonymous senior Trump administration official that s/he and many others are "working diligently from within to frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations."

Such subversion of presidential authority is certainly problematic. But given an amoral president with a fifth- or sixth-grader's understanding  of world affairs (as Defense Secretary James Mattis is said to have described Donald Trump), one can be forgiven for wishing for adults in the room.