Following is the full text of remarks by Secretary of State John Kerry, delivered at the State Department in Washington, DC on December 28, as posted on the Department of State’s web site

SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. Thank you. (Coughs.) Excuse me. Thank you for your patience, all of you. For those of you who celebrated Christmas, I hope you had a wonderful Christmas. Happy Chanukah. And to everybody here, I know it’s the middle of a holiday week. I understand. (Laughter.) But I wish you all a very, very productive and Happy New Year.

Today, I want to share candid thoughts about an issue which for decades has animated the foreign policy dialogue here and around the world – the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Secretary of State John Kerry today articulated, in the clearest possible terms, what is at stake for both Israel and the US: Israel's security and its viability as a democracy and a Jewish state. He also offered a pragmatic vision of the only way forward for Israel that ensures both.

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.

This week, Alpher discusses the US abstention from last Friday's the UN Security Council resolution condemning the settlements; Netanyahu’s reaction to the abstention: calling Israel’s ambassadors home, dressing down the ambassadors of Security Council members, cancelling meetings with heads of state like the UK’s PM May and Ukraine’s PM Groysman, and suspending a variety of international aid and cooperation programs as well as coordination meetings with the Palestinian Authority; the government of Israel's argument that this resolution renders new two-state solution negotiations less likely because it encourages the Palestinians to adhere to the international route of BDS, UN resolutions and appeals to international courts; whether he would have preferred to see a different Security Council resolution; and if 2334 could contribute ammunition to Palestinian attempts to confront Israel at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

Americans for Peace Now (APN) welcomes today's action in the United Nations Security Council in support of Israeli-Palestinian peace and the two-state solution.

Americans for Peace Now (APN) urges the Obama administration to support or abstain on today's UN Security Council resolution in support of Israeli-Palestinian peace and the two-state solution.

Rabbi Jonah Rank is the Maskil ("Teacher of tradition") at Shaar Shalom Synagogue in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Rabbi Rank was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2015.

When the humorist Dave Barry released his book Dave Barry’s Bad Habits: A 100% Fact-Free Book in 1987, he might not have foreseen that, just three decades later, the United States would have become such a major player in promoting fact-free political discourse. The low bar of entry that permits most Americans access to the internet and the only slightly higher bar that permits most Americans to create web content of any kind have helped bring us to where we are today. When reading articles shared on digital media, if the facts don’t sound like the facts we’ve previously heard, we might ask if this news is real or not: Was it perhaps created from a fake-news website? Is this article actually based on found facts? Is this publication the eloquence of a gullible writer mistaking The Onion for news? Is this piece of journalism simply a collection of conspiracy theories all rooted in a series of truth-contorting tweets?

Published December 19, 2016 (Updated January 25, 2017)

Much has been written about the views of David Friedman, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee as the next U.S. Ambassador to Israel. We have compiled this collection of quotes from his articles and speeches, so people can better understand and judge Mr. Friedman, based entirely on his own words (downloadable pdf of this document is available here).

• Rejecting U.S. policy in support of peace efforts/two-state solution
• Attacking liberal U.S. Jews (as kapos, etc)
• Accusing President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry of anti-Semitism
• Attacking Hillary Clinton & Bill Clinton
• Other positions of note (pro-Putin/Assad; pro-quashing campus activism on Israel, attacking the New York Times, etc.)

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.

This week, Alpher discusses whether President-elect Trump's selection of David Friedman as US ambassador to Israel will be the "game-changer from hell;" what happens if the embassy is really moved to Jerusalem; what should Trump be doing about the embassy; and how the ambassadorial appointment and the Jerusalem embassy issues factor into the existing divides and conflicts within world Jewry.

On December 16 2016, APN held a briefing call with Senator George Mitchell and Alon Sachar.  Senator George Mitchell and Alon Sachar are the authors of the newly published book "A Path to Peace: A Brief History of Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations and a Way Forward in the Middle East."