The past few days have demonstrated yet again how dangerous the Israeli government’s occupation policies are. The Biden administration must take determined action to stop the Israeli government from destroying any chance for a future Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
On Sunday, the Israeli government approved a measure that grants responsibility for West Bank planning procedures to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a zealot national-religious settler who publicly proposed a plan to annex most of the West Bank by doubling the number of Israelis who live there. The measure also stipulates that planning procedures for settlement construction will no longer require approval by the Minister of Defense, as they did in the past.
Yesterday, it was officially announced that the West Bank Civil Administration’s Higher Planning Committee, the body currently responsible for all construction planning in areas under Israeli control in the West Bank, will discuss next week the promotion of a whopping 4,799 housing units through 28 plans for 18 settlements, including the authorization of an illegal (even by Israeli law) outpost.
Also yesterday, an IDF incursion into the West Bank town of Jenin triggered one of the most intense firefights in over 20 years, involving a high-powered roadside bomb used by Palestinians against Israeli armored personnel carriers as well as the use of an attack helicopter by the IDF to help rescue Israeli soldiers caught in in the fighting. The toll was high. Six Palestinians were killed, including a 15-year-old, and almost 100 were injured, some of them critically. On the Israeli side, 7 soldiers were injured, some of them badly.
And today, there was a deadly terrorist attack near the Israeli settlement of Eli, near Ramallah. A gunman shot and killed four people and injured four more, further escalating tension in the West Bank.
Produced by the Foundation for Middle East Peace in cooperation with Americans for Peace Now, where the Legislative Round-Up was conceived.
1.Bills, Resolutions
& Letters
2.
Hearings & Events
3. Media & Reports
4. Members on the Record
(Palestine/Palestinians)
5. Members on the Record
(Israel)
6. Members
on the Record (Iran)
7. Members on the Record (other
Mideast countries)
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.
Amichai Chikli, the Israeli government minister responsible for maintaining good relations between Israel and world Jewry, is apparently on a campaign to do just the opposite. After offending participants in New York’s annual Celebrate Israel Parade and viciously attacking J Street, Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs now apparently has a new target: US Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt.
In addition to being one of the world’s leading Holocaust historians, Professor Lipstadt was President Biden's choice to lead his administration’s effort to fight antisemitism, a job that she has performed ably.
Neither vicious settler violence nor unusually blatant Biden administration criticism have given the Israeli government pause as it goes ahead with its irresponsible decision to rebuild the settlement at Homesh, in the northern West Bank.
Last week, despite US requests to cease and desist the process of rebuilding the settlement (“The Homesh outpost in the West Bank is illegal; it is illegal even under Israeli law,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price), the government of Israel went ahead and connected this rogue settlement to the water grid. Haaretz ran a poignant editorial, commenting that “in his sixth term as prime minister, Netanyahu believes that the international community in general and the United States in particular talk a lot but in fact let Israel do whatever it pleases in the occupied territories.” And Israel’s leading strategic affairs think tank, the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) published an unusually scathing report on the topic of Homesh, concluding that the government of Israel “prefers to undermine the rule of law, violate Israel’s commitments to the United States, and pay the price for the escalation of terrorism in the northern West Bank in order to advance the ideology of the radical right wing in the government, which seeks to chain the West Bank forever to the State of Israel and thwart any chance of a political-territorial compromise with the Palestinians.”
Produced by the Foundation for Middle East Peace in cooperation with Americans for Peace Now, where the Legislative Round-Up was conceived.
1.Bills,
Resolutions & Letters
2. Hearings & Events
3. Media &
Reports
4.
Members on the Record (Palestine/Palestinians)
5. Members on the Record
(Israel)
6.
Members on the Record (Iran)
7. Members on the Record (other
Mideast countries)
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.
