Americans for Peace Now cautiously welcomes yesterday’s launch of the Joint US-Israel Strategic High-Level Dialogue on Technology. As announced in this summer’s Jerusalem US-Israel Strategic Partnership Joint Declaration, these talks are intended to establish a US-Israel technological partnership on critical and emerging technologies and solutions to global challenges. 

Twenty-two years ago, then-head of Israel’s opposition Ariel Sharon, escorted by a thousand Israeli police officers, provocatively visited Jerusalem’s Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, igniting the second popular Palestinian uprising (the second intifada). This protracted armed conflict, which included brutal Palestinian terrorist attacks and ruthless Israeli operations to re-conquer the West Bank, caused more than 1,000 Israeli fatalities and more than 2,700 Palestinian fatalities. Thousands more were injured and hundreds of thousands traumatized.      

Americans for Peace now welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s endorsement of the two-state solution in his United Nations General Assembly speech and commends him for stating that peace is not an expression of weakness but rather “a victory of all that is good.”

A United Nations General Assembly speech by an Israeli prime minister, which focuses on peace and explicitly pledges to pursue peace, is a welcome and refreshing development.

Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee met to consider the Peace and Tolerance in Palestinian Education Act. While the name of the legislation represents something all schools should aspire to, it is in actuality a thinly veiled attempt to de-legitimize the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) and demonize the teaching of the Palestinian narrative. There are real and problematic examples cited by supporters of the bill, which UNRWA takes seriously and is working to address. However, we believe that it is incumbent on schools to teach tolerance and avoid bias in their curriculum on both sides of the Green Line.

Early in the summer, we wrote to you about the new map that APN is creating in partnership with our friends at Shalom Achshav. We’re taking this step because  maps are important. They tell us a story. And we believe that the story they tell should be true and reflect the reality on the ground.  Unfortunately, the official maps used in Israeli schools – as well as distributed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to synagogues, day schools, summer camps, and other Jewish institutions in the US – tell a false story and ignore the reality of territory, history, and the Occupation today.

Twenty-nine years ago this week, the leaders of Americans for Peace Now stood among the many dignitaries at the signing ceremony of the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn. APN has worked behind the scenes in the years that preceded Oslo to push the vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace, advancing the dialogue between Washington and the PLO, and helping induce the détente in relations between the Israel and the Palestinian leadership.