Clarity
By Ori Nir, APN's Vice President for Public Affairs
Responding to a somber Eid al-Fitr holiday greeting last week, a friend from East Jerusalem responded with a line from the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish. It says: “We have on this land what makes life worth living.” It’s a love song, a song of love for life as well as a song of love for Darwish’s homeland.
Hello my friends,
I’ve been staring at this page, blank, for a long time. How to write about this week? What to write about?
I should tell you about the briefing that APN held, bringing Israeli and Palestinian voices directly to Congressional staff. About the many one-on-one conversations and consultations with members of Congress, as they struggled to figure out what to say. About our efforts pushing the State Department and the Administration to do more and better. And about the fact that while others circulated petitions and sent thoughts and prayers, we supported a Congressional action that demands specific steps from our government in clear and unequivocal language.
This is what APN does. This is what we are here for.
But when I sit to write about that, I get a WhatsApp messages from my son, in Israel for his post high school gap year. And texts from my nieces and nephews, both in Israel and the US, trying to sift through the whirlwind of news and social media in order to understand what is really happening. I try my best to reassure them that it will be ok.
And then there are the messages and posts from friends and colleagues whose families are not in Israel, but in Gaza. How do they tell their children, their families, that it will be ok?
The calls with the State Department, webinars with our partners, Congressional briefings and actions, all of them are crucial, and we will continue to push for an immediate ceasefire and to address the underlying issues that led to the this most recent round of violence. But beyond that, we will continue to speak up for the humanity and inherent value of both Israelis and Palestinians.
We will not be silent as so many elected officials, commentators and “Jewish community leaders” fall back on the old tribalist approach and demand that people “take a side”. This is not a sporting event, and we are not interested in scoring points for our team or cheering on others as they do so. I will not celebrate the death of others and I will not cheer the destruction of their homes.
We have so much work to do. I am deeply grateful to be doing it with you.
B’Shalom,
Hadar
May 12, 2021
APN supported a letter sent by 25 members of the House of Representatives to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, urging him to take urgent action to prevent the displacement of Palestinians from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah.
As violence in Jerusalem triggers hostilities across Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, Americans for Peace Now (APN) urges all the parties and stakeholders to take action to prevent further bloodshed and to stop the escalation toward war.
The steep escalation of the past weeks requires responsible leadership in the short term, and underscores the need
for renewed US-led Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic engagement to end the occupation and advance peace efforts.
Recent developments again demonstrate that the current situation is not viable and requires immediate
attention.
The Biden Administration may not have wanted to prioritize Israel/Palestine. They may have hoped to maintain the
status quo. But the status quo is no more, and looking away does not make this crisis go away.
Recent days have seen an escalation in violence in Jerusalem — even beyond what normally takes place around Jerusalem Day. With the violent events at Al Aqsa Mosque, police crackdowns on Palestinian protesters, the threat of home evictions in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, and today’s incendiary Flag March, the city is in a state of crisis. This is a highly volatile and dynamic situation—and we don’t know where it will lead.
This conversation featured leading Palestinian and Israeli experts from Jerusalem to update about what is happening on the ground, what Israelis and Palestinians are doing, and what we can do from afar.
Cosponsored by: Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), the Israel Policy Forum (IPF), the Union of Reform Judaism (URJ), the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), the New York Jewish Agenda (NYJA), and the Progressive Israel Network (PIN), a coalition which includes Ameinu, Americans for Peace Now (APN), Habonim Dror North America, Hashomer Hatzair, Jewish Labor Council, JStreet, New Israel Fund (NIF), Partners for Progressive Israel (PPI), Reconstructing Judaism and T’ruah.
SPEAKERS:
Huda Abuarquob is Alliance for Middle East Peace's (ALLMEP) on-the-ground regional director in 2014. She has years of experience in conflict resolution, NGO leadership, and social change education and activism, as well as a life-long commitment to building strong people-to-people Israeli-Palestinian relations. She is a well-known speaker on issues related to Middle East politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Huda is the oldest of twelve children, the daughter of respected Palestinian educators, and an aunt to twenty-two nieces and nephews. Born in Jerusalem, she has traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, lived for six years in the U.S., and now resides in Hebron.
Daniel Seidemann is an Israeli attorney specializing in Israeli-Palestinian relations, with an emphasis on Jerusalem. He is the founder and director of Terrestrial Jerusalem, an NGO that works towards a resolution to the question of Jerusalem that is consistent with the two-state solution.
Hagit Ofran is the Co-Director of Peace Now's Settlement Watch project and has two decades of expertise on issues related to the settlements in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. She is widely recognized as Israel's foremost expert on Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Monday is Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. This city, sacred to billions of people across the globe, is not only the spiritual center of multiple religions. It is also the home of real people. Families, men, women and children. Jewish and Muslim. Israeli and Palestinian. And this city is in crisis.
In Sheikh Jarrah, in Silwan, Palestinian families are being forcibly evicted from their homes, only to be replaced by Israeli settlers. This crisis has been building for a long time. Our colleagues at Shalom Achshav have been on the ground fighting against this, and we here in the US have been pushing for our government to speak up and take action.
Today members of Congress, led by Representatives Marie Newman and Mark Pocan, are urging Secretary of State Tony Blinken and the Biden Administration to do just that.
Members of Congress need to speak up and to push the Administration to act before it is too late. And they need to hear from you.
We at Americans for Peace Now are following with horror the reports from Israel, as the casualty tally of the disaster on Mount Meron keeps rising.
A Briefing on New Human Rights Watch Report on Israeli Violations
of Palestinian Rights
A new report by Human Rights Watch on Israeli violations of Palestinian rights is ruffling feathers in Israel and beyond. The comprehensive report, “A Threshold Crossed,” is based on years of documenting violations of Palestinian human rights, to state, controversially, that “Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians” in order to maintain “Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land.” The report contends that these violations “are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
To better understand how the world’s leading human rights organization has reached such harsh conclusions, APN hosted a webinar with Human Rights Watch’s Israel and Palestine Director, Omar Shakir, and Eric Goldstein, Director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division.
Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, investigates human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Prior to his current role, he was a Bertha Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he focused on US counterterrorism policies, including legal representation of Guantanamo detainees. As the 2013-14 Arthur R. and Barbara D. Finberg Fellow at Human Rights Watch, he investigated human rights violations in Egypt, including the Rab’a massacre, one of the largest killings of protesters in a single day. A former Fulbright Scholar in Syria, Omar holds a JD from Stanford Law School, where he co-authored a report on the civilian consequences of US drone strikes in Pakistan as a part of the International Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic, an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Affairs, and a BA in International Relations from Stanford. He speaks English and Arabic.
Eric Goldstein, acting Executive Director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division, is an expert on Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Western Sahara. He has conducted research missions to these and other regions of the Middle East since the 1980s, writing numerous reports for Human Rights Watch and publishing articles in news media and academic journals. He has taught courses on human rights at Princeton and Georgetown universities. Before joining Human Rights Watch, Goldstein worked at the Committee to Protect Journalists. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University.
Washington, DC – The world's leading human rights organization, Human Rights Watch (HRW), today issued an important report, which highlights the systemic oppression, discrimination and blanket violations of Palestinian human rights under Israel's almost 54-year-old occupation. The report lumps these violations together with the discrimination that Palestinian citizens of Israel suffer and defines them all as "Apartheid."
Americans for Peace Now (APN) welcomes a new congressional letter urging the Biden administration to use all the tools at its disposal, including the recently released Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexis Document, in its efforts to combat antisemitism.