Today’s featured Jewish anti-Israel group is Americans for Peace Now (APN), doing their best to screw the state of Israel from their comfortable homes in the US, far from the front line that is Israel:
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Americans for Peace Now is urging U.S. senators not to sign a letter encouraging the Arab world to normalize ties with Israel because it does not mention efforts to halt Israeli settlements.
The bipartisan letter to President Obama, circulated by Sens. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and James Risch (R-Idaho) and backed by the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, is “unhelpful” because it “seems to make a straightforward and reasonable demand for the Arab world to normalize relations with Israel,” but “the subtext of the letter directly contradicts and undermines the efforts” of the Obama administration “to promote Middle East peace.”
The Senate letter notes that “over the past few months Israel has taken concrete measures to reaffirm its commitment to advancing the peace process,” and notes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s backing of the two-state solution and the removal of roadblocks and other measures to “improve the daily lives of Palestinians.”
But “the Bayh/Risch letter conspicuously ignores Israel’s continued refusal to stop settlement activity” and “never even once mentions the word ‘settlements,’ ” states the Americans for Peace Now letter. “It sends a message that signers consider settlements more important than peace.”
APN’s message, on the other hand, is that kicking Jews out of Jerusalem, for example, is more important than … well, than anything else.
It goes without saying that APN’s position is not shared by the Israeli government but in addition it is opposed by the great majority of Israelis and even by Aluf Benn, Editor at Large of the left-wing Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz:
…in the past decade, repeated peace negotiations and diplomatic statements have indicated that larger, closer-to-home settlements (the “settlement blocsâ€) will remain in Israeli hands under any two-state solution. Why, then, insist on a total freeze everywhere? And why deny with such force — as the administration did — the existence of previous understandings between the United States and Israel over limited settlement construction? There is simply too much evidence proving that such an understanding existed.
APN is a primarily Jewish organization, as is J Street, as is the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and Jewish Voice for Peace, which brought Cindy Corrie to testify against Israel at the festival. And we mustn’t forget Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group funded by anti-Zionist European sources, which presented unverified and unverifiable accounts of IDF ‘war crimes’ in Gaza to the international media. Then there’s B’tselem, the Israeli ‘human rights’ group which only reports on violations of Arab rights.
But wait: in addition to these and countless other Jewish organizations that I haven’t mentioned, there are also the individual Jews that do so much in the struggle against Zionism. There are the obvious ones like well-known academics Noam Chomsky and Norman Finklestein, and the less-well known but equally vicious ones like Lawrence Davidson. We can’t forget hack journalists and bloggers like Max Blumenthal and Philip Weiss, or even those who are competent writers like Roger Cohen. Israel haters all.
I could go on: Tali Fahima, Jeff Halper, Ilan Pappé, Neturei Karta — they never end. Oh yes, one more, the anarchist vegan collective I wrote about yesterday.
A friend of mine once said that he seriously believed that Jewish history — ghettoization, persecution, expulsions, pogroms, the Holocaust — had somehow damaged the Jewish people, a kind of mass post-traumatic stress disorder.
How else can you explain it?
Member of Neturei Karta with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
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