APN hosted a briefing call on Wednesday, May 25th, at 2:00 pm Eastern Time with Akiva Eldar, senior political columnist with Al-Monitor’s Israel Pulse and formerly with Haaretz.

Akiva discussed the recent developments in the Israeli political arena: Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition negotiations with Avigdor Lieberman and before that with Labor’s Yitzhak Herzog; Moshe Yaalon’s resignation from the government and the Knesset, and the increasing tension in Israel between the government and the security establishment.

Americans for Peace Now (APN) today sounded the alarm over the imminent appointment of Israeli serial provocateur and extremist firebrand Avigdor Lieberman as Israel’s new Minister of Defense. APN's President and CEO Debra DeLee commented: 

“Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is today once again showing the world that he puts politics and personal political survival above the national security of Israel and its people.

“Avigdor Lieberman has a long and ugly track record of irresponsible, reckless, and deliberately inflammatory rhetoric and actions. As foreign minister in Netanyahu’s previous government, he caused severe damage to Israel’s foreign interests, creating crises in Israel’s relations with regional and global allies.

Recently, APN Director of Policy and Government Relations Lara Friedman was invited to speak at two events for the American University in Cairo (AUC), organized under the auspices of AUC’s Prince Alwaleed Center for American Studies and Research, part of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. The first lecture, entitled “The Middle East and the 2016 U.S. Elections,” took place on March 13, 2016 at AUC's historic Oriental Hall on the Tahrir Square campus. The second lecture, titled “A Conversation with A Washington Insider: Americans for Peace Now's Lara Friedman,” took place March 14, 2016 at AUC's campus in New Cairo.

Click either image below to play the video.

 Rabbi Rachel Miller Solomin is a Jewish educator, writer, life coach, and mother living and working in California’s Silicon Valley. She was ordained from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in 2001.

Several years ago, on a bright California Sunday, I had a car accident involving pedestrians.  By maneuvering my car, I had avoided hitting them head-on. The family involved incurred only minor physical damages, but they were traumatized.

Since then, I have been struck by the relationship of these events to the Jewish laws of monetary damages. This week’s Torah portion, Emor, contains the biblical origins of these laws: “If anyone maims his fellow, as he has done so shall it be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The injury he inflicted on another shall be inflicted on him” (Leviticus 24:19-20, my emphasis). This formula, known variously as the lex talionis, reciprocal or retributive justice, assigns penalties appropriate to the injury. In the Torah, “an eye for an eye” is intended to limit consequences to proportional justice rather than permitting vengeance killings in response to minor injuries. When the accident happened, I ran out of my car and collapsed, sobbing apologies, beside scared, crying children in their stroller. The children’s mother suggested I move away from the kids -- ”If my husband sees you, he’ll kill you.”