Israel’s Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) last week produced a new video, formatted as a “trailer,” which wars against the bi-national state reality that Israel’s right wing is imposing on the country by its diplomatic intransigence. The video, depicting the brutality that is a bi-product of a bi-national state, is hard to watch, but it does reflect that reality-in-the-making in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

On the eve of the 20^th anniversary of the assassination of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, please join APN for a briefing call on Monday, November 2^nd, at 2:00 pm Eastern Time, with Dan Ephron, the author of a new investigative book on the murder.

In Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, Ephron tells the parallel stories of Rabin and his assassin, Yigal Amir, during the two years leading up p to the murder, and sets the scene to the two decades that followed.

Ephron is an award-winning writer, who has served as the Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek and the Daily Beast, and now lives in New York City.

The details of the call are as follows:

As we mark the 20th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, APN supporters in the Washington DC metropolitan area are invited to join us on November 5th at 7PM at the DC JCC, for an evening of conversation and remembrance honoring Rabin, his legacy and leadership. Particularly at this time, it is important to commemorate an Israeli leader who had the courage to lead his people toward peace.

Led by the JCRC of Greater Washington, and co-sponsored by Americans for Peace Now, the evening will feature Knesset Member Ayelet Nahmias-Verbin, a former assistant to Rabin, a current member of the Zionist Union, and a passionate activist for Rabin's legacy. 

For more information on this event and to RSVP click here: http://www.jcouncil.org/site/Calendar/1759717568?view=Detail&id=109901

Like all Israelis of my generation, I remember the night of Nov. 4, 1995.

Having just heard from the news desk editor at Israel’s Haaretz newspaper that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been shot, I called Palestinian officials for reaction. I was Haaretz’s Palestinian affairs correspondent at the time and was on the phone with Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat when I heard on Israel Radio that Rabin’s spokesman was about to make a statement. As Eitan Haber hushed the crowed, I started translating for Erekat: “The government of Israel announces in dismay, in great sadness, and in deep sorrow, the death of Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered by an assassin, tonight in Tel Aviv.”

This week, Alpher discusses whether the set of understandings between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority regarding the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif acheived by Secretary of State Kerry will end the violence; the overall effect of the mini-intifada of the past month; why Jordan’s King Abdullah couldn’t play a more active role, without recourse to Kerry; what we are to make of bewildering statements by Netanyahu, to a World Zionist Congress audience in a speech in English, that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, suggested to Hitler in 1941 that he annihilate the Jews (“burn them”) rather than expelling them and that as prime minister he has built far less in the settlements than his predecessors;

Saturday night’s Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) rally brought out thousands of people, Israelis sick of the status quo, to protest the Netanyahu government’s intransigence, its diplomatic inaction and its fomenting of violence and brutality.

Under the slogan “There is no Security without a Political Solution,” thousands of Israelis urged their government to choose dialogue over demagoguery and incitement, diplomacy over force and subjugation, to offer Israelis hope, and to lead Israelis toward peace with the Palestinians.