The following message from Tom Feldman and Michael Walzer is the first in a series of messages that you will be receiving from members of APN’s Board of Directors and staff during the eight days of Hanukkah.

These messages are our way of exchanging gifts: offering you the gift of learning -- for you or a loved one -- in exchange for your contribution to APN.

We call it Spreading the Light. It’s a celebration of ideas and learning to nourish our hearts and minds and bring some much-needed light into our lives and into the lives of people we love.

For us, the best way to spread the light, to enlighten, is through books that we find eye-opening. The books that we will be offering you during the week – gifts to convey our appreciation for your support -- include fascinating chapters in the history of Israel and the Palestinians, and the conflict between them, as well as an Israeli-Palestinian cookbook, a book by Israel’s leading modern poet, and a whimsical book on the role that words play in Jewish tradition, co-authored by Israel’s leading contemporary novelist, a founder of Israel’s Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) movement, and his daughter.

Thank you for all that you do to support our efforts to counter the darkness of war, violence, intolerance and extremism, and advance hope for a better future for Israel and its neighbors.

Happy Chanukah,
Jim Klutznick, Chair, and Debra DeLee, President and CEO,
Americans for Peace Now

Americans for Peace Now mourns the passing of Samuel (Sandy) Berger Z”L, a former member of our Board of Advisors and a friend of APN. As President Clinton’s national security advisor and in other capacities, Sandy served America’s national security interests. He also played a pivotal role in advancing Israel’s security and wellbeing, and was an avid advocate of the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Since the beginning of this year, an unprecedented but little-noticed campaign has been waged in Congress—backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and others—in support of Israeli settlements. At the core of this campaign is an effort to legislate a change in U.S. policy, which since 1967 has remained firmly opposed to settlements, under both Republican and Democratic presidents.

Backers of the campaign, both in Congress and among outside groups like AIPAC, are promoting numerous pieces of legislation that redefine “Israel” to mean “Israel-plus-the-settlements” and make supporting settlements an integral and mandatory part of American support for Israel, as a matter of policy and law. They pass off their efforts as an entirely non-controversial matter of countering boycott-divestment-sanctions (BDS) against Israel in general, countering BDS policies adopted by the EU and some European countries, in particular.

Michael Koplow, the Policy Director at the Israel Policy Forum, this week added his voice to those suggesting that the US should drop its 48-year-old policy of opposing all Israeli settlement construction, and replace it with one that in effect green lights some such construction - or in Koplow's words, a policy that "distinguishes between kosher and non-kosher settlement growth." Koplow joins Brookings' Natan Sachs and others, all of whom follow in the footsteps of Dennis Ross in supporting such shift and predicting that it would help pave the way to peace. And Koplow - like his predecessors - uses words like "realistic" and "pragmatic" to describe his approach, suggesting that those who disagree are anything but.

Warren Spielberg is an associate teaching professor at the New School for Public Engagement in New York and a fellow at the Child Institute at al-Quds University in the West Bank. On November 24, we talked to him about his recent study on young Palestinian men in East Jerusalem. We focused on the causes for frustration and anger among them in order to better understand some of the background causes for the current violence in Jerusalem. Prof. Spielberg also spoke about his newly published book, a study of young African-American men, and about the parallels between that demographic and young Palestinian men in East Jerusalem.

Tuesday, December 1st
5:30pm to 7pm
Room 407 of the Marvin Center (800 21st Street NW)

Join us for an event on Yitzhak Rabin's legacy, which will include a brief overview of Rabin's life and his assassination, followed by  Ori Nir speaking about his experience as a journalist on the ground during the Rabin era, the importance of the Rabin legacy, and getting to two states.

Click here for the Facebook invitation

Support for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) targeting Israel is growing, generating great angst and solution-searching amongst Israel supporters – including pro-peace progressives – in the United States and elsewhere in the world.  From the Adelson-Saban summit earlier this year, which gave birth to a new anti-BDS organization (to be led by someone who for years headed a far right-wing, pro-Israel, Evangelical Christian operation), to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s letter to Jewish leaders, BDS is now being treated even by many pro-peace progressives as the new “existential” threat to Israel, despite the fact that the actual track record of the BDS movement, in terms of concrete impact, is thus far mixed.

Former APN intern Hamze Awawde and Sarah Perle Benazera are a Palestinian and an Israeli who go to Rwanda to learn first hand about the extraordinary path the Rwandan youth has taken on the road to unity and reconciliation following the 1994 genocide. A Production by The Aileen Getty School of Citizen Journalism YaLa Young Leaders

By Yariv Oppenheimer is the secretary-general of Peace Now. This article appeared first on November 20, 2015 in Ynet.com T

he Paris attacks cannot justify for a minute our ongoing control of the Palestinians and do not make the vision of a bi-national state any better for Israel.

If the Islamic State members could, they wouldn't hesitate to hurt Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas too and behead him. As far as the radical Islam created by ISIS is concerned, the Palestinians and their leadership are heretics too.

This week, Alpher discusses what strategic significance the Paris Massacre might be to the Islamic State; whether it is a sign that ISIS is losing in the Levant; what other countries can we expect ISIS to target now; whether the constellation emerging after the Paris attacks affect Israel’s security; why the former Yemeni prime minister Abdul Karim al-Eryani, who died at age 81 in his Cairo exile, was significant, and what this tells us about the future of Yemen.