Americans for Peace Now (APN) strongly condemns comments by Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who in a speech in France absurdly asserted that “there’s no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people.” APN calls on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to condemn Smotrich’s outrageous statement and urges the Biden administration to do the same.

Smotrich said that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, Palestinian culture or Palestinian history, and added that this “truth” should be heard “at the Elysee Palace and the White House." To make things worse, Smotrich’s lectern carried a schematic map of so-called “Greater Israel,” which included the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Smotrich’s speech triggered justifiable fury among both Palestinians and Jordanians, including a statement by the Jordanian Foreign Ministry, noting that the map constitutes a violation of Jordan’s US-brokered peace agreement with Israel.

Produced by the Foundation for Middle East Peace in cooperation with Americans for Peace Now, where the Legislative Round-Up was conceived.

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.

When the APN trip to Israel-Palestine, originally planned for last November, was postponed, little did we know that by rescheduling for early March we would be arriving in the middle of the largest protest movement ever seen in Israel.

It was powerful to join the hundreds of thousands of Israelis in what has become a weekly, and now even daily, show of anger and protest against the ultra-right-wing Netanyahu government. We also went to the weekly Sheikh Jarrah protest, which took place down the block from our hotel, only to quickly turn back in the face of police violence including the use of Skunk Water and water cannons that left protesters battered and bloody.

In recent years, many have depicted the Israeli public as politically apathetic, as dormant. And in some way that was correct. Much to our chagrin and concern, Israelis have not been turning out in droves to protest the Occupation and its woes. But the public protest of the past ten weeks in Israel proves that political indifference does not characterize current Israeli society.

For the past ten weeks, large segments of the Israeli public have protested in the streets against the anti-democratic policies of Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist, ultra-nationalist government. For ten weeks, both on Saturday night and on weekdays, hundreds of thousands have turned out to protest, often clashing with police forces. Members of Netanyahu’s cabinet assumed that the protest would subside just as it had erupted, but the opposite happened.

On recent Saturday nights, in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem Haifa and other towns, the overall number of demonstrators reached 400,000 or 500,000. If the same proportion of Americans took to the street to demonstrate, there would be almost 18 million people protesting in US cities. According to some estimates, 20% of Israelis have participated in some act of protest against their government’s legislative coup in the past three months. This coming Saturday, protest action is planned in 170 sites across Israel.

Photos by Gili Getz:

Israel’s Ugly ‘Judicial Revolution’: the Existential and the Just Plain Disgusting

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.

In the past week, over 2300 Americans signed Americans for Peace Now’s petition to President Biden urging him to deny entrance to Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Despite vocal opposition, it appears that Smotrich will be allowed to proceed with his upcoming travel plans. It is disappointing that Minister Smotrich’s remarks calling for the Israeli government to “wipe out” the West Bank village of Huwara in the wake of the settler-led pogrom on the village on February 26th have not precluded him from entrance into the United States.

In the aftermath of violence like this, it is incumbent on political leaders to call for calm and to do everything in their power to ease the tensions. Instead, Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the civilian governor of the West Bank whose openly pro-annexation agenda has emboldened the most extreme sectors of the Israeli settler movement, called for the Israeli government to commit a war crime. This type of rhetoric doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Tragically, we have seen far too many times where incitement like this leads to violence. Just days ago, a group of young settlers raided Huwara again, attacking Palestinians and their property.