Book recommendation from Lara Friedman, president, Foundation for Middle East Peace — Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine by Noura Erekat; Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar; Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo by Seth Anziska; Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump by Khaled Elgindy; The Accidental Empire by Gershom Gorenberg; Zealots for Zion: Inside Israel’s West Bank Settlement Movement by Robert I. Friedman; Dear Brothers: The West Bank Jewish Underground by Haggai Segal; The Yellow Wind by David Grossman

Welcome to FMEP’s Weekly Settlement Report, covering everything you need to know about Israeli settlement activity this week. To subscribe to this report, please click here.…

(Analysis by FMEP’s Lara Friedman, originally published Jan. 31, 2020 at Medium) What can be gleaned from the responses from Members of Congress to President…

Peter Beinart is joined by Tel Aviv University Professor Yael Sternhell to have a deep and rich conversation about how teaching about the history of…

1. Bills, Resolutions, & Letters 2. Hearings 3. On the Record…In Support of Trump’s Greater Israel plan 4. On the Record…Neutral/Positive-Leaning On Trump’s Greater Israel…

On January 28, 2020, President Trump at last unveiled his long-awaited vision for Israeli-Palestinian peace. That same afternoon, FMEP’s own Lara Friedman was interviewed on…

“In an immediate reaction to the Trump ‘Peace to Prosperity’ peace plan, Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said, ‘There has been an idea out there propagated by various organizations called ‘peace through Israeli victory.’ The idea being, ‘We impose absolute defeat on the Palestinians, and when they realize they are utterly defeated, then they will accept whatever is given to them, and everyone can go and have a better life.’ That is the best description of where we are now.’ …we say, guilty as charged.”

…But Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, scoffed at the plan, saying in a Jewish Week interview: “If you don’t care about democracy and the rule of law, this is great. The entire thing is framed in condescending, racist tones. Anything they [Palestinians] get is a gift that can be conditioned and retracted at will. … What was presented today was a statement that says Israel has the right to keep a huge chunk of the West Bank, that Israel always had a right to it, and it laid out a conditional Palestinian state on some of the land.” She added that the map proposed by the plan shows “non-contiguous Palestinian areas surrounded on all sides by Israel. … And the U.S. laid down conditions for a state that no Palestinians would ever accept. They guarantee the Palestinians will reject them. And Trump said this was their last chance.”