Media

  • PLO office closure threat could be last straw for Palestinians

    FMEP’s Lara Friedman talks to Al-Monitor about the Trump administration’s decision to allow the PLO mission in Washington, DC to operate as long as it “limit its activities to those related to achieving a lasting, comprehensive peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.”

  • Settlement Report: November 22, 2017

    A weekly report on Israeli settlement activity by the Foundation for Middle East Peace. This week covering: two legal opinions issued by Israeli Attorney General defending the retroactive legalization of outposts via the expropriation of privately owned Palestinian land; Israel fast-tracks a Jerusalem cable car line despite growing opposition and serious consequences for Palestinians in Silwan; another bedouin community in the E-1 settlement area faces eviction; and, settlers fight for their “right of return” to inaccessible settlements.

  • Mission impossible: How an old US law could scotch peace talks before they start

    Lara Friedman, an expert in US law regarding Israelis and Palestinians and the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said that when she heard Abbas’s speech at the UN this year, she immediately understood it might have repercussions. Friedman has for years followed closely all news and legislation on Capitol Hill that relates to Israeli-Palestinian issues. While reading the December 2015 foreign ops bill that added the ICC provision, she recalled thinking, “Holy crap, where did this come from?” She wasn’t sure if anyone else had noticed the ticking time bomb planted silently into the bill. Should the PLO mission in DC be closed, she said, it would take the US relationship with the Palestinians back 30 years. Friedman surmised that may be what the provision’s authors intended: moving the clock back to the pre-Oslo era, when the idea of a Palestinian state was more or less unthinkable in Washington.