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.…

The cynical among us might conclude, with Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, that “peace between Israelis and Palestinians is not a consideration. It is just cosmetics.” The US administration’s earlier actions – endorsement of Israel’s West Bank settlements, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, and cutting funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (which supports Palestinian refugees) – certainly suggest as much. As Lara Friedman, President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, put it in 2018: “It’s very clear that the overarching goal is to eliminate the Palestinian refugees as an issue by defining them out of existence.” Kushner’s proposal does the same to the Palestinians as a whole and Palestine as a functioning entity.

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…