1. Bills, Resolutions & Letters
2. Members Weigh in on 1967 lines, Gilad Shalit, the Flotilla, Syria & Egypt
3. HFAC Hearing on Iran and Syria
4. Upcoming HFAC Hearing on aid to the Palestinians
5. Wanting Something for Nothing: The Real Reason Behind the Outrage Over Obama's Reference to 1967 (Shameless plug for my latest oped)
6. Odds & Ends
When President Obama said in his recent Middle East speech that "the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps," it was treated in many quarters as if the President had introduced a new idea. On the right - in Israel as in the US - the reaction was one of fury; in the solid center, there has been a lot of talk of "Obama's peace plan."
Yet the simple truth is that Israel and the Palestinians have been negotiating on precisely that basis for as long as they've been negotiating - since the secret Oslo talks of 1993.
IDF General Dov Tamari rips apart the notion -- promoted in the wake of Prime Minister Netanyahu's visit to Washington -- that Israel must retain parts of the West Bank for its defense.
Last month I attended an Israel Week event at the University of Maryland. I was there in two capacities: as an intern for APN and as a graduate student at Maryland.
On campus, we asked my fellow students to tell us why peace in Israel is important to them.
Their responses are powerful. There's pro-peace energy on campus. Many college students are like me: We know that without peace, Israel's very existence in danger.
A new compendium of facts and figures about Jerusalem, published by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) on the occasion of "Jerusalem Day," a national Israeli holiday intended to celebrate the so-called "reunification" of Jerusalem, shows how this holy city is becoming poorer, less developed and more religiously zealous than other Israeli communities.
First, population figures. The overall population - Jewish and Palestinian, in West and East Jerusalem - is 789,000 (2010 numbers), of them 285,000 are Arabs (36%) and 504,000 are Jews (and other non-Arabs (a negligible number of foreign workers and other foreigners), who account for 64% of the population.
