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APN Leadership Meets with Ayalon

Bresler Ayalon.jpg
A leadership delegation of Americans for Peace Now, on a fact-finding trip to Israel, met today in Jerusalem with Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.
 
APN urged Ambassador Ayalon to:
- Fully implement the settlement freeze.
- Realize the urgency of making progress toward peace and act accordingly.

Ayalon, who spoke off the record, engaged in a lively conversation. For more than an hour and a half he listened attentively to APN's concerns, agreed with some and argued with others. 

"We told Deputy Minister Ayalon that the Israeli government must realize how damaging the absence of a credible peace process is to Israel and to its allies," said Debra DeLee, APN's president and CEO. 

"We told him how dismayed we were by the way in which his office dealt with the congressional delegation that J Street brought to Israel last month. We told Ayalon that Israel's government does itself a disservice when it refuses to have a full and frank conversation with elected representatives of the American public," DeLee said. 

"I am pleased that we were able to have a frank conversation," said DeLee. 

APN has a long relationship with Ayalon. When he served as Israel's ambassador to Washington, Ayalon appeared on an APN-sponsored panel that also featured the ambassadors to Washington of Egypt, Jordan and the PLO. It was the first time that the Israeli ambassador and the PLO's chief of mission to the US appeared together in public. 

The meeting with Ayalon is one of a series of meetings that APN's leadership is having this week with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, activists, pundits, pollsters and public policy experts. 

More about these meetings will be posted on this blog later this week.