ISRAEL OFFICE The state of inequality under the law, experienced for decades by the 450,000 Israeli citizens living in Judea and Samaria, finally is being examined Roughly and challenged. a dozen rational ZOA Israel later pointed out to a number of MKs that leveling the civil-law playing field could help additionally with our struggle against the USAID boycott of Jewish Judea/Samaria. The State Department’s oft-proffered claim to justify this policy is that Israel itself treats citizens in the territories differently. The MKs immediately grasped the irony of Israel inadvertently fostering discriminatory U.S. policy, for example, via the recently threatened dismantling of Netiv Ha’avot homes in Elazar, not to mention the large-scale destructions, over past months and years, in Migron, Beit El’s Ulpana, Amona, and Ofra. All are the result of a nontransparent, biased adjudication process used solely for Judea/Samaria land disputes. Whether our initiative to address these longstanding injustices ultimately succeeds or not, we can foresee many fresh opportunities along the way to fix the misperceptions about Judea/Samaria’s legal status that underlie Israeli diffidence. “TWO-STATE” ALTERNATIVES In the face of Palestinian Arab irredentism, bolstered by political correctness and ubiquitous narrow thinking, helping to steer the conversation away from the disastrous two-state paradigm remains a ZOA Israel priority. Roughly a dozen rational alternatives to an irreversible and 30 existentially dangerous Palestinian Arab sovereign state are presently on the table, but the understanding of their respective benefits and ramifications—especially inside the Beltway— still is seriously limited. Spring 2009 is the last time the Knesset conducted forums to explore two-state alternatives (hosted in quick succession by Danny Danon, now Israel’s UN ambassador, and Tzipi Hotovely, now Israel’s deputy foreign minister) before this past June’s back-to-back forums, also held with our encouragement and participation. The Legal Grounds team concurrently stepped up its cross-continental inter-parliamentary activities, which had begun in November 2015 with a letter delivered by ZOA Israel to Capitol Hill in coordination with MK Bezalel Smotrich (Bayit Yehudi, Land of Israel Caucus co-chair). For our July 2017 Washington run, we solicited and facilitated proposal letters from four MKs: Yoav Kisch (Likud, Land of Israel Caucus co-chair), Yehudah Glick (Likud), Miki Zohar (Likud), and Shuli Mualem-Refaeli in her capacity as the Bayit Yehudi faction chair. Addressed to fellow legislators in Congress, the letters described favored alternatives ranging from autonomy and federation plans to full Area C annexation. ZOA Israel’s prefacing letter added a request that congressional leaders consider working cooperatively, both with us and with the Knesset, on creating platforms for scrutinizing the vari- alternatives to an irreversible and existentially dangerous Palestinian sovereign state are presently on the table, but the understanding of their respective benefits and ramifications— especially inside the Beltway— still is seriously limited.
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