Meretz USA | For Israeli Civil Rights and Peace

Meretz USA for Israeli Civil Rights and Peace is a US non-profit organization that supports a genuine peace between the State of Israel and its neighbors (including the Palestinian people) based on a negotiated land-for-peace solution.

Featured Event

MARCH 13-20, 2010: The Israel Symposium

03/13/2010 - 9:00am
The 2010 Israel Symposium
March 13-20, 2010
Presented by Meretz USA and the World Union of Meretz

The Israel Symposium is an intense one-week trip to Israel that allows participants to meet, learn from and build bridges with progressive Israelis, Jewish and Arab.

Featured

Live from Israel, it’s the Israel Symposium!

I'm excited to be writing from Tel Aviv, where I am about to participate in this year's Meretz USA Israel Symposium, which gets underway tomorrow evening.

This year's Symposium program will be intense. We'll be all over the country - in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Ramallah, up north to the Golan Heights and Galilee, and down south to the Negev. All in one week!

And we'll be meeting with the a huge array of public figures: Peace activists and members of the human rights community, members of Knesset from across the political spectrum, members of the security establishment, diplomats, journalists, and representatives of Israel's Palestinian Arab community, and of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Netanyahu, the Religious Zionist?

Last Sunday, a band of 60 Israeli irregulars launched a well-planned operation aimed at conquering Jericho – one of the West Bank towns under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

Led by an Israeli Member of Knesset, breaching Israeli military checkpoints and violating Israeli law, the “Youth for the Land of Israel” group cited the presence of an ancient Jewish synagogue in Jericho to justify Israel’s title to the city. The operation, MK Michael Ben-Ari admitted, was part of a broader campaign to have Israel retake the entire West Bank.

Meretz in Israel

Meretz: East Jerusalem construction makes a mockery of Netanyahu’s professed desire for peace

The Meretz party's Knesset faction will be submitting a motion of no-confidence in the Netanyahu government over its ongoing massive construction in East Jerusalem. This week, Israel authorized the construction of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem's Ramat Shlomo neighborhood, creating a diplomatic crisis during the visit of US Vice President Biden. The Meretz faction termed the Netanyahu government's moves, "the policy of a pyromaniac".

Meretz chair, MK Haim Oron, attacked the government in a press release: "This is an inebriated government ["Adloyada government", in Hebrew], which, by its own hand, is making a dangerous mockery of its professed desire to renew diplomacy."

Only Meretz is united for Israeli democracy

The Meretz party's electronic bulletin this week boasted, sadly, that Meretz is the only party in Israel that has been united in defense of Israeli democracy, following the attack on the New Israel Fund and its President, Naomi Chazan. Here are sections of the bulletin:

This week, we mark a full year since the Knesset elections that dealt us a sharp blow. The McCarthyist campaign of lies and hatred of the last two weeks against the New Israel Fund and ... its President, Naomi Chazan, clarified the meaning of last year's election results: A dangerous and frightening erosion of democracy in Israel.

Meretz chair calls for release of East Jerusalem protesters

Meretz chair, MK Haim Oron, has called on Israel's Minister of Public Security to release from jail the protesters who demonstrated against Israeli settlement activity in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

Asking the Public Security Minister to defend their freedom of expression, Oron complained that, "each and every week, demonstrators from the Left are prevented from expressing a legitimate protest, while demonstrators from the Right, who are crassly and wildly violating government decisions, are being indulged."

Click here to read more about the issue in YNet.
Click here to see this item on the Meretz party website.