Friends,
Today, Israeli authorities rubber-stamped Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich's request to build 3,401 homes in the long-delayed E-1 settlement project in the heart of the West Bank.
It’s not just another settlement. It’s a deliberate, calculated move – as Smotrich openly admitted – to split the West Bank in two and “bury a Palestinian state.”
But he will fail.
Bulldozers, concrete and settlements can’t bury a people’s hopes and dreams for freedom and self-determination. As Jews, it’s a truth we know intimately: 2,000 years of oppression and persecution never destroyed our dream of being a free people in our own land.
This will not stop Palestinian statehood. It will not halt international moves toward recognition. It will not bring peace or security. Quite the opposite.
For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike pressed Israel to freeze settlement expansion in E-1. But restraint has been replaced by a green light: On Monday, Trump’s Evangelical Ambassador Mike Huckabee said Israel has the “right” to move forward with the “massive” E-1 project.
We must be clear-eyed that settlements like E-1 make peace harder – but we must also reject the spin from the settler movement that they make a Palestinian state impossible.
They do not.
Smotrich has said the quiet part out loud. Now is the time to make our voices heard. This White House (or the next) still has the leverage to limit this and blunt the damage – as does Congress, the American Jewish community and other countries around the world. We must all speak out.
To be pro-Israel today means refusing to allow extremists to shred Israel’s founding values of peace, justice, democracy and equality. It means refusing to send yet another generation of young Israelis to guard illegal outposts and fight endless wars as messianic extremists drag Israel deeper into isolation and pariah status.
That’s why we’re continuing our work to press Congress and the next generation of US leaders to take a bold, strong new approach – and to abandon the failed, outdated approaches of the past.
We can only do that with your support. Thank you sincerely for standing with us.
Jeremy Ben-Ami
President, J Street
