WASHINGTON—The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has strongly criticized the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main pro-Israel advocacy group in the U.S. for calling, during its annual policy conference, for the establishment of a Palestinian state. ‘’This contradicts the positions of both the Trump Administration and the Israeli government,’’ it said in a statement.
In his address to the conference, AIPAC CEO Howard Kohr told the 18,000 attendees that everyone must work “toward two states for two peoples.’’ ‘’ One Jewish with secure and defensible borders, and one Palestinian with its own flag and its own future. Today that dream seems remote. This is tragic,” he said.
For ZOA, AIPAC’s call ‘’coupled with its long standing refusal to support Israel’s policy of the right of Jews to live anywhere in Judea/Samaria, its delay of almost a year in supporting a stronger Taylor Force Act until it was weakened, indicates AIPAC’s claim that its policy is only to support Israeli policy seems to be inaccurate.’’
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said in a statement :“How can it do so when supporting the creation of a Palestinian Arab state is not the policy of either Israel or the Trump Administration? President Trump made it clear that he supports any solution that commends itself to both parties while Prime Minister Netanyahu has stated that a Palestinian state is not the policy of his government under prevailing conditions.’’
“Clearly, there is an astonishing disconnect between the views of the Israeli government and people and AIPAC. There is also a repeated pattern of flawed judgment by AIPAC,’’ he said.
He called Kohr’s statement ‘’wrong, counter-productive and dangerous.’’ ‘’Creating a Palestinian Arab terror state, largely immune from Israeli reprisals behind what would now be sovereign borders, and rendering Israel an indefensible nine miles wide, would only greatly empower and incentivize Palestinian Arab extremism and non-acceptance of Israel. It would also be a grand display of rewarding Islamist terrorism.’’
In Israel, two Likud ministers also indirectly criticized the AIPAC leader’s stance. Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely declared that “U.S. Jewry should, in many senses, change the record about a lot of its basic assumptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Welfare and Social Services Minister Haim Katz stated that “AIPAC is Israel’s greatest, most important friend, but that does not allow it to decide Israel’s stance on various issues, certainly not to U.S. voters.”
