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Ben Norton

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected on the promise that Palestinians would never have their own independent state, and now even the most powerful pro-Israel organization in the U.S. appears to be changing its rhetoric on the two-state solution. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, scrubbed a reference to the two-state solution from talking points on its website.

Forty years ago the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379 which declared “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” At the UN on November 11, US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power and Secretary of State John Kerry forcefully condemned the resolution on its anniversary. In his 2,500-word statement, Kerry mentioned Palestinians just once, Power did not mention Palestinians at all.

Danny Danon, Israel’s new ambassador to the United Nations, boasted on his official Facebook page on April 27, 2011 that he was proposing legislation that would have the Israeli government “annex the West Bank and repeal the Oslo Accords.” The Facebook post was deleted sometime on or after August 28, 2015—after Netanyahu had appointed him Israel’s ambassador to the UN. While he can delete past Facebook posts, there is some evidence Danon’s radical right-wing politics that he cannot expunge.

Reverend Graylan Hagler, a veteran civil rights activist and outspoken supporter of Palestinian human rights, was invited by the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School and Rochester, NY Friends of Sabeel Chapter to speak about Palestine on September 24. Mere days before he was going to travel to upper New York state for the talk, the divinity school disinvited Hagler following pressure from Christians United for Israel.