The community of Beit El in Samaria. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – Some right-wing Israeli politicians leveled harsh criticism at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) during its annual conference in Washington, DC, for endorsing the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan has launched a campaign urging AIPAC to change its position on the issue, and a number of politicians from the right are backing him up.

Dagan penned a strongly worded letter in which he said, “AIPAC’s list of messages to senior officials in Washington, and the vision it represents, is presenting the ‘two-state solution’ [which in effect means a Palestinian/terror state next to Tel Aviv] as the position of Israel and the US, despite it not appearing in the basic agenda of the government, and is therefore not the stance of Israel.”

The letter continued: “The US administration, unlike its predecessor, has removed the two-state solution from its national security report. Not only is AIPAC not accurately representing Israel, it is even undermining efforts to achieve dialogue in the Middle East.”

The settler leader then noted that although Israeli Knesset members had reached out to AIPAC on the issue, the lobby had not changed its position.

“We are asking that AIPAC’s defined vision be updated to accurately represent the position of the Israeli government,” he said.

Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely of the Likud Party said, “US 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, also of Likud, stated, “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 US voters.”