This report summarizes the bills and resolutions pertinent to Palestine, Israel, or the broader Arab-Israeli conflict that were introduced, during the first session of the 115th Congress, which coincided with the first year of Donald Trump's presidency. Major legislative themes related to the Palestine issue are identified here, as well as initiators of specific legislation, their priorities, the range of their concerns, and their attitudes toward regional actors. The Taylor Force Act, attempts to cut funding to Palestinian refugees, and anti-BDS legislation are included. This report is part of a wider database project of the Institute for Palestine Studies, congressionalmonitor.org , which contains all relevant legislation from 2001 to the present (the 107th through the 115th Congresses) and is updated on an ongoing basis.

In 2013, four Palestinians incorporated Amoro Agriculture, Palestine’s only mushroom farm. In the absence of an alternative to Israeli mushrooms on the Palestinian market, Amoro’s products were welcomed as an engaged example of the boycott of Israeli goods and were hailed as an iteration of a Palestinian resistance economy based in the agricultural sector. Using the testimony of the farmers and their experience of what proved to be a short-lived agritech venture, this article explores questions of agricultural development in the occupied Palestinian territories generally, and the development of a “resistance economy” based in agriculture specifically. It argues for recentralizing the question of the development of agricultural labor in the occupied West Bank and for abandoning the depoliticizing romanticism that surrounds the land and the farmer in the discourses of Palestinian struggle. It further contends that growth in the agricultural sector needs to be addressed in a holistic fashion, which includes a recalibration of the relationship of capital and the quasi-state bureaucracy of the Palestinian Authority to labor.

This retrospective assessment argues that despite the arrival in office in 2009 of a president who articulated the case for Palestinian rights more strongly and eloquently than any of his predecessors, U.S. official policy in the Obama years skewed heavily in favor of Israel. While a negotiated two-state resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians continued to be the formal goal of the United States, Israel's defiant refusal to stop settlement expansion, the administration's determined actions to perpetuate Israeli impunity in international fora, as well as the U.S. taxpayer's hefty subsidy of the Israeli military machine all ensured that no progress could be made on that score. The author predicts that with all hopes of a negotiated two-state solution now shattered, Obama's successor will have to contend with an entirely new paradigm, thanks in no small part to the gathering momentum of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

This update is a summary of bilateral, multilateral, regional, and international events affecting the Palestinians and the future of the peace process. More than 100 print, wire, television, and online sources providing U.S., Israeli, Arab, and international independent and government coverage of unfolding events are surveyed to compile the quarterly Update. The most relevant sources are cited in JPS 's Chronology section, which tracks events day by day. JPS Chronologies are archived on the JPS website at www.palestine-studies.org .