 But welcome everyone to the U.S. Institute of Peace for what we hope will be a truly worthwhile and interesting event. My name is Keith Mines. I'm the Interagency Fellow from the State Department here at USIP, and I'll be the moderator for today's event. So in his recent press conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Trump said he's looking at two states and one state, and would ultimately support a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that both sides like. So this bluntness took a lot of people by surprise, but it does put out there something that everyone has been thinking. Is the two-state solution still viable, and should we be considering alternatives? Our objective today is to stretch the conventional thinking, to explore new ideas and convene some fresh ideas on the topic. And we have just the right people to do that. So I'd like to frame our discussion with two vignettes. On December 28, 2016, and one of the last acts of the Obama administration, Secretary Kerry stated the administration's belief that, quote, the two-state solution is the only way to achieve a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. There is simply too much at stake for future generations of Israelis and Palestinians to give in to pessimism, especially when peace is, in fact, still possible. The other end of the spectrum, we have tablets David Goldman, who recently laid out a picture of continued unrest in the region, and a pretty rosy picture of the demographic picture for Israel. So he concluded, when Israel absorbs Judea and Samaria, and it is a when, not an if, the chancellors of the West will wag their fingers and the Gulf states will breathe a sigh of relief. The historical homeland of the Jewish people will pass into Israeli sovereignty, not because the national religious will it to be so, but because Israel would be the only state able to govern Judea and Samaria, and the only military force capable of securing its borders. The realization of the Zionist dream will then be consummated not with a bang, but with a whimper. The bangs will be much louder elsewhere, close quote. So here to help us navigate this complex terrain, we have Mike Yafi, Dalia Scheinlin, and Khaled El-Gindi. Mike is currently the vice president of the Middle East and Africa Center at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Up until January, he was the senior advisor to the special envoy for Palestinian, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at the State Department, and he served as the academic dean of strategic studies at NDU. He has a distinguished career as a negotiator with the State Department, from arms control to NATO to the Middle East. Dalia Scheinlin is first and foremost by her own admission part of a dying breed that believes in two states. She's a leading international public opinion analyst and strategic consultant based in Tel Aviv, and her stuff is everywhere, and she's a true master of ground truth on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, democracy, religious identity, and other societal issues. And Dalia holds a Ph.D. in political science from Tel Aviv University. And Khaled El-Gindi is the author of a forthcoming book on the history of American-Palestinian relations throughout in the fall of 2017. We appreciate his taking time off from writing to join us. I promised him that we wouldn't tell his publisher that he's here, so we'll try to keep that under wraps. Khaled is a fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings and a founding member of the Egyptian American Rule of Law Association. He previously served as an advisor to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah and was a key participant in the Annapolis negotiations. Khaled is co-author of the Arab Awakening America and the Transformation of the Middle East by Brookings from 2011. So I'd like to give each of our speakers seven to ten minutes for an opening statement, and then we'll dive right into Q&A. Mike? Thank you, Keith. Thanks for that kind introduction. And welcome. Welcome to all of you. I see many colleagues in here from the State Department and from various embassies throughout town with whom I've interacted with during the last five years. So as Keith said, I've been on the Israel-Palestinian negotiating team since 2012, and I retired only at the end of January, so it will not be much of a surprise for people to think and to hear that I haven't really changed my position in the month and a half since I joined the U.S. Institute of Peace. That is to say I still am a believer of the two-state solution, not just because I think it's the right way, but it's the only way that I can possibly think of as the way forward. It is the only way that can meet the aspirations of the Palestinian-Israeli peoples, both in terms of their ambitions to have secure states, to have democratic states, in the case of Israel, to have a Jewish-majority state, and the only way that they can actually have stability, I think, is through that effort. Then over the course of the years, we looked at all the alternatives, I think, and more so there's been many that have been pronounced in the last year or so. I counted 11 different alternatives ranging from a binational state with equal rights, a binational state with not equal rights, to a Palestinian state minus, to confederations, confederations between Israel and the Palestinians, confederations between the Palestinians and Jordan, confederation between Egypt and Nitzkazah Strip. There's been the ideas of unilateral efforts. Every one of these efforts, I think, fails on many different accounts, and most significantly because they will not have the support of the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Jordanians, or the Egyptians. In part that is not, I don't think, just from a lack of creativity. I think it really is from a strong analysis, but I think also from a deep ethos that has developed since 1936, since the Peel Commission first broached the idea of partitioning the land for the two peoples. You can follow that whole narrative, particularly through UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which was the idea for the partition plan that was adopted in the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, adopted in the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988. You see it in the peace agreements that have been signed. You also see various other permutations that have developed, such as in 2002, when the Arab League put forward the Arab Peace Initiative, which basically was a statement saying, in fact, they are done with this conflict. What they want to do is get on with normalizing relationships with Israel based in the context of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. You also see various things that have changed over time, and to me, a significant moment is also 2015, because it was in 2015 based on Israeli statistics, demographic statistics that for the first time, you see that the Arabs have now outnumbered the Jews between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It's no longer a hypothetical, if you will. So it is a direct question about what will be the state, again, that meets the objectives of both parties, a Jewish democratic state and or a Palestinian state. To me, I'll jump ahead and say basically the only way I think you can have a Jewish democratic state is to establish a Palestinian state. You also see that in looking at the numbers as well, continuing that in January 15th, you have the Paris conference that took place in which over 70 countries basically affirmed in a communique that they only see one solution to this problem, the two-state solution. And you also see just by the numbers of states that have recognized both Israel and the Palestinians. So 161 states have recognized Israel, and 136 states have recognized the Palestinian state already. And you also look at our presidents. Every president from the 33rd president, President Truman, up through President Trump, have all said they support a two-state solution, something into our partitioning of the land. The 43rd president is the first president to say that he supported a Palestinian state. And the 45th president, the current president, President Trump, has basically said that in addition to a two-state solution, he's open to hear ideas on a one-state solution or whatever the parties deemed they would like. Part of the dissolution with the two-state solution is because it hasn't been achieved, of course, and that's not because of lack of effort. There have been, since at least 1991, four major negotiation rounds. It is the Madrid-Oslo process of the 1990s, Camp David, to the Taba process from July 2000 to January 2001, the Annapolis and Post-Annapolis period of 2007 to 2008, and most recently the CURRY initiative from 2013 to 2014. And although those all have not resulted in an agreement, it doesn't mean that there was in progress. It doesn't mean that there was a total failure where nothing happened at all. Instead, I would say there's been a degree of conditioning that has happened over time. To illustrate it, I'm more on a personal level. So I joined the peace process in 1993 before the Oslo agreements were signed, before the Israel-Jordan Treaty was signed. At that time, I was a member of the multilateral negotiations, particularly the group on arms control and regional security. And if you remember your Madrid history, Madrid was comprised of two tracks, basically. The bilateral track with Israel and its immediate neighbors and a multilateral track that brought in 16 parties to negotiate more or less what would be the terms of a comprehensive agreement, particularly in light of an agreement between Israel and its immediate neighbors. So when we started those talks, the multilateral talks, the Palestinians were not even a delegation in those talks. They were conjoined with the Jordanian delegation. So they weren't even recognized at all as a separate entity. When we talked, now, this is a room with Israel and with only one other country that had recognized Israel at that point, Egypt. And so when the parties addressed questions to Israel, the format was to address them to the chairs. In our group, it was jointly co-chaired by Russia and the United States. So they would address the questions to the chairs, and the chairs would dutifully repeat the question to Israel. And Israel would respond, and we would repeat the answer back to them. By the time we finished those negotiations, they had collapsed essentially by 1995, all but one country was unwilling to shake the hand of the Israelis or address the Israelis directly on 101. And they finally actually did so at the last meeting of the working group, which actually happened in Tunis. But again, as much as that may seem like a small step, if you will, that notion of recognition is actually a huge step. And since then, we've seen all sorts of positions that the parties have taken that really give the highlight essentially what we think could be the road ahead. Those who negotiated under the CURRY team would basically say they think they made the most progress towards addressing the final status issues. I think that's probably true, even though it didn't get, again, to provision. But I think there was more direct talk on those final status issues than had ever occurred before. And so, you know, you do see progress. You see things of, let's say, with the Palestinians and between the Israelis, they've had really, really good security cooperation during the last few years. Although you still see rockets, they've come in mortars that come from Gaza. You don't see any rockets and mortars coming from the West Bank towards Israel. You have the Fatah, which has basically embraced nonviolence as an overarching principle. And there is, of course, the recognition of Israel, that they recognized Israel, one could say, through the Declaration of Independence in 1988, but certainly in the 1993 agreement with Oslo. You also see a lot of that your economies are intertwined. And you see also, and this is not just a, this is not to paint a rosy picture, it's not. It's complicated, it's the bottom line. And so you see other things such as the building of the settlements, the demolition of Palestinian homes in Area C. There are no, there are no shortage of hurdles in any of this. And partly, I would argue that's a reflection of the fact that this is a complicated issue. It is an emotional issue. It is one that at any particular moment can spark conflict. And that's what makes it so difficult to resolve. But it's not the last time, it's not the only time we've seen difficult issues. And one would have argued the same about the Cold War. One would argue about the situation in Colombia. One would could also look at issues of Cyprus. Some issues just take a long time in which to resolve. And at the same time, as you saw in the, for the, during the Kerry talks, if you will, that the issues are not necessarily a stable issue. It's not a stable situation and hasn't met an equilibrium, if you will. In fact, we see a lot more backsliding occurring now under deterioration. And I think it was that deterioration that we had seen in the last year in particular, which motivated President Obama and Secretary Kerry to call out and say that we are seeing a deterioration of the conditions that can bring a two-state solution. So this led to the Quartet report of July 1, 2016, in which it laid out that the parties are unilaterally taking steps that are basically impeding, if not basically eliminating the two-state solution. That included settlements, included demolitions, included incitement, included violence. This was followed by a number of other activities, including that of the support for the UN Security Council resolution by abstaining in December. It occurred in the background of a potential regularization bill being passed in Israel, which would have retroactively legalized settlement outposts, which Israel itself had even called illegal. And this, of course, also leads to the Secretary's speech in December 26, in which he not only lays out again what he sees are the worsening conditions, but lays out also what he believes were principles by which the parties, if they adopt, could make progress. And of course, this is then given an exclamation point, if you will, in Paris in January 15 of this year, in which over 70 parties came together to express their support for the two-state solution and own the two-state solution as the way ahead. About a year ago, one of the longtime negotiators on the U.S. team retired. And he met with all of us, and his words were kind of significant. He said that, you know, recognize that we've only been in negotiations for very, very short periods of time during the last 60, 70 years, if you will. He said, but he says the most important work actually occurs between the negotiations and cautioned us to constantly work towards those conditions that can bring about a better situation. It means calling out the parties on things that they do that we think are hurting the two-state solution. It means actually looking for ways to improve conditions on the ground, economically and politically for the Palestinians in particular. The last thing we want to do is negotiate an agreement and have the Palestinian state become a failed state. That would just be not only a setback to the process, but a setback for negotiations everywhere in that case. So we have a vested interest in building up the state. There are a lot of efforts from the international community that are willing to put forward their and embrace these ideas and work with the Palestinians to build up their governance, to build up their economy. And it's not simply a matter of doing so in order to make the occupation seem that it's more palatable. It is actually to build a state for that is the only thing that we think is the most viable way forward. So I can give a number of other suggestions and ideas away ahead, but I think my time has come to an end, so I'll leave it there. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. That was a great insider's view of the last round and kind of where we are. And because you're my boss, I couldn't cut you off. So that was okay, too. So when I was in Israel and we never knew what was going on, which was free and when we didn't know what was going on, which was frequently someone would always say we have to talk to Dolly about that. So we would invariably call up Dolly and she would give us the insider view of lots of things. So we're going to turn to you now, Dolly, to walk us through this confederation concept and whatever else you'd like to share. Thanks. Thank you so much for the introduction and for being here. I will now proceed to disagree with everybody because nobody's my boss. Only partly, though. I'll start with just one quick correction. Actually, the quote about being a dying part of a dying breed of two staters was not my quote, but it was a quote of my colleague and friend, Jeremy Ben-Ami, who is the founder of J Street. And the reason why it's important to mention that is because I consider myself having made some sort of a transition when I started to realize that the conditions on the ground, I think, are no longer conducive to the traditional two-state solution. So it's only a partial correction because what I'm going to talk about today is an approach that is, you know, you can think of it as two states 2.0. I think it is still two states, but it is more reflective of the kinds of conditions we have on the ground. And I was going to skip the part where I talk about the developments on the ground that I think have led to this on the assumption that many of us are aware of it. But I think I'll just walk through very quickly the problems that everybody's aware of, the growth of both the number, the size, and the spread of the settlement. So the number of settlers, the strategic location of the settlements in parts that make a Palestinian state not very viable, the creeping or slow incremental annexation of Area C, which I assume people know as 60% of the West Bank. These are the kinds of things that make the traditional two-state solution very difficult, and again, I'm not going to spend time on them, but they are the critical things that are actually happening. What I did think was a more interesting starting point for me right now is what I see is the political flaws of the two-state solution and the process to get there. I mean, as you point out, when a process has been going on, a negotiation process for about 26 years and four serious rounds and all sorts of unofficial conversations between officials and track two and so many efforts, and it fails time after time to be implemented. And I agree with you, it's the failure to implement it that has led people to lose faith in it, but there's a reason why we're not getting to the goal. And at a certain point, I think we have to start questioning why it is that all the best minds of the generations of politicians that have been through this aren't getting there from both sides and the conclusion that I start to come to, and I'm glad you raised other conflicts, because this is something I think about with Cyprus as well. They also haven't resolved their conflict. You have to start a question, do they really want to get to that goal? Do they really want to get to, A, the political concept of a two-state solution itself in its traditional form, and are they willing to accept some of the essential core compromises that we need to get in order to get there? And we all know pretty much what they are, because we've been through so many rounds of negotiations. And since you mentioned Cyprus, again, I'll bring it up. I mean, if we were to reach a situation like Cyprus where we haven't been able to resolve the conflict and they just went through another failed negotiation after so many years and so many efforts, if we were to reach their situation of lack of violence, I would say, let's wait until the timing is right. But we're not there. We have people dying every day. And a military regime that is governing people, which is different from the situation in Cyprus. The capacity to live a normal life is very different. But back to those core sticking points. So again, I'm starting to analyze the situation by saying I'm not convinced that both sides really do want to get to the two-state solution as we envision it, and I'm not convinced that they want to make the core compromises that we're going to have to make. And I base that on my reading of the negotiations, but also on the fact that I do polling for a living, and I track this stuff very, very closely. I think the peak of willingness to accept some of those compromises was a long time ago, and I'll tell you what I mean. The biggest problems, the biggest sticking points in the items of a two-state agreement, number one is refugees. In other words, this is a really zero sum issue. The Palestinians, for them, it's a core part of their national identity. The demand for recognition of right of return and some sort of compromise that suits them will never, ever go away. On the Israeli side, it is the item that has the highest and most consistent level of rejection in polls. And with barely any sort of budging on the elite level in negotiations, although some progress has been made in developing the kinds of solutions that could be workable, but this is still probably the toughest issue. In my reading, it is the toughest issue. Right up there and not far behind is Jerusalem. Of course, the division of Jerusalem, which most people think is the most emotional issue. Again, my reading over the years is that refugees are even more emotional, but Jerusalem is not far behind. Right now, consistently, I would say for the last decade, you have about 65% of Israelis who completely reject the idea of the division of Jerusalem, which is considered a core aspect of the two-state solution. And this compromise is not particularly more acceptable on the Palestinian side either. I mean, the compromises are, I mean, I don't want to get into tons of numbers, these are the two biggest issues. And then settlements, which for Israelis is an issue of evacuating settlements or leaving them there. For the Palestinians, it's the issue of the border of their Palestinian state. So it's the same issue, but in two different directions. And ultimately, I have to ask myself, are either side really willing to make those compromises that would have to be made? It doesn't look like it. And I can tell you that the most serious negotiation that I was in any way involved in, and I was already living in the region, and working for the government at the time through a polling agency that I was working with, was the Camp David negotiation in 2000. And that was the negotiation that came closest. Famously, Yossi Beilin, who was one of the chief Israeli negotiators, called it within reach or within touching distance. And that's when we saw Israeli public opinion just barely and incrementally move towards the most sensitive compromises on Jerusalem, just barely scratching from the bottom a possibility of reaching a majority. But we've never seen those numbers again. So that's on the public side. And on the elite side, we certainly haven't seen any efforts that were really that close. Ehud Olmer came the closest. So that leaves me thinking that the situation on the ground, because of the developments on the ground that I mentioned, and the lack of political willingness to get there, I don't see that we can reach a two state solution anytime soon, nor do I see that we have the luxury of waiting and waiting. So then I started thinking about a confederation approach. I call it an approach because it's not a foolproof solution. I don't believe there is a foolproof solution. It's a conceptually different way of approaching the problem. It is still two states. I'm going to run quickly through the basic outline of what this means, because you'll see these slogans tossed around, and I think it's worth understanding that this is a conceptually different program with substance. It is two separate states. You're looking at, I don't think anybody can skip over the stage of Palestinian national self-determination. No other people in the world have had to skip over that stage, certainly not the Jews. And I don't think it's realistic, nor is it historically justified. You're talking about two governments, two legislatures, two national identities. This is not a unitary state. And it goes without saying that, of course, if you have a Palestinian independent state, it is a civil government, a representative government, and there is no more military regime governing Palestinian life in the West Bank and in Gaza. The difference is that these two entities, these two states, create a voluntary association. Voluntary meaning it can also end if it's not working. And the association is to share certain elements of their sovereignty by agreement. And the elements that characterize this, really the first and foremost one, I shouldn't say foremost, the first one that comes to my mind is the idea of the open borders. So instead of hermetically sealed separate states with a hard separation paradigm, you're looking at the default option that people can move. People can cross, they can travel, they can work. Israelis can go to all the holy sites in the West Bank. Some areas of the West Bank Israelis can't go. And you will see settlers going around the West Bank saying it's not fair. We can't access parts of this land that are holy to us. Just as of course you have Palestinians who can never go to the sea, can't travel, can't visit their old neighborhoods which is part of their emotional longing. And most of all Palestinians would be able to come in and work on the Israeli side. If it sounds impossible, if it sounds like a dream or a fantasy, remember that this is essentially how things were for the first 20 years after 1967. It's not that different. And that was a time of much less violence than we have now. The second major aspect is that you disconnect citizenship from residency. So people have the ability to live in the other state. Israeli Jews could live in the Palestinian state as permanent residents with all the rights of permanent residents except the critical right of national voting, which they would do in their own state. Palestinians could live on the Israeli side in the Israeli state and they would have all the rights of permanent residents pretty much like roughly 300, 350,000 Palestinians live today in East Jerusalem. But they would have national voting rights in the Palestinian state. That means that you have more flexibility, again, both for work, travel, and obviously I'm getting at the argument I'm gonna make for dealing with the refugee and settlement issue. Not that they're equal. I don't wanna put them on a false equivalency but these are the major items in the agreement that need to be addressed. And when you do that, you have the flexibility for where people can live, but you don't change the national character of each state. So you don't threaten the Jewish identity of Israel because you won't have Palestinians who are able to vote in the national parliament en masse and vice versa. I will add that Palestinian citizens of Israel, Arab Israelis, this is my vision on it. You have different people who are advocating this who see it differently, but I would imagine they should just have the right to choose, not between dual citizenship, the right to choose whether to be just citizens of Israel or to take dual citizenship. I don't see any reason why that couldn't work. On the issue of Jerusalem, you keep the city united but allow it to be the capital of two cities. So both countries, of two countries, sorry. So both countries would have their national capital there but the city remains divided, undivided under a single municipality governing the neighborhoods, which I hope many of you have been there and if you haven't, you should come visit but you should come visit both sides of the city. You'll see that there aren't really two sides. They're intertwined very, very deeply but with massive differences between the neighborhoods and I think further division will just further those socioeconomic and infrastructural divisions. And then the additional layer is joint authorities. So these two entities, these two states, I shouldn't call them entities, they are two independent states. They will have the kinds of joint authorities that would make the entire region run better. So joint resource management, water, waste, climate. I hope nobody's underestimating the importance of these things, especially as the water in Gaza becomes more and more polluted and seeps into the soil in the Negev region. These are not problems you can disconnect. But also joint authorities like a court of human rights so that people can bring their grievances if they're living on the other side to a court that represents both sides and argue their cases here. Security, how would security happen? Well, as you pointed out, like security is essentially depends on the security cooperation of today. So there's a major difference. If you have Israelis and Palestinians cooperating today you generate, what's happening on the ground is a lot of anger because Palestinians have no political freedom, they're still living under a military regime and they're angry, increasingly angry at the Palestinian Authority for cooperating with that military regime using terms that are a lot uglier than what I just said. But would you have security cooperation between two independent states as equals? You pretty much replicate the model that's working. It's one of the only things really working today, but in a situation of greater equality and more political freedom. So this is sort of the basic outline. What I wanna do instead of going into the policy details of each one is walk through what kinds of problems this solves or at least addresses. Again, I don't think we can pretend to really resolve every single problem anywhere in the world. It takes, first of all, it takes the idea of the division of Jerusalem off the table. I think that in the current environment, again, the peak of support that I saw was 17 years ago and we've never gone back to that. The public opinion data is very stable on it and either side accepts the compromise just two weeks ago when visiting Australia the Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterated that he will never divide Jerusalem. And for many, many years, during the two-state paradigm years, that was considered a euphemistic way of saying I will never reach a two-state solution. This takes that off the table. It loosens or erodes the near total rejection on the Israeli side of allowing Palestinian refugees to return. It doesn't open a flood gate to millions and millions of Palestinians moving into Israel from abroad because they're refugees because you would do it by agreement in a phased way that people can be vetted for security. But with an independent Palestinian state with unlimited right of return, you can still diffuse the tension and the utter rejection on the Israeli side because they'll be allowed to live in Israel as residents but they can't change the national character. It generates a whole new approach to settlers. Right now we're looking at somewhere around 600,000 settlers if you include East Jerusalem. The two-state, the traditional two-state argument is that only 100,000 of them may actually need to be moved but I think we vastly underestimate the disagreement on that. And the default option that you can uproot people who have been, some of whom have been living in these areas for three generations, I think doesn't really have a moral and increasingly, or legal and increasingly a moral basis. So this doesn't, I'm excluding, you know, hilltop settlements on private land, the kind of thing that this law was designed to cover but, you know, those will have to be evacuated and certainly anything that would break up Palestinian contiguity would have to be evacuated but you defuse this, you know, essentially what causes the rejection among the group of people who are most likely to be spoilers, okay, who are the settlers. And again, security, I made the case about that. I wanna talk also about economy because that is a big problem I think that is underestimated. I mean, this is complicated because the model that I'm proposing raises problems. It does. When you open the borders, you risk, you know, a lower level economy and, you know, being flooding into a higher level economy and dragging it down, and that's a serious concern. On the other hand, there is no way to disconnect the economic viability of the two states, specifically on the Palestinian side. I mean, I just wanna point out that before 1992, before the, you know, the beginning of the peace, well, the end of this, first since he fought on the beginning of the peace process, about 115,000 Palestinians worked in Israel out of a population that it was about 2.1 million. At present, you have roughly 50,000 people working in Israel Palestinians out of a population of over 4 million. You can do the math and understand that this is not a viable situation. I think we tend to underestimate the dangers of a more, of a deeper sort of separation and a more hermetic Palestinian state that is not really viable economically and how much anger and, you know, eventually violence that will cause. So this I think gets at some of the heart of the reasons that nobody's really willing to say but that are holding us back from reaching a two state solution. There's a lot of criticism for this. I don't know how much time I have left. Do I have a couple of minutes? Zero. Okay, then I will save it for the question and answers. I'm quite zero. But just to point out that I'm on the criticism. I know what it is and I'm not saying I have a complete answer for everything but I think there are some viable arguments to counter. I think we can channel that during the Q&A. Yes. Great. Good. Okay, thanks. Thanks, Heath and thank you, Delia. Also there's some seats up here for those of you that are standing if you want to come on up. Thank you all for being here. A lot of what I wanted to say has already been said but I'll probably go ahead and say it anyway. Excuse me. Before getting into the pros and cons of the confederal scenario or alternatives to two states or one state, I thought I might outline some basic assumptions at least that guide my own thinking on this issue. Because I do think we have to be very aware of how we use terms and what they mean. The first point I would make is that we need to distinguish between solutions and outcomes. Very clearly, for example today, the goal for many years has been a two state solution. The reality is that we have essentially a one state reality of course not based on any sort of equity between the two sides. I think we also need to make a distinction between partition divided sovereignty on the one hand and separation which is sort of the operating Israeli paradigm nowadays which is mainly demographic. When we talk about separation we're talking about demographic separation and it's not necessarily tied to sovereignty. Partition of course is intended to divide sovereignty in a certain geographic area between the two parties. The third point I would make is that power matters. Israel has the ability to enforce certain outcomes unilaterally while the Palestinians do not. I think it's, we all know this and you know but I think it's important to keep this in mind as we think about what kinds of solutions and outcomes might be viable. At the same time an imposed or coerced outcome including the status quo of occupation is inherently for the reasons Dalia already pointed out is inherently inequitable and unstable. In other words to use a cliche the status quo is unsustainable. So with that in mind I would, I sort of look at this issue as a spectrum. I imagine a universe of options along a spectrum between hard partition on the one hand and binationalism on the other or there are alternatives to binationalism if you wanna go even beyond and imagine a liberal state where you have a sort of homogenized identity but we'll leave that aside. So either you have divided sovereignty or you have unitary sovereignty. In the middle I think there are, this is the, there's a whole universe of options that have not been explored that I wholeheartedly agree with Dalia that absolutely need to be explored. You know the classic two states, two peoples we all know is the two state solution also known previously as partition. Then we have this kind of this middle space of two states and once in one space. And there are a number of proposals or ideas that are out there. Dalia has an excellent article and it was at the Washington Quarterly I think. Ipkri has put out some ideas on this. I've worked on that one too. Did you? Okay. There are two gentlemen by the name of Levine and Mossberg who've written a book called Parallel States which is slightly different than the confederal model in that it's not based on two states with defined borders so it gets a little bit kind of mushier in terms of sovereignty but even if it's not practical I think it's a useful thought experiment. And also to plug a former colleague of mine, Omar Dajani has a great piece called Divorce Without Separation in Ethnopolitics. That's just some reading, some reference material in case you guys are interested. Now to jump into the meat of the matter. Partition has always been the preferred solution of mediators, the international community outside onlookers even quote unquote pragmatists within the two camps. It's always been so as Mike has pointed out going back to almost 80 years. But in practice no one has ever actually made partition work. Again, going back to the Peel Commission, 80 years of failure, each and every single model, 1937, 1947, 2001, 2008, 2013, 14, all of these models have failed. So partition sounds great. It is, it's the classic question of is partition half a loaf or is it half a baby? And that's the problem. You have the pragmatists of course who will look at it as half a loaf. You get some, I get some. But there is the central question on the Palestinian side and the Israeli side that makes really partition very, very difficult. And I would say that the window for a classic partition model of two state solution, let's say along the lines of the Clinton parameters or the Kerry parameters, that in my mind is almost certainly, that possibility is almost certainly dead. It's been completely overtaken by events. Settlements have expanded at an unprecedented pace. Just a quick example, a settlement like Har-Homa has something like, it didn't exist at the time of the Clinton parameters. And yet we still use this as a reference. It's literally the fastest growing settlement probably in history. I think it's something like 80% annual growth, which is really, really quite phenomenal. In any case, the settlements and the realities on the ground are one thing. But at the end of the day, I think really what has led me to determine that the two state solution is most likely dead is the politics. If you look at the politics and the political trends, I think it's very compelling. First, the basic TORs, the basic rules of the game, which used to be 242 and land for peace and so on, they've been so thoroughly eroded by the Oslo process itself that it really, it hasn't worked. I mean, it's one of the reasons why the Kerry negotiations failed is because there was a very clear attempt to shift the goalposts and change the terms of reference. Probably a more compelling reason why I've concluded that it's probably not possible to imagine a state along the lines of classic partition. Of course, theoretically it is, but for all intents and purposes, it seems unlikely. Is that the political consensus that has existed among all the parties around the two state solutions since approximately the 1990s has either collapsed or is collapsing. In Israel, these are, this political consensus, whether you're talking about Israelis, Palestinians, or even Americans, has always been very, very precarious. And I think this speaks to this kind of ambivalence that the two sides have and that appears in the polling. But I think that window has essentially closed. In Israel, you have a government that is very clearly post-two state solution that is beyond partition. Some say it explicitly like Naftali Bennett. Some I think like Netanyahu sort of couch it in more diplomatic language, but essentially what he's putting on the table, Palestinian state minus, which isn't different now in the Trump era than what he was actually talking about in the negotiations, is not really a sovereign state. It is a state under Israeli control surrounded by Israeli territory. And so it's not a viable model. On the American side, you have a Republican president, as Keith pointed out in this introduction, who has sort of exposed his own ambivalence about a two state solution. And he comes from a party that has expunged the idea of a two state solution formally from its party platform. And that's not incidental. It's not purely symbolic. We see the ramifications of that in various pieces of legislation on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. So the politics are working against, the trend lines are all working against, against the classic hard partition along the two state model, even on the Palestinian side. And I would say that support for a two state solution, a West Bank Gaza state has been strongest among West Bank Gaza Palestinians as opposed to diaspora Palestinians. But even among that constituency of Palestinians who were the first, who were the ones who originally sort of convinced the PLO leadership to push the PLO leadership to move in that direction, even they are turning against the idea of partition. Mahmoud Abbas' own son, if many of you remember New York Times piece, has come out and said, I don't support two state solution anymore. I support moving, advocating for equal rights under a single state. That is the trend certainly among Palestinians, among a younger generation of Palestinians. On the other hand, I think the one state bi-national model is also unworkable. And I see these two models really as ideals. They have a certain idealistic appeal, but they're unworkable in practical times. And I think it's unworkable. One state model is unworkable, not for technical reasons, but largely for the same political reasons. There isn't almost no support for it politically. There is no political consensus around a one state solution, or at least not around the one state solution that would be acceptable to the other side based on equal rights and citizenship. Someone like President Rivlin in Israel is a notable exception, and it's an important maybe indicator of a future trend, but certainly there's nothing close to a critical mass in Israeli politics. The same is true even on the Palestinian side, where you have the strongest support for one state is really in the Palestinian diaspora. And that's always been the case. That's not a new phenomenon. At the end of the day, there are no serious political parties or movements or actors on either side that are advocating and organizing for a one state solution. That could change, of course, in the future. What I think is really beneficial about the confederal model is, as Delia already pointed out, it addresses the kind of central narrative dilemma that both sides essentially see the whole of the territory as their natural homeland. These are not things you can decide where to draw a border on a piece of paper, but in the hearts of Palestinians and Israelis, that's not necessarily how they view the world. And I think the genius of this type of a model is that it opens up a whole new array of possible solutions that the classic partition model absolutely cannot. Again, as Delia has already pointed out, on refugees, on Jerusalem, and particularly on the settlements. I also think that it does a better job than either the other two models or theoretical models. I mean, I think of the confederation, not as a single model, but as a range of possible models. But I think it does a better job of neutralizing the power imbalance between the two sides than either of the other two models. Of course, there are some serious challenges. It is extremely complicated to imagine a negotiation process around something like this. You have a lot of moving parts. And it also assumes, I think, a much greater level of trust and goodwill than currently exists on either side. And then, of course, you have the mixed record of other examples, Belgium and the Balkans and other places. But at the end of the day, I think even though it is much more difficult to negotiate, it is far more equitable and sustainable over the long term. And it's not really, even the classic partition model is not as clear cut as we imagine. There are plenty of examples. For example, the 1947 partition plan, the sort of mother of all partition plans, was called for partition with economic union between the two sides, between the two states. So of course, that was never implemented, but it was understood that even at that very early stage, that the two were inseparable economically. And I would argue that that is even more true today. It's very, very difficult to separate Palestine from Israel in economic terms. There are lots of other examples, the old from Camp David, there's the open city model that Palestinians proposed for dealing with Jerusalem, which envisioned a kind of shared sovereignty within a narrower geographic space. But the bottom line is that these are not necessarily new ideas, but I think it's high time that we kind of unshackle ourselves from the old Clinton parameters model and really start to stretch the idea of two states. Because if we don't think, if we don't start to stretch our thinking on that level, and we insist on creating this binary between, it's either binationalism or it's hard partition, then I think people will gradually gravitate towards binationalism. If you have to choose between a failed, the 80 years of political failure in practice in terms of partition, and at least the theoretical idealistic hope of the possibility of a more equitable binational reality, people will eventually gravitate toward that. So this opens up a range of possible options, I think that need to be explored and sort of close the door on the Clinton parameters, Kerry parameters, and that whole era, the Oslo era, has been a disastrous failure and that'll end. Well, thank you very much. That gives us a lot to think about. I know that the crowd's got a lot of questions. I want to just do one framing question and I'd like to go back to Mike to kind of respond. That's okay. My framing question is whenever I look at the breakdown of talks, and I think we always analyze it this way, then there's always a question of whether it was a breakdown on process or end state. And we've now got, you've got 11, I've got 13 that I've kind of cataloged over the past couple of weeks. So as I look at the plan B process ideas, this is just what I cataloged out this morning, but you've got Stu Eisenstadt and Dennis Ross that want to set conditions for the next round by empowering the Palestinian economy. So they believe in the two state solution, but they want to go about it in a different way. Moshe Yalon has his bottom up approach, focusing again on the Palestinian economy, governance, security cooperation, regional initiative. International Crisis Group wants parameters formalized at the UN. Kobe Huberman just got something this morning. He's got taken his Israel Peace Initiative and now calls it the Israel Regional Initiative and has a whole series of things that put that in a regional context. Again, getting to a two state solution, but in a different process. Pooji Herzog and the Labor Party have their 10 points for separation, an ultimate two state, but starting with separation and the commanders for Israel's security also kind of focused on separation. And then the new end states, we've got people like Carolyn Glick that just wants a one state tomorrow. We've got the current right wing in Israel that wants a one state through kind of creeping annexation. We've got partial annexation, kind of a state and a half, confederation. We've just heard about Ben Kaspit raised again the confederation with Jordan as an idea. And another idea about I hadn't heard for a long time, trilateral land swaps between Israel, Egypt and Jordan. And then there's always the question of what happens to Gaza. So effectively is it three states, two or one? So the question is, are we crazy for continuing to make the two state solution the prime option or are we in a situation where no matter how hard we try everything else is going to be harder? And then the question, are we in this situation because of a bad process or because of the wrong end state? So I'd like to go to Mike and then if the others would like to comment on that, that'd be good. Thanks. So 13, huh? Well, there's probably more. Probably there are actually. Just how many breakdowns do you make? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Look, I mean, there's always an assessment about process and always there will be a thing of saying what if we did, what if we didn't kind of thing? It has been an incredibly difficult process. I'm not going to ascribe blame to either side, but both sides have done due damage to themselves in the positions they've taken that have broken things down. But at the same time, and this is why I still believe the end state of a two state solution is the right one because they have made a lot of progress in those discussions, though they did not see the fruition of those discussions. It's sometimes it makes me wonder if the notion of saying nothing, the principle which says nothing is agreed until everything is agreed should be reexamined in the sense of saying that maybe what should be done is that if it can lock in the agreements in a way that they're not implemented until everything is agreed is one way to approach it. Most of the talks that I've seen and basically have said they need to talk about everything, almost everything at once, and putting off the hard things to the very end, putting off Jerusalem, putting off refugees and so on. There are others that say, no you need to be forthright, start with the borders, start with the territory issue, and then the other parts will be able to be, you can work, which have addressing the normative and the narrative issues, which I think are very, very strong elements about why the two state solution is the only one that addresses the narrative issues, how the parties think of themselves as national entities and their aspirations. And that's part of my biggest problem with the confederation concept is that they don't address that well. And the fact that there's really very few examples of confederations that are enduring is a problem that needs to be addressed, if you will. And whether or not these are viewed is maybe do you approach the idea of saying do you do a confederation and then you from there somehow, if it breaks apart that you go back to a two state solution? I think if you get the parties into the room, they will quickly actually, if you focus on a confederation, I think they will actually start to come back to a two state solution as the ultimate end goal. We can go through a lot of different things about each of the negotiations about what didn't work in them. I would say a lot of the record is not very well known and not made public, which is a hindrance, although there have been lots of things that have been written. And you must be one of those things when I saw Michael Herzog's description recently of the Kerry negotiations, which was, I thought, a reasonable approach from an Israeli perspective. I don't think it would have been the article I would have written from an American perspective, and I don't think the Palestinians would have the same perspective. Bringing those together would be very useful if that could be done, but they all are built on narratives that each will have to see how fair they would be, but there's also been this notion of a lot of elements are taken in the negotiations to try to ascribe blame on the other when the negotiations fail. As I said, I keep saying to it, I know it seems trite almost, of saying these are gonna be complicated elements, and we tried to learn lessons from each negotiation round as we improve. The last round with the Kerry, we looked at a lot of different things that were written during the interim years, particularly between Camp David and the Kerry initiative would occurred under the Annapolis approach. One of the things that was quite clear was said that you needed strong leadership to be involved in the negotiation from the United States, while Secretary Kerry devoted an inordinate amount of time to this issue, and he did that from day one of his term as Secretary of State, so he didn't wait to the very last year as Secretary of State to take his approach, which again was with big criticism about how these things have been approached in the past. So there have been a number of things that were learned over time, which I think is what Martin Indyk had said that basically that we got to a zone of agreement, which is a awful term in negotiations, where we had not really seen that zone before from the parties. He particularly was labeling that for the Israeli side. The Palestinians were in a very different state at that by the time the negotiations ended, it is true, but there was still from the intense periods of interaction between the parties, I think they had far more intense discussions about all of the core issues that would need to be resolved in a two-state solution than had ever been done before. Right, thanks. Should we go, do you want to respond or should we go straight to questions? Oh, I mean, I have lots of points that I'd like to, but maybe just a couple. Sure, yeah, if you could do a few. I mean, I have a number of points that I'd like to talk, but I'll just, in relation to the so many options that are out there that these plans that are coming out, I think that, I don't want, I feel like there's a risk that the whole discussion is becoming academic in the sense that, even though I am sort of an academic, but in the sense that it could take us lots of time to go through each one and parse them out for which is better or which is worse, but I think that that kind of time does not exist on the ground, and I think that when we look at measuring, assessing a model by how well it addresses the needs of the region, I think that we can boil it down to the fact that there is a population of over-formal and people who are living without basic human rights, and I'm going to qualify that. I think we're getting basic human rights fatigue. I think people don't internalize what that really means anymore, and I think that if we want to make it easier to understand what that really means, focus on freedom of movement. When people can't move, when they're living under a chokehold, they have no economic prospects and no general prospects for life, and it's just, it's not sustainable. And I would just say, if anybody wants to think about which of these are the best, start thinking about which one opens up the region and ends the suffocation. In terms of national narratives, I do want to address that as well. I agree with you that we need a solution that addresses national narratives. I absolutely wouldn't underestimate it, but I think that a confederation model that allows for two independent states that realize the national fulfillment of each one that preserves their national character through national voting rights of the people who belong to that state, but allow, I think what's missing in your analysis, in my opinion, is that Palestinians will never, ever give, I mean, the idea of returning to where they were originally from is central to national identity and their national project. And on the Israeli side, increasingly, what are we gonna do? The idea of being connected to the holy sites, including those in the West Bank, has become more and more part of the Israeli national identity like it or not. One final point about comparisons, because you raise them, yes, there aren't that many examples of working confederations, but we also don't need to limit ourselves to those situations that admit, or don't admit that they're confederations. So specifically, the residency and citizenship model, the EU takes a lot of flak these days, but it is still one of the most successful experiments in history for ending a continent that was a bloodbath and keeping relative peace for so many decades. I don't need to point it out. Belgium is not that stable, but nobody's really killing each other there. And the Bosnia model is very interesting because people in the region are up in arms about how dysfunctional it is right now, and everybody's talking about the need to rethink Dayton and figure out a more manageable system for something that is kind of like a confederation, even though they don't call it a confederation. And when you say confederation, they say, no, no, no, we can't do that. But actually, you have two separate entities who are kind of in an association. Well, again, I would argue that 20 years of nonwar is better than 20 seconds of nonwar that we have in the region. Great, thanks. Can I just real quickly, because I think it's an important question about a process versus politics, versus the substance of negotiations. I would attribute failure actually to all three. It's a process failure, it's a political failure, and clearly the realities on the ground have also overtaken, I think, chances for a territorial partition. The only way, I will be the first to concede, it remains the preferred option. I would, and I worked on this for many years though, worked on the settlements file and was involved in territory negotiations. I would love to see a scenario in which 100 or 150,000 Israeli settlers would be evacuated in order to allow for a minimal land swap between the two sides based on 1967. That didn't happen and I don't see any real political chance of that happening, just given all the trend lines that we've already discussed. The only way it could have worked is either that the United States as the key mediator in this process would have adhered strictly to international law, and that is 1967 and not one inch more, or at least a very tiny minimal adjustment of the boundaries, which is sort of what the Palestinians had in mind, or that they would have in some other way tried to level the playing field between these two asymmetrical sides, and that gap between Israeli power and triumphalism and Palestinian dysfunction and division and defeat has only grown wider, and yet we still have the same expectation that the negotiations in 2013 will proceed exactly where 2001 left off, which is incredibly unrealistic, just the power imbalance has only grown. So there's been no attempt by the United States to either adhere to international law or to try and level the playing field, which means holding Israel accountable, which means there's a political price to pay for that. So given that political reality and the structural inability of the United States to play that role, then we have to consider these other models. As a final point, just to clarify, I think it's useful to identify some criteria when we think about any solution. The first, I think criteria, whether we're looking at a two state or one state, is any solution has to provide self-determination for both Arabs and Jews in this piece of land between the river and the sea. And secondly, which is maybe not as essential, but highly likely and desirable, is that it allow for the national self-expression of both groups. And that is why, that's one reason why I don't see a binational model as feasible, but a confederal model allows both sides to maintain their national narratives, even if they are mutually exclusive, because they have access to the whole of the territory and can imagine in their collective imaginations the land in whatever way they want. The practical day-to-day aspects of life can be worked out in terms of economic arrangements, security and all of those things, but you allow each side to have its own national narrative. One of the huge failings of the Kerry process was to insist that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, to accept, asking Palestinians to accept the Zionist narrative without any reciprocal demand on the Israeli side to also acknowledge the Palestinian historical narrative. It was only on one side, which, again, that inability to level the playing field, I think, is essential. Okay, so we have 17 minutes for questions. I apologize, I stole a lot of the question time, but I know we've got a lot of people. Do we have, I think we have microphones. Yeah, okay, so why don't we start here? Thank you. My name's Mark Mayerson. I describe myself as inspiring, aspiring, informed citizen. The confederation model is very exciting to me. I think it also unmoors things from this 18th century European concept of nation state, which is probably mythic in its entirety, but one shower moment I had where I've written many people and I have never seen, I've gotten some traction and response, but deals with Jerusalem, which is to lease the old city to the Saudis for 99 years. So, to use Hong Kong as the map as this, and I think I can defend why I think it has, excuse me, all sorts of positive regional effects. I think it also has security effects because Saudi Arabia's far away, so of Israel, whatever, and even as a provocative thought experiment, it begins to unmask, at least in my opinion from the Palestinian side, is the control of the old city very important or is the agenda, the destruction of the state of Israel? Okay, maybe Donnelly or Khaled just real quick. I think that there's two things, there's mythical Jerusalem and there is residential Jerusalem and I think we cannot talk about residential Jerusalem in those kinds of terms. This is a municipal environment, it is the biggest city in Israel and it has massive inequalities of economy and infrastructure and those need to be resolved and so that can't be managed by somebody far away who has no stake in seeing the city live in an integrated and peaceful way. So that's the first point. I mean the second point is what do you do with mythical Jerusalem, what we call the Holy Basin or the Holy Areas? I mean the truth is this is also one of the areas where the status quo is not so awful in terms of the management of the religious sites where the Muslim holy sites are managed by the Wachaf and the Israeli holy sites are managed by a group of far-right religious extremists but which would be nice if that would change too but probably, there I would say, this is what I think about the Confederation idea that it tries to take from some of the better elements of both the extensive and exhaustive work done by the two state negotiations over the years and combine it with elements of what I see as a more realistic situation on the ground. So among those, we often talked in the two state negotiations about the internationalization of international management of the old city or of the Holy Areas and I don't see any reason why we couldn't draw on the best of those proposals for that very sensitive and explosive area. You go back over here. Thank you, Obadi, from One Voice. Dalia, two questions. So the first is based on the fact that it seems that the Israeli governments have not been super interested or feeling the urge to end the conflict. What is it that in the Confederation model that would make them go for it? And the second thing economically, don't you think that this will, so two states but access to both states for everyone would eventually create two socioeconomic structures which end up making a fragile reality, vast differences between Palestinians and Israelis in terms of economy, kind of eventually living together? Sorry, just to clarify the question, that your question is whether it would become more of a federal reality than a confederation? No, no, no. Is that what you said? No, I'm asking. About the economy? In your model, there is gonna be a massive socioeconomic difference. Don't you think that that is gonna create a lot more conflict? Conflict, yeah. Okay, so on the first one, incentives. I mean, it's a big problem, right? Right now I think all of this is sort of economic because there isn't very much incentive, not on the Israeli side, which holds more of the power. And on the Palestinian side, I would argue there's not that much incentive from the political elites as well and Palestinian authority and Fatah for all sorts of reasons that I'll let you expand on. The only thing that I can say is that if the two sides were somehow to decide that they did have political incentive to do it, I think this opens up options for resolving some of those key obstacles to the two state solution. One of the reasons on the Israeli side, why anybody who is inclined to advance the conflict resolution doesn't wanna touch it is because they're afraid of the settler lobby. I mean, the settler community, the settler organizations. And this offers a perspective that is different. I'm not saying it solves all the problems, but I'm involved in a sort of civic initiative around it and every time we have a conference, we have two thirds of the room populated by people wearing kippot, you know, yamakas because they're interested, this is different for them. We're saying, wait, you don't have to all leave your homes and they kind of are curious and open-minded about it. So if there's an incentive, the incentive is the same incentives to be the leader who actually advances conflict resolution but in a way that might actually open up opportunities. In terms of the economic issues, those are very serious problems. The thing is, I think that we have to take a cold, hard look at the dangers of hard separation because you will continue to have two very disparate economies under hard separation and fewer opportunities for Palestinians both in terms of mobility, starting businesses and being entrepreneurs, like the way things are now, if people know they're very, very constrained in terms of import, export, and the opportunity to actually grow economically, I think it would just be further constrained. Plus the major thing, the major key to economic modernization, any society, is the flow of information and technology and skills. And Israel is a resource for Palestinians. There's already very low, quiet initiatives to help transfer that knowledge, especially in the IT and technology sector, that are nascent. The more openness you have between these societies, I think the more possibility there is in the medium and longer term to start really using that resource that Israel provides for the know-how of developing a tech sector, developing an entrepreneurial sector in tech, and that's the kind of thing that really will drive an economy to be more modern eventually. I just don't see what the prospects are under a hard separation. So yes, there will be a dangerous disparity but there already is and the question is which opens up avenues for bringing them closer together? Thanks. Howard? Thanks. It's very interesting. All of you talked to some extent and you just finished a question about the economic issues and we spent the US and other countries very intensive efforts building the Palestinian economy, trying to build the Palestinian economy and building the Palestinian state, the institutions. It was going quite well I think, I'd say kind of modestly in the time that I was working on it but that was because it was the Annapolis period, it was George Mitchell period, there was a political horizon, there was a lot of enthusiasm, Salam Fayad was prime minister and all of that collapsed around 2012 and I have sort of a conundrum. I believe very strongly in the need to build up the Palestinian economy and the need to work on state institutions and that doesn't really depend on a political process in the sense that you could do it without it but the experience is that when you don't have a political process that the enthusiasm for doing this kind of economic development just isn't there, the donors don't provide the money, the Israelis and the Palestinians are less interested in doing it and it just doesn't ever get any traction. And what I'm hearing here and somebody said this is almost getting to be an academic discussion, I don't know how with all these kinds of ideas on the table about one state, two states, confederation, you can create a vision among Palestinians that there's a future that they're moving toward and that therefore it's a good thing for them to participate in this kind of economic development activity and at the same time that it's a good thing for the donors to support it so I don't know, I just don't see the two meshing together like they were during the 2007, 2011, 12 period. And I have really a quick question for you, Mike. You have conspicuously avoided mentioning George Mitchell's name in the 2009, 2012 period which I thought was part of the peace process and I wonder why. Mike, why don't we start with you? George Mitchell, there. No, basically, Mitchell spent a lot of time trying to get the parties to the table as opposed to actually sitting down with them and actually having an intense negotiation. I think it only happened at the very end of the 10 month moratorium that they really started to have some discussion but a lot of that ended up focusing on trying to extend the negotiation period. So that was the main reason that I didn't really talk about that as the intense period of which they were really engaging on issues related to the two-state solution. Very briefly, I agree that the economic horizon, the economic element is an important approach but the political horizon has been the most difficult aspect that we have not been able to really provide in the last few years. I mean, you look at the polls, the Palestinians majority still support the two-state solution but a larger group now believe that it's not possible and that changes the whole narrative as a result and that is a lot of young people who are looking at this conflict as perhaps their parents' conflict or their grandparents' conflict, if you will, and they wanna move on with their lives, they wanna have economic betterment and that might be some of the thrust that might drive to look at other ideas if it's not the two-state solution. But as I keep coming back to that notion of saying, I think they're still gonna fall back as default to the two-state solution as the only way ahead as they get into some type of negotiation format. It's hard for me to imagine them coming together in a negotiation to form a confederation. I think it would quickly fall apart and fall back towards the idea of a two-state solution. Khaled? Yeah, just quickly on the economic point, Howard, as you know, a key issue, a key obstacle has always been access and movement and those restrictions. I think the advantage of a confederal model is that it allows open access and movement for all people regardless of whether they're West Bank ID, Gaza ID, Israeli citizen, blue Jerusalem IDs. All of that goes away and so instead of dealing with a very compartmentalized, narrow, tightly constricted, multiple Palestinian economies that exist, there's an area A economy and there's a Jerusalem economy and there's a Gaza economy and there's the remnants of an agricultural sector in area B and C, instead of dealing with them differently or separately, you would be able to deal with economic development holistically and part of the reason those initiatives failed is because of the politics because someone like Tony Blair or someone like Condi Rice or George Mitchell or whomever has to expend enormous amounts of political capital in order to convince an Israeli general to lift the checkpoint in order to allow some goods to be moved. In a confederal model, all of that goes away. You have economic union, you have one single market, whether it's a labor market or goods market. So it may sound idealistic but it certainly has much more economic potential for all sides than the very narrowly constricted area A and B economic initiatives that the donors have attempted to take on. Thank you everyone for a very rich conversation. I actually want to go back, Dalia you didn't have a chance towards the end of your remarks to talk about, you said you're aware of some of the challenges or pitfalls of the confederal model and I wonder if I could just draw you out on what you see those to be. Well I'll try to do this really quickly because I know we have not much time left but I think the main criticism is I think I probably failed to mention it when I talked about two separate states. The idea in the minds of the people who are working on this confederation stuff is that the border is basically a long 67. So we always talk about the adjustments and the blocks, the settlement blocks but we're looking at because settlers can stay if they're not actually stealing land. The idea is that the border is there and so on the one hand the settler, some people think this is, the settlers will say well you're leaving us out in the cold, you're cutting us off, why should we ever accept this? It looks in some ways they can say it's totally anathema and that you would leave us with a Palestinian sovereignty. So how can you bring these spoilers to the table? That's one angle. On the other angle, I think the critique from the left is that it's like a prize to the settlers because it assumes by default that many of them can just stay there and that you say well the settlement enterprise has won. They don't have to go and so the two discontents do not make everybody happy. It's not like criticism from both sides balances it out but I think actually those are the key problems. The other problem is what really happens with external security? So if I argue that internal security is a matter of the security cooperation as it exists today in a situation of greater equality which I think is a strong argument, who's gonna manage the borders all around this region? I mean will Israel ever truly trust the Palestinians to manage the Jordan side of this? No, I mean the answer is no, I can't imagine Israel will ever take that concept seriously and so you're probably looking at Israeli control over the external borders and then negotiating that with the Palestinians and getting them to agree to that will be difficult. It'll be a problem. There'll have to be some sort of serious compromises made along the way if anything like that can ever be worked out. I think those are the key ones I see and the economic one which we've also discussed and I don't have 100% answers on them just the competing perspectives that I talked about but in terms of the key left and right criticism I think if we're actually moving towards a situation of conflict resolution there's going to have to be a maturation of people's willingness to make compromises. I mean if settlers are going to say we agree that there needs to be a better political situation on the ground this one allows many of us accepts and embraces the idea that is not legally or morally really justifiable to uproot people from their homes after generations that's a big concession to them and they still have their national voting rights and national identity as citizens in Israel and Israel remains a Jewish state. They should come to view that as better than what they were being offered before and on the Palestinian side, well yes they're going to have settlers who are still living in their society. I mean, look at the Serbia-Casavo negotiations they have Serbs still living in Casavo and they're being forced to create a multi-ethnic society. Nobody's really asking that of the Israelis and Palestinians per se but they can live with them there. They will on the other hand have the 67 border which is a massive concession that is nothing like what we've been discussing lately. So those are ways to kind of erode the critique from both sides. Great. I'm afraid we're completely out of time. So I just want to close with a couple of comments. First of all, can I see by a show of hands how many are more hopeful than when you came? How many are less hopeful? How many are about the same? Okay, about the same as one but there was a few that are a little more hopeful. I think any exchange like this that opens up new ideas where we're not stuck I think is a good thing. I wanted to point out we have another event there's a flyer outside for our Northern Ireland event next Monday the 13th one to five another very interesting event looking at lessons from the Northern Ireland peace negotiations and the economic process that was used there. So I'll close with one more vignette there was a great Aritz cartoon about 25 years ago the first time I lived in Israel that had a devil with his pitchfork and everything and there's an Israeli extremist that's walking in with a Zuzi Palestinian with a Molotov cocktail walking in they come into hell and the devil pokes him with the pitchfork and says welcome to your new homeland I'm afraid you're gonna have to share it. So our objective is to avoid that ultimate reality and I hope we've sparked some thinking that can help us to look for these solutions that will help us to avoid that and thank you very much for coming.