 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. My name is Michelle Dunn. I direct the Middle East program here. And I'm happy to welcome you to this discussion of what is going on and the issue of Israel-Palestine US policy, so forth. And we're very pleased to welcome Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, who is, well, how to introduce her, a major figure in politics and civil society in Palestine. I first met her in 1991, when she was the official spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid Peace Talks. When we were working to launch the Madrid Peace Talks. That's right, even before the Madrid Peace Talks. And in addition to her important roles over the years as a negotiator, as an advisor, and so forth, she's also founded important civil society organizations. And it has really stood up very consistently for human rights, civil rights, women's rights, democracy, and so forth in Palestine. So welcome, Hanan. We're very happy to have you here, Michelle. It's good to be here. And I want to welcome Daniel Levy, who is president of the US Middle East Project Forum. Previously, he was director for the Middle East at the European Council on Foreign Relations. And before that, an advisor and negotiator in the Israeli government during the tenure of Prime Minister Ehud Barak, so also a former negotiator. And another former negotiator, my colleague Andrew Miller, who is deputy director for policy at the Project on Middle East Democracy, as well as a non-resident fellow here at Carnegie. Andrew formerly worked on a lot of Middle East issues. Among them, the Palestinian-Israeli issue and the US-Israeli relationship, including the military relationship at the National Security Council during the administration of President Obama. I also want to acknowledge my new colleague, Zaha Hassan, who's sitting in the front row, who's really the organizer of this event. She is a new visiting fellow here at Carnegie. Thank you, Zaha. So we're going to have a little bit of a moderated discussion to start, and then we'll open it up to conversation with you, because I can see, by looking out that we've got an incredibly well-informed audience here. So I know we're going to have a lot of excellent questions. Hanan, I want to start with you. So the US administration under President Trump has taken a lot of very controversial steps related to the Palestine issue. To put it mildly. To put it mildly. Recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moving the US embassy, at least ceremonially, withdrawing a lot of funding, including for ANRWA, canceling other funding. For example, yesterday's, a couple of things happened just yesterday with the cancellation of an additional $165 million in funding for Palestinians, as well as the closure of the PLO mission here in Washington. So some of these steps respond to longstanding congressional initiatives, which other administrations had maybe resisted to a greater degree than this administration has. Now there have also been some very recent gestures, which seem to be intended to overcome Palestinian objections and somehow attract the Palestinian leadership back into a conversation with this administration. For example, President Trump saying he favored a two-state solution during his press availability with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly. And a statement by Secretary Pompeo last night at the JINSA dinner. Again, now last night, Secretary Pompeo did not use the word state, but he was saying that the administration wants the Palestinian people to have a space, he said. A real economy, a real governance. The spaceship recently. So let me just ask you, I mean. Sorry, I'm being flippant by the situation. I'm sorry. What do you make of this? Let's see this question. What do you make of this? I mean, in other words, how much do you see this as a real change in US policy? Or is it just kind of the realization of trends that have long been in place in US policy? And in addition to your evaluation of what it means, what does it mean for Palestinians? What does it mean for Palestinian plans, for Palestinian politics, internal politics, leadership questions, et cetera? Yeah, start out with five minutes and we'll begin. I'm not going to go into the long history of Palestinian-American relations or lack thereof. People here know this, yeah. Yes, let's just start with the whole issue of the peace process and the American role in the peace process and whether this is a continuation of a pattern of behavior or whether this is a clear departure. From the beginning, and I again commit the unforgivable sin of quoting myself, I said the Americans, by no stretch of their imagination, can be accused of being even-handed. From the beginning, the US administration, all successive US administrations, have brought their special relationship with Israel to bear on the peacemaking effort, on the peace process. And we have seen this in many ways. I can tell you a whole list of things, like for example, never criticize Israel openly, never present an American paper unless you clear it first with the Israelis, never deliver everything Israel once ahead of time, but put pressure on the Palestinians constantly, and prevent any issue from going to the UN and prevent the Palestinians from going to the UN, try to get as many rewards for Israel ahead of time, like normalizing the Arabs and so on. Anyway, these were all, and there are many other steps that are different aspects of the Israeli-American relationship that were brought to bear on the role of the US as a peacemaker, and primarily, or as an even-handed peace broker to say it in a way which is polite, but anyway, primarily the Americans wanted the monopoly of the peace-making over the political process. They didn't want to share this with anybody, and they're the ones who made the division of labor that the Europeans deal with nation-building and state-building, and they didn't even call it state-building, but the Americans take the political decisions, and from the beginning, the Americans adopted the position of the Israelis that we were not a nation, and that we were not working towards a state. I remember saying, you know, they keep giving us non-papers because they think we're a non-people, and they tried to make us, as you remember, go under the umbrella of the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. We weren't even the Palestinian people, we were Palestinians without the article that. It's Israel and Palestinians, you know, we sort of dug up a few Palestinians from them somewhere and said, you know, you Palestinians, go talk to Israel. So in a sense, and whenever they intervened, they intervened on behalf of the Israelis. And the language of the American documents was Israeli, constantly, to the point where we have to tell them, I mean, give us, where is the American position? We've seen this position, we've heard that it is purely Israeli. So that was from the beginning, that was the pattern. And they also got the revocation of the Zionism, is racism, and all sorts of advanced payments for Israel, but all sorts of pressures on the Palestinians. So that was part of the pattern. Gradually, the American position, let's say, evolved slightly. It didn't change drastically, but it evolved slightly in the sense that they felt that such a word by us, in many ways, can be counterproductive, particularly since they wanted the Arabs on board. And they wanted the Arabs also to put the bill, so to speak, which is what Trump really wants nowadays. And they wanted the Arabs to normalize with Israel, and the Arabs had the usual possession that without solving the Palestinian question, there won't be any normalization. So they were trying to deal in different configurations and trying somehow to manage the bias. But from the beginning, the issue of two states, the issue of Palestinian sovereignty never came up. Never. At one point, we told them because they were bound by, as Seth wrote in his book when I read his book, I said, you've read my mind as well, you remember. Because since the days of Camp David, the Americans dealt only with autonomy for the Palestinians. Self-government, self-rule, maintaining Israeli control, maintaining even Israeli sovereignty, they didn't care. What they wanted was the usual pattern, Israeli sovereignty, Israeli security, was the main motivation and driving force. And therefore, if separation served Israeli security, then that's what they're going to do, separation, by giving the Palestinians the functional control over their lives, but not political, not sovereign, and not freedom. And so all along, the issue of running your lives, we will give you the right to run your lives. And we said the Israelis offered this under occupation in 1980 and we rejected it because we said we don't want to be employees, administrators under the Israeli occupation. We want it to be free. We told them, we told the military governor then, Wilson, why don't you just withdraw and we can run our lives, but how can we don't want, we can run our schools and everything we will. Perfectly good at these things. What we want is to be free. We want sovereign control, we want to be free, and we want occupation plan. But that was never addressed. The first time, actually the term occupation became part of the language of the discourse of official USA was under George W. Because he's the one who wrote the statement about how the occupation that began in 1967 has to end. And he was the first who mentioned the state. Baker and the Bush, Herbert Walker Bush did not mention the state. They did not mention the occupation. But in the letter of assurance, they articulated very clearly that they do not acknowledge, that they do not accept any unilateral measures that were preempt and pre-judge the outcome of them and status issues. And in that context, they do not accept settlements, and particularly in Jerusalem, and they do not recognize Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem. So this is quite distinct and different from where things are now. So in some ways, the current American administration tried to do things differently by doing the same thing but worse. And then tried to do things differently by introducing an active component and an ideological component. An active component in the sense that they started acting unilaterally. And they started creating facts on the ground in defiance of international law, in defiance of all the previous commitments. And we have a long list of the previous American administrations. And of course, in violation of all the agreements that we had with the Israeli. And they stuck, I mean, the Americans for a long time stuck to autonomy. I told you at one point we told them, it's a dirty word in our lexicon. Don't tell us autonomy, we don't want autonomy. But now they're not even talking about autonomy. They're not talking about statehood. They dropped the term occupation entirely from the lexicon. David Friedman, you know, so scolded everybody. How dare you talk about occupation? There isn't any, what is it, I mean? Is it a sort of friendly merger? I don't know. Anyway, and then he said the settlements are not legal. Hostile acquisition. Hostiles. Yeah. And the settlements are not illegal because the Jews have to build in their own land and they have the right to build whatever they want. And then they started moving, of course, they funded settlements anyway. And then, and they adopted this language, this course, which was very strange stories because it's in violation of the law and agreements and American positions. And then they started building on this. No two-state solution now. I want to make it clear that the two-state solution is not a concession to the Palestinians. It's a concession by the Palestinians. And it's a very painful concession because we agreed to recognize Israel on 78% of our land, which David Friedman considers that it's a, but not Palestine. And we're the ones who, at the beginning, wanted all of Palestine. And then the whole issue of working on the principle of partition and the whole issue of accepting 24238, which does not mention Palestinian state, by the way. And the whole issue of saying 181, when we accepted 181, they said, okay, that's the principle of partition, but 24238 deals with 67. So they even took us much further from the roots, from the causes of the problem and in the conflict. So now we have no two-states, no 67 borders, settlements not illegal, and Jerusalem was handed over in violation, not just of the law, but of clear American commitments and the requirements of peace. This was a death blow. This is how they disqualified themselves as peacemakers and as playing any role in peacemaking. So when not only do you take sides, but when you violate international law and humanitarian law and you start pounding the weaker side in order to bash them into submission, that certainly is not being even handed. So that's, we went with that. And then the issue of the refugees. If you want to see what this administration does, listen to what Netanyahu says. And of course, Adelson. Because Netanyahu was talking about how, we have to get rid of Andhra, how the refugees have to be redefined and so on. Within one week, we got this statement from the Americans that Andhra has to be disbanded and Jared Kushner started talking about it as being corrupt and perpetuating the problem and for years it has been there and it has not solved the problem of the refugees as though Andhra was asked to solve the problem of the refugees. Only a political process can solve the problem of the refugees, but not Andhra. So they took Jerusalem off the table, Pence came and this is another component they added which is the ideological component. It's a dual component based on extreme Zionism. One component is the, of course, the Zionist ideology and the Jewishness of the state and so on that David Friedman espouses and defends. He is Israel's extreme spokesperson. He's not an American ambassador. And then you have the other Christian evangelical dimension, the Zionist Christians as represented by Pence who also comes armed with his Bible telling the original Christians that he knows more about them than they know about themselves. So that is another problem. The ideological component is extremely serious. It's extremely dangerous because you are launching us into towards a religious war and you are making this issue incapable of being dissolved because God is taking science and that's it. And because you have absolute truth and absolute truth and you are strengthening the people who use religion as a political tool and who use it to claim absolute right. And that is very dangerous, particularly when you see what Israel is doing in Jerusalem in the Al-Aqsa and Haram Sharif compound and so on provoking the religious, provoking people's sensitivities and spiritual feelings and so on. And we kept saying this is a man-made conflict and it has to be resolved on the basis of legality and through a political, rather than a violent or coercive approach. So that's another thing that then they started targeting Palestinian institutions. To me, I mean, the money might not be that great. Redefining, as I said, the refugees, but also because you reduce their number and so on, we can talk about that later. But targeting places like the Palestinian hospitals in Jerusalem, this is just gratuitous cruelty, really. And this is telling the Palestinians, we're going to keep bashing you and smashing you and targeting everything that counts, everything that means anything to you. So here we are now with the Jerusalem hospitals with even the NGOs that people don't like. Like the normalization NGOs of people to people, this artificial construct that you can bring a few Palestinians and a few Israelis together and they can love each other and the problem will be solved. Most people don't like the people to be real. You know that they're counterproductive and they create an artificial construct which has no relationship to reality. So they defunded those, thank you very much as well. They defunded NGOs, they defund USAID all the work, the infrastructure and the roads. And the roads, by the way, were serving the Israelis because they were helping build bypass roads and they were helping sort of find ways for the Palestinians not to be seen or visible to the Israelis. So that's another thing. And to finish with all that, they decided that they have to close down our office in Washington. This means that they have closed. I mean, I'm not talking about Taylor Force and all these resolutions because we know that Congress has taken so many resolutions against Palestine. But now there is a shift in Congress and the same as there are some people in Congress and the same as there's a shift in academic circles and civil society and minority groups, women's groups and so on. There is a feeling that the injustice done to the Palestinians has become very visible and very extreme. And so also the barrier of fear is being broken. Fear of being accused of being anti-Semitic, fear of going against the grain, fear of losing your job, fear of all this and somehow people are beginning to speak out, which is very important. But at the time in which the administration is taking extreme positions that would not just destroy the chances of peace, but that would say, they've moved from being biased or not an even-handed peace broker as they knows into being a partner in crime. We think that the American administration, this administration has become complicit in the occupation. And that's why we cannot in any way recognize them as a peace sponsor and we cannot accept the fact that they have violated our rights and the most basic requirements of peace and international law on the issue of Jerusalem and the UN. And we can put this in context, but I don't want to. You Americans have to deal with this problem and it's very serious, the assault on international organizations and international law and so on. And the support for the most extreme fascist, racist forces in the world. And let me ask you a quick follow-up and then I wanna bring Daniel and Andrew into this conversation. But my question is this, so this whole situation that you've described, what's its effect on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? I mean, we've seen a lot of protest in Gaza and we've seen, let's face it, the Palestinian leadership, Palestinian Authority leadership yellow have come under harsh criticism for pursuing an approach that has ultimately failed and so forth. So what are the trends there? I mean, Palestinians are still there, they're still there and they've been in large numbers. And even if there's no negotiating process and so forth, but where and how are you? Well, I mean the West Bank as well. The West Bank as well because the whole issue of the demographic that has become a very issue because you are trying to serve as an interest. The other administrations wanted to get rid of the demographics right to Israel. They didn't want to do justice to the Palestinians. They wanted to ensure that the Palestinians don't at any point become a majority in historical Palestine and therefore put Israel in a position where the argument has become whether Israel can be really Jewish and democratic or it has to choose between being Jewish and democratic. Which is really not the argument. The argument is what do you do with the occupation? What do you do with the situation of captivity and oppression and injustice? That's what should be the argument. Not how do we save Israel from itself? But anyway, now the Palestinians. It seems that Jason Greenblatt is working on the plan to separate Gaza from the West Bank. This is one way of getting rid of the idea of a sovereign territorially contiguous state which would threaten the purity of the Jewish character of the state of Israel. And they're pandering to the hyper-nationalist, ethno-nationalist identity type, nationalist in Israel. And they're feeding that sense. So now by doing what Sharon started to do with the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, which is what Rabin described as, he said he had wished that Gaza would sink into the sea and it would wake up one day. It's because he saw in Gaza a demographic threat and the security threat. So now they want to sever Gaza, not by throwing it into the sea, but by cutting it off from Israel and thereby from the West Bank with no linkage and making it an Egyptian problem, an Egyptian security problem basically, an economic problem. And at the same time, using turning it into a humanitarian issue and then economic issue. So there were people in Gaza and Hamas who were because of the very difficult conditions in Gaza and they are very cruel and inhuman. And I say this openly. There were many who were willing to go along with that. Not because they see themselves as a humanitarian issue only and so on, but because they see no way out. There is no political way out. And Hamas started slowly talking about two states and so on, but at the point where the two states have become a policy of the bankrupt. It's not working too late. And so they felt this is one way of lifting the siege. Now the whole conflict is between do you come to an agreement with Israel on Tahdiah, on Qam, on a ceasefire first, or do you accomplish reconciliation first? The Greenblatt Egyptian approach was at one point, I think Egypt shifted was, let's work on a ceasefire, let's work on economic wellbeing, and then let's work on reconciliation, which really defeats the purpose because it means you have really contributed to the separation of Gaza and therefore the prevention of a Palestinian state. Everything that can be done will be done to prevent the state. So now this is one thing. The second thing is that the national project, the national political program of the PLO, of FATRA, and so on, has been defeated. Partly because of their mistakes, partly but primarily because of the Israeli-American collusion. When you stake your political career, your future, your whole agenda is based on a compromise that you are pressured into taking. We need a negotiated settlement, you need to abandon terrorism and violence, you need to accept the two-state solution, the partition of Palestine, you need to accept 242, 238. All these, the PLO accepted. And since it took us, it took the PLO two decades to accept not just the partition of Palestine, but the 67 borders. And now that that is being destroyed and now that the occupation has become even more overt and more cruel and it's on the rampage, the land theft is just proceeding at unprecedented rates, the theft of resources, the home demolitions, again, the cruelty, the oppressive nature of the system. The willful shooting and killing of people, particularly children. What's happening in Gaza, the sniper fire, the targeting of people, this is just unconscionable. And not only that, but people turn around and blame Hamas or blame the victims and blame the people for being there. We used to have a very sadonic joke and the first intifada, I don't know if you remember, we said, you get arrested for obstructing the free passage of an Israeli bullet. This is true, if the Israelis shoot you and wound you if you don't die, you're arrested. And part of my job as dean at the university was to go and protect our wounded students from being arrested, from being abducted from hospitals by the army. So now what they're doing in Gaza is in many ways targeting people and targeting children and using really very cruel ways of creating disabilities, shooting at the knees and so on and genitals, the degree of injury. As I don't know who was it who said, we will turn them into a generation of people who have permanent incapacities. So the way they, and then on the other side, the flip side, they say, no, no, no, if we just need to make Gaza into an economic oasis and then we will deliver security to Israel. So on the one hand, Israel is busy, sort of bashing Gaza and making life impossible. And on the other hand, the Greenblatt and his approach is, okay, you do whatever you want to the Gazans, we'll blame them for what happens to them. But let's see if by giving them economic ease and lifting and getting the Qataris to pay and so on, maybe this will deliver security to Israel. You see, the objective is not Gaza. The objective is what delivers security to Israel in a variety of ways. And this has weakened the Palestinian leadership, both Hamas, Hamas is not popular in Gaza by the way. Maybe it's more popular in the West than, I don't know. Qatar still has the majority, but the leadership as a whole has been weakened and there is a very serious gap between the people and the leadership because they did not deliver. They, as I said, state everything on this two-state approach of promises made and not kept on several palaces and erroneous assumptions. One of it is that you make nice with the Americans and they will do you justice. And this has been a constant policy that the Palestinian leadership suffered from, really. Thinking that all you need to do is appease, be nice to the Americans, play the game, be positive, show that you're positive. We were always on probation, on good behavior. And instead we ended up getting more and more bashed and now it's out in the open. The Trump agenda is out there. Give Israel all the rewards, bash the Palestinians into submission and this is one thing that shows how ignorant they are. Not just with the space that they want to do with the outer space, but with the sense that you think anybody can deliver the Palestinians or anybody can sign on behalf of the Palestinians or that they can turn us into a humanitarian issue and then economic issue. All these palaces don't work. And this ignorance is really lethal if you are in a decision-making position. Thank you, Hanan. Let me turn to Daniel now for your perspective. So Daniel, the Trump administration underlines frequently its close ties with Israel. Secretary Pompeo said during his talk last night that these are stronger than ever. Maybe something that's been said by a lot of other American leaders before. Have you just said that one? And Jason Greenblatt told the Times of Israel a few days ago that his draft peace plan will be heavily focused on Israeli security needs. So what I want to ask you, Daniel, is how do you see this US relationship with Israel the way it is currently and US approach to the Palestine issue as playing into decisions by the Israeli government on related issues? And what about Israeli domestic politics? I mean, we're hearing about possible early elections coming, a possible possible indictment of Netanyahu. I mean, how do you see things playing out inside of Israel on this entire issue? Swimmingly. Let me start actually with that Jason Greenblatt quote because it's perhaps one of the only things and I'm not even sure I do disagree with you on that because I'm not sure that that's what you meant, Hanan, but this point of security. I think it's very important just as to set out there from the get-go, this is not about Israeli security. This is about territorial grandisement and the permanent disenfranchisement of another people. You do not achieve security. No, I agree with you on that. Right, I thought you might. They don't understand what brings security. Exactly, you do not achieve security those ways. As you just said, Michelle, let's not pay short shrift and be unfair to previous administrations. I haven't read, Hanan just referred to a book by a friend and colleague, Seth Ansiska, called Preventing Palestine, which I haven't read yet. I'm looking forward to reading. So there is this debate over continuity and change and I think it's right to see elements of continuity but it's also very important to see the elements of change. The way I would characterize large measure of previous American policy is they would ask normally rather politely an Israeli government to do something it had absolutely no intention of doing, which is withdrawing an occupation and allowing for a sovereign Palestinian state while making absolutely clear that if Israel didn't do those things, everything else in the relationship, in the bilateral relationship would remain exactly the same. Military, political, diplomatic, financial, aid, the whole package. Leverage would not be brought into play in a significant meaningful way. It should hardly surprise us then that the standard Israeli response was if it's all the same to you, thanks but no thanks. We'll carry on doing with the Palestinians as we choose. But now the end game is different and the approach is different. And that has, as you asked, Misha, that has significant implications on the Israeli side and I think what is so significant at the moment in terms of the relationship is, yes it is underpinned by a set of personal relationships. We heard Prime Minister Netanyahu talking about sleeping at the family home of the Kushners and kind of sleeping in Jared's bedroom on visits. We have an American ambassador who I think that is, as you suggested, Hanan, a misrepresentation of his role. He basically triangulates between Netanyahu's Likud and Naftali Bennett's Jewish home and what he comes up with is more often than not American policy. But what is so significant here is how it is politically underpinned and it is politically underpinned by things that Benjamin Netanyahu has been a central player in developing over his entire political career. He is the most GOP of any Israeli politician and under Trump for the first time in an extraordinarily long tenure as Prime Minister for the first time he is cohabiting with a Republican president in the White House. So maybe we'll actually overtake David Ben-Gurion if he's still Prime Minister next summer. And for the first decade in the late 90s, Clinton, throughout the entire duration of the two terms of Obama, when Netanyahu was in power, he was cohabiting with a Democrat president. That's not the case anymore. And of course, this isn't just any Republican president because you all know better than I. But the underpinning of that in the relationship with the evangelicals, which Netanyahu, way back when he was at the UN and when he lived here, was a central figure in developing. The underpinning in the ideology that goes back a long way with the neo-conservatives and if there was any question mark as to whether this would be a neocon-free administration or not, given Trump's flirtation with withdrawal from the international stage, that was definitively laid to rest when the new national security advisor, John Bolton, was appointed. If people remember, in 1996, when Bibi first became Prime Minister, it was the neocon crew here, led by Richard Pearl and others, who were drafting that document, Strategy for a Clean Break, the Netanyahu in 96. For a new realm or something. Yeah. Third, the donor relationships, principally in the position of Sheldon Adelson, who is the most important political financial supporter. As I understand it, he's going to be the largest spender on the GOP side in this cycle. He's the largest spender, albeit it's not classified as political money through a slate of hand inside Israel. There's a new reporting pro-publica on the Japanese casino and how it meshes with his business interests, but that's a very important underpinning. And there's a new part of the underpinning, which is new to this moment in American politics, which is this outright, outright thing. This shared values shtick in illiberal democracy, majoritarianism, ethnocracy, the veering towards neo-authoritarianism, the way they view the media, the way they view many of the organs of the state. And my friend Namjad, who's here in the audience, shared with me a skit that Trevor Noah did recently. And this is really shared by Trump and Bibby. It's this shtick of the bully playing the victim. And you saw it in a recent confirmation process in this country. This idea, the way that white male victimhood is playing here is exactly how Netanyahu plays Israeli-Jewish victimhood in Israel. And that's something strong, this whole package that I've just presented to you. So it's hardly surprising that it then plays out in the kind of policies we're seeing. Now, what I would suggest is actually going on is that while it's almost like a magician's trick, while we're all distracted by this talk of an American plan, is it in four months, is it whenever, there is a plan and it's being implemented. And that's what's really going on. And if you were looking for the hidden genius of the plan, the hidden genius of the plan is that it was all put out in the public domain by Benjamin Netanyahu in June of 2009 when he gave a speech at Bariland University. It was considered a historic speech. He had just returned to the prime minister's office in Israel after a decade hiatus. And the big thing was, was he still against the Palestinian state? Bummer had just come into office. And Netanyahu in that speech made a rhetorical shift in his position. He basically said, you know what? I'll set it out for you. It's not gonna have sovereignty. There's not gonna be a withdrawal. There's not gonna be Jerusalem. There's not gonna be anything on refugees. We're gonna control it militarily. If you guys wanna call this a state, why should I be the schmock who stands up here and says, hey, it's a Bantu stand. It's not a state. So you know what? If you call it a state, I'll call it a state too. That was the shift that took place in his position. It's replete with the economic peace stuff, including, as Bibi called them, the financial involvement of the Persian Gulf states, shows a certain understanding of the region he lives in, that he talked about those countries in those terms. So I think that is the exact playbook that we're seeing. Interestingly enough, I don't think Netanyahu does want any formal plan put out there because no matter how on his side it is, the political traffic in Israel won't bear it. And this is where it's interesting because it comes back to that point about Friedman triangulating between the Jewish home of Natali Bennett and the liquid of Prime Minister Netanyahu. There is a debate in Israeli politics today that the Trump administration has played a significant role in. That debate goes from the center, and perhaps even some of the center left, right through to the deep right of Israeli politics. The consensus is that there will be nothing approximating Palestinian sovereignty, freedom, independence, rights. The point of contention is, are we on a marathon in preventing those things, or are we in a sprint to formalize the permanent dispossession of the Palestinians? Through dismantling UNRWA, through much talk of annexation, through things like Khan al-Akhma, the destruction of a Bedouin village. And the law, the nation's law. Through the state law, through the extension, which is part of it and also slightly different, but also this talk of extending Israeli law into the territories in all kinds of ways. Netanyahu's, my reading of Netanyahu, is that his default position is incremental, actually. That we're succeeding, we've done all this, there's no hurry. We've done it for 50 years, since 67. 25 years using the tools of Oslo. You guys threaten some of these achievements by going too far, too fast, and you could incur overreach. And that's the fight that's going on at the moment, and it's a fight that, in many respects, the administration here seems to have put its thumb down on the scales of the sprinters. I'm not sure whether the UNRWA thing came from the Israeli Prime Minister's office. I'm not at all sure. My tendency is to think that Friedman's back office and Mickey Haley's back office were doing this not necessarily at the behest of the Prime Minister's office. Once it happened, he jumped on board with it. Where? He talked about it quite openly. But I didn't, it wasn't really part of his shit. I don't think. Now, what, I think it incurs an element of risk, but the onus of proof is on those who want to demonstrate that this is risky because on the Israeli side, they feel they have this managed. And don't underestimate Netanyahu. At the moment, the trend seems to be that we are going to early elections in Israel. I think in the next two, three weeks, we'll have a much clearer sense of that. Netanyahu is extremely well positioned. There is an acute absence of an alternative. There's an acute absence of an opposition that is offering something different. Really, the leader of the opposition is almost Ehud Barak on Twitter, which is a remarkable thing in 2018, to be saying. And it seems, but you never know in an election, it seems he's got over the hill of the corruption stuff in terms of how that plays out publicly. I was going to say, what about the legal side of it? Yeah. The attorney general will take as long as he possibly can to begin a process of hearings with the prime minister. So it seems that that has been kicked way down into 2019. An election will postpone that further. Netanyahu, I think, well, first of all, being prime minister is now his not going into jail card, which is not an insignificant thing, right? I mean, as a motivation to stay in the prime minister's office, that's way up there. So the moment it looks like the... Decider go to jail. No, because what she's being accused of is not... I thought they decided to scapegoat her. No, I don't think so. She wasn't supposed to go to trial. Her lawyers were trying to convince her to settle this. Okay, so what I would say on Bibi is, his assumption is I win an election. Everyone knew the cloud hanging over me and I'm in a very strong position to say to my coalition allies, unless and until I'm found guilty, an indictment in and of itself, a trial should not disqualify me and that's the way he'll try to play it out. I think things would change in the absence of Bibi because he has become an important player on the world stage. We can talk about that. His ability to manage the politics here, I think has been very effective, but also very risky, because one of the things you see here is the Natanyahu partisanization, which isn't a word, but you know what I mean, making Israel into such a partisan issue in your politics, generates the potential of blowback, part of which is being realized. And I would suggest that those interested in changing things should focus the conversation around Israel on values and everything becomes a derivative of values. Two last comments on this. One, I do think it's important to note that in that rather bleak picture, the project of the administration here and in Israel is made easier by the continuation of Palestinian division at the national political level and by the apparent abandonment of Gaza. I don't know how sustainable it is for the Palestinians to be cut off, abused in every respect, to continue to take American money just for security. And for security, the Palestinian security forces read for the protection of Israel and Israelis, because that is their anointed role. And the other thing I would say, and it was just touched on, at the end of the day, as long as the Palestinians are physically there on the ground, then whatever the Kushner plan, whatever the withdrawal of funding, whoever Israeli ambassador, Ron Derma, sits next to her at Ginza dinner. I'm talking about you, you, you, Ambassador Atavi. Those things are not going to change the fundamental that there are Palestinians there and there are Israelis there and the Palestinians are not going to accept a perpetual status of inferior beings treated without a modicum of dignity. Thank you, Daniel. And by opening up this issue of the assistance, you've sort of bridged to what I wanted to ask you, Andrew. So we've been seeing some big changes as well in US assistance. So assistance to Israel has been locked in through another 10-year MOU. That's something we've seen happen repeatedly. Increasing over time now, $38 billion over 10 years. Now, assistance to the Palestinians for civilian purposes has been pretty much cut, whether UNRWA, USAID, et cetera. The assistance to Palestinian security forces still technically going forward, but now that's also threatened, I think, by this new law, under which American citizens can sue recipients of USAID. Thank you on terrorism-related issues. So I wanted to ask you about these assistance relationships, what they mean, how the United States is using them, obviously, for a lot of pressure against the Palestinians. Another little thing I wanted you to comment on was the Egypt Gaza angle, since you know Egypt so well. To what degree will Egypt play along with the idea of hiving off Gaza, taking it off the table, so to speak, making it a completely separate issue? Which I agree with Daniel, is something that the Palestinian leadership has helped to make it look like a possibility. So with respect to assistance to Israel, as is well known, towards the end of the Obama administration, we negotiated a new $38 billion, 10-year memorandum of understanding with Israel that locked in $3.8 billion per year to Israel through I think it's 2028. That amounts to something like $10 million a day in U.S. taxpayer money that's going towards Israeli security. I think that the decision behind it, at least behind the political thinking, was that it was subscribing to the idea that Israel will feel more confident in making concessions when it feels strong. I think as an empirical matter that is very much suspect, but nevertheless that is a theme in American politics, a theme in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that has permeated, that has defined the U.S. approach, that military aid is not to be used as a weapon or as a negative sanction against Israel to encourage them along. Although we saw in past administrations how U.S. assistance to Israel was used to great effect in dealing with the Egyptians and dealing with the Syrians, the prospects during the Nixon and Ford administrations under Henry Kissinger of a review of the relationship of holding the delivery of certain kinds of items that clearly had I think an impact in Israeli calculations and helped to secure some types of concessions. But the orthodoxy within the U.S. government within Congress is that only when Israel feels completely secure from a security perspective will they make those concessions. And with that deal locked in and with substantial congressional support, it's going to be difficult to use assistance as a weapon in terms of negotiations. When I say weapon as a source of influence, the only way it could be done would be by promising more as an incentive to say that we've given you $38 billion if you want more than this, if you think the security environment is changing and you want to walk in a bigger deal then we need to see some movement from you. We need to see serious negotiations. We need to see that you're willing to make the concessions that would make a two-state solution possible. I'm not particularly optimistic about that but that's the one way in which it could do it. You have the exact opposite approach with the Palestinians. And that is new to this administration, to the Trump administration. There was never any thought during the Obama administration of using assistance to the Palestinians as some sort of weapon or some sort of leverage over Palestinian behavior, over Palestinian conduct in any type of negotiations. And while Congress would have been supportive of doing that all along, there always was someone in the administration, someone in the executive branch, including the president, who understood the national security implications of doing so, that the assistance to the Palestinians was an inherent good for the American taxpayer, for U.S. national interest and that it shouldn't simply be wielded as a tool in trying to extract concessions from the Palestinians. But unfortunately, that's not the case. And if you look at the entirety of these decisions, the whole of it, how can you draw any conclusion but that this administration is seeking to turn the screws in the Palestinians in the hope that they're going to capitulate? I think what's clear is that this administration views Israeli-Palestinian relations through the prism of a bankruptcy deal. In the minds of this administration, the Palestinians have lost, that they're going bankrupt and they're gonna have to accept pennies on the dollar. The generous and the perceived generosity of previous agreements and obviously that's historically contested as well, not even those we put on the table. The Clinton parameters know what Secretary Kerry was floating in one way or another. No, that's too generous. The Palestinians are gonna have to accept something less than a sovereign state and they have no choice because they lost. That is the mentality of this particular administration. And I think it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of a problem, of the problem. And this is similar to what Daniel was saying. You can't treat international relations. You can't treat an international negotiation as a business deal. There are fundamental differences, one of which is it's difficult in international relations to have an objective standard of failure. In the business sector, it's relatively easy. You know that by a certain date, if you don't have more money coming in, you can't pay your expenses. When does the Palestinian movement fail? And if you look at it a broader historical context and on as you live through, people were saying similar things about the Palestinians in the mid-80s when Arafat was consigned to Tunis, that the Palestinians' moment had passed and that the situation fundamentally changed. Then we had the first intifada. So it's by no means clear that even though the situation looks very bleak for the Palestinian people, that there won't be a recovery, that they won't be able to regain some leverage in what's taking place. I think a second important difference is there's no limited liability in international relations. If you're running a business and you can protect your personal assets from the eventual settlement, you declare bankruptcy, you lose your corporate assets, but your home is probably not gonna be taken. This is a very personal business and Yitzhak Rabin has seen this and where Sadat has seen this, there were attempts on Arafat's life. These leaders cannot make these decisions and expect that they can continue their private lives. This is a very serious business. This is not something that you can simply cast aside. I think the third difference, and it's somewhat similar, is unlike a bankruptcy, there's no starting over in terms of a national movement. The Palestinians can't redefine their nation and try to negotiate a new two-state agreement. The Palestinians can't move to another place and try to create a new state in the same way that a failed business could rename itself or they could open themselves up under a different jurisdiction. And I think the fourth and final difference is the nature of those transactions is such that you can't, I'm thinking of a more perhaps diplomatic way to put this, but maybe I shouldn't bother, but there needs to be an appreciation that in the final analysis, you can't rely on the idea that everything is marketable. So in a business transaction, in real estate, there's a difference between a Park Avenue penthouse and a shack in Kansas. One costs more than the other, but they're ultimately the same kind. Jerusalem, an identity issue that's important to Palestinians, is a priceless object. You can't just trade them off of each other and that's what this administration seems to think, that okay, we gave Jerusalem to the Israelis, we'll compensate the Palestinians with something else as if Jerusalem could be defined in terms of compensatable terms that simply giving the Palestinians a few more percent of the land or by allowing them to have a slightly larger police force that would somehow address the Palestinian concerns. It doesn't work that way, but we have in President Trump, someone who's come from this world, this real estate world, David Friedman, his ambassador, his personal real estate attorney, Jason Greenblatt, who worked for the Trump Organization was heavily involved in real estate and these issues. They don't have the background and I know many people who have government experience have been derided in this particular context and everyone up in this dais has had it, but it does mean something. There are differences in the same way that I wouldn't want someone to welcome me into the business world having never served there and expect to apply the same lessons that I learned from statecraft and diplomacy, but in the arrogance of the minds of the current administration, you can simply apply those. So I think it's a very problematic dynamic in that regard and it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what's taking place and ultimately this is not going to be a bankruptcy. The Palestinians are not going to fold. They're going to reinsert themselves one way or another and it may not be to the benefit of the Palestinians themselves, to the Israelis, to the Americans, to anyone else, but the problem isn't going to be defined away. The problem is not going to be resolved by capitulation. This is going to be an ongoing problem that requires management and this particular administration, unfortunately, is doing everything they can to make things worse. And Hanan, when you were speaking, I was reminded of a, to show my age a Simpsons quote where Homer Simpson says there are three ways to do things. There's the right way, there's the wrong way and then there's a Homer Simpson way and then his daughter says, well, isn't the Homer Simpson way the wrong way? It said yes, but it's faster and I think that's what this administration is doing. It's the Homer Simpson way. They're pursuing the wrong course but faster than previous administrations have done. That is the fundamental approach to what's taking place. And we have to be clear that on these specific assistance issues that have been mentioned before, the Taylor Force Act, Michelle, you mentioned the Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act, this new piece of legislation not specific to the Palestinians, but that would give American citizens standing in US courts against foreign entities that accept US assistance. And importantly, this has implications for the Palestinian security forces because the PA is gonna be confronted with a situation where they either have to continue to accept the assistance while accepting that they're going to be in legal jeopardy in US courts or they're gonna have to turn away that assistance, which has been very important to their ability to operate in order to protect themselves from that legal jeopardy. So it's very much a deeply problematic action. And Michelle, you said at the outset that Congress has been doing this for a while. And I think in past administrations, with a wall like that coming forward, what you would have seen is engagement from the administration. And they may not have been able to kill it, but they would have included a waiver, for instance, where the administration could say that we're waiving the provisions of this term because it's in the national security of interest of the United States to continue providing the Palestinian security forces with assistance while at the same time ensuring that they're not gonna come into legal jeopardy. But there was no effort, as far as I know, on the part of the administration to qualify that law, to try to get Congress to tone it down so they would have flexibility. Unfortunately, that's not what's taken place. But make no mistake, these assistance decisions taken together are a political act. They are trying to pressure the Palestinians. They're trying to bring them to their knees in the hopes that they're gonna capitulate to this vision that Benjamin Netanyahu subscribes to, that right-wing Israelis subscribe to, that some American Jews, and including American Jews in this administration, as well as evangelical Christians, view as the ultimate end state of what should take place. And the consequences could be explosive. We really even haven't discussed the UNRWA decision of depth. I mean, we've decided to get out of the business of supporting UNRWA. What does UNRWA do? They're supporting refugees across the region. 1.3 million. Right, services. Yes, exactly. Services provided to them. And this is not money that's even going to the PA. This is going to a UN organization to attempt to improve the situation on the ground. You have 1.3 million in Gaza, 800,000 in the West Bank, over 2 million in Jordan, 400,000 in Lebanon, 500,000 in Syria. What do they expect is going to happen? Even if the administration's focus was on punishing the Palestinians, you're also punishing the Jordanians. You're punishing the Lebanese. You're punishing the Syrians. Nicholas Burton, the former Under Secretary of State, said this is diplomatic malpractice. I agree. It's diplomatic malpractice on an epic scale. It's hard to see how this isn't going to blow back against US interests. And that's incredibly problematic. Turning to the question of Gaza and Egypt, I think the current Egyptian leadership has made pains not to alienate President Trump. They're perfectly happy to alienate the US government but President Sisi wants to maintain his personal relationship with President Trump. And what that means is he's reluctant to say no. But there's a difference between not saying no and saying yes. And he may not have delivered a clear no that I'm not willing to go on with this. But I can't take on responsibility. Exactly. I can't imagine for the life of me that the Egyptians are going to take on the responsibility of Gaza. The longtime Egyptian position has been Gaza's and Israeli problem. Why are we dealing with it? You created this problem. You should be responsible for managing what's taking place there. You should bear the expenses. Additionally, Egypt has been involved in an extended insurgency in the Sinai where they're trying to battle militants. And the Egyptians rightly or wrongly believe that's being fed by Gaza. Why would they assume responsibility from that territory which they believe is the source of the problems? What they want is to get rid of Gaza. They don't want to take it in. So I find it highly, highly unlikely that the Egyptians would agree to do so. But you also have an Egyptian government that's made some pretty surprising mistakes as well. So I can't say it's a zero probability. But I rank it very low. OK. Thank you very much. We are going to open up now to your questions. If you have one, put your hand up. I see one in the first row here. Please introduce yourself and state your question with a question mark. Thanks, Michelle. I'll try. My name is Amjad Attala. I'm president of Vortex International and the managing director of the Doha Debates. Thank you for a great presentation. I wanted to ask you a forward-looking question, especially for Dr. Ashrawyan for Daniel. And I want to congratulate Carnegie, actually, because a lot of your work on this issue is very forward-looking. In the United States, the response to the current government for those who oppose its policies have been, with a gross generalization, broken up into two camps. Those who are like, we need to get back to the day before the election when everything was fantastic. And those who say that, actually, things that happened before the election were pretty bad. And that's why we got this. We need something very different. That wing of the resistance, so to speak, or that wing of the response, has taken on the Palestinian issue far more strongly and adamantly as a rights issue. So they've taken on the march of return in Gaza. They've taken on the issue of equality inside Israel, and Israel being a citizen state rather than a Jewish state. My question to both of you is, for you, Dr. Ashrawyan, when the Palestinian, when the PLO's executive committee meets and discusses strategy going forward, how does it imagine a future? Is it just waiting for this administration to be out of office and then hoping for a kind of return to a carry world where you'll have carry shuttling back and forth and negotiating between the Israelis and the Palestinians? Or does it have something broader in mind in light of all the changed circumstances? And for Daniel, I think the question is the same for the American Jewish community in particular. It seems that they've been replaced with the evangelical community as the constituency for the Israeli government. And where in the past, the Israeli government would respond very heavily on how American Jews felt. Majority of American Jews are Democrats. Majority of American Jews are progressives. And yet, so they don't support the policies of a Benjamin Netanyahu. But at the same time, the evangelical community does. How does that replacement of the two communities as a domestic constituency for a foreign government play out, you think, in a forward-looking policy? Let's take, I'd like to take a couple of more questions. There's one here and one in the front row. This one and this one, and then we'll come back for more. Thank you very much, Benjamin, to a no-current affiliation. I'd like to ask the panelists about the administration's Jerusalem decision and its consequences, one of which was opening an embassy office in West Jerusalem. Shortly after the US administration made its decision, Russia also made a pronouncement, I believe it was President Putin who made it, saying that they recognized West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. I understand that the French have made a statement also. I'm not so sure about the Chinese or the Brits. It seems to me that these various statements are kind of a lead to an acceptance of a division of Jerusalem along some lines. And if one reads the President's statement, our President's statement, it was very carefully worded not to preclude that possibility. Hi. I'm Deborah Shushan from Americans for Peace Now. And so my question is about the Arab states, actually. And I want to focus here specifically really on the Gulf states, the Saudis, especially the Emiratis. I'm wondering how far, it seems like the Netanyahu and Trump administrations feel pretty secure that the Saudis in particular, especially their man in Riyadh, MBS, who's, of course, very much in the news right now, is prepared to sell the Palestinians down the river and to deliver them. My question is, how far do you think the leaders in the Arab world are prepared to go? Some of them are weak, obviously. Others are preoccupied with Iran. How far would they want to go? How far would their publics allow them to go? And Dr. Shrawi, what is the Palestinian leadership doing to reach out to the Arab leaders and also to their populations to try to kind of stem what appears to be this tide? Thank you. All right, let's answer these questions. We'll come back for more. Would you like to go first, or would you like to answer any of these? Yeah, they're not easy questions. They're not easy, because the first question I said, and it's an implied statement. Look, the Palestinian leadership has very few options. First of all, they cannot play the game with the Trump administration. They cannot accept in any way and survive anything having to do, as you said, with Jerusalem. And we'll go back to the issue of Jerusalem, because, and here I might digress, because we are not happy with the Russian position, by the way. And it's not that Trump left things open. Only when you have a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital can you then deal with the status of all of Jerusalem. But you cannot decide ahead of time, because all of Jerusalem is Corpus separatum, still. And no country recognizes any part of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Nobody did, until Trump did. And then Guatemala and others. But the issue is that Jerusalem, in itself, you cannot come and preempt it now and say, okay, we recognize West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. No, you can't, because that's illegal. We discuss all of Jerusalem, and then if you want to change its legal status, then it's East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine and West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. There is a logic to why nobody did that. And the fact that Putin said, well, we recognize the Palestinian state and therefore, it doesn't work that way at all. It's just a justification. But they still haven't moved their embassy to West Jerusalem, the Russians. And the land on which the, by the way, it's still a consulate, right? And Friedman just goes in there, I think once or twice a week, and goes into his office, closes the door, disappears, and then opens the door and leaves. So even the consulate staff don't know what he's doing. But it is a sort of in-your-face position, and he did it, he made sure he did it on May 15th to tell the Palestinian people, this is a victory for the Israelis and your Nakba is continuing, the day of the Nakba. The Palestinian leadership do not control all the components. Everybody asks, what are you doing? Where is your next agenda? Where will you head now? Why don't you? And there were many suggestions and many, many papers written, and you should abandon the two-state solution. You should dissolve the PA, you should do this and that. And you should make it into a purely rights issue and accept the fact that there is an emerging one-state solution, an apartheid state, or how do we turn it into a bi-national state? How do we turn it into different types of configurations as you know? And you've read all the documents I've read on the Carnegie paper along with the Rice Institute. The whole issue has been explored, but so far I haven't seen a political plan. I have seen, look, the two-state solution is the most convenient political program because everybody can say, I've committed to the two-state solution, I've done my national duty, I recognize the fact that Palestinians have to have their own state, but they don't do anything about it. And Israel has nothing to lose by maintaining this creeping annexation and ending the two-state solution. As you said, there's no cost. On the contrary, the rewards are still ongoing, including the Europeans than it. So in a sense, this mantra, this frozen sort of construct of the two-state solution is verbally very convenient. You don't have to do anything. All you need to do is say, I'm for the two-state solution and you hear that you hear that from many people and you stand aside and you allow Israel to destroy it and to expand and so on, and you don't even use any punitive measures, you don't hold Israel accountable, you don't engage with the Palestinians and then you tell the Palestinians what do you propose to do about it? And if Israel destroyed the two-state solution, they don't say, well, Israel has to pay the price. They say, why don't you wax creative? Why don't you think Palestinians are ways out? We always have the honest, we have to prove that having been persuaded and controlled and pressured and sometimes blackmailed into accepting the solution and now it is destroyed, despite all these promises, and I'm a historical witness, no? Not the historic, it's the historical one. A witness to all the promises made from many countries and international organizations. Successively, I mean, gradually over the years, all you need to do is accept two for two to three. We said, we'll accept one at one. In the 70s, we said, no, you can't accept one at one. You have to accept two for two to three. We said, 67 boundaries, we can't. I mean, no, you have to accept that. You have to postpone it. The whole dynamic of the international peacemaking agenda and of the international political agenda was always make the Palestinians prove that they deserve some rights. Make the Palestinians prove that they are good little boys and girls and they will play the game the way we have designed it. And as I said, one of the ongoing fallacies and erroneous assumptions by the Palestinian leaders of historically since that famous date in which Abu Ammar agreed in 1988, not just to the two-state solution, but to denounce tourism, that this... Announce tourism. No, he said he would, he said he denounced tourism and they told him you have to renounce terrorism. Yeah, you automatically mean to tell. So ever since that acceptance, there has been just a series of requests and demands and so on. And the Palestinian leadership felt that there are guarantees that the Americans of international community, they brought us to this situation and so we have to show good faith, see the instance of intent, you have to play the game. And this has been, I think, the downfall from the beginning that the answer we gave Nelson when they offered us the civil administration should have been given the Americans and the Israelis. And the signing of the Declaration of Principles began a downhill struggle. And the Palestinian leadership was trapped. As I said, it's that, it's taken everything on that. The DOP adopted the functional approach. I don't want to go into that. Not the territorial approach. Adopted the phased approach without assurances or guarantees. Departed from basic rights, including the right to self-determination and all the objectives that the Palestinians wanted. And so on. There are many things wrong and you know my position on the DOP. So the peacemaking process became, gained the life of its own, became a process, went off, Israel used it. It was very convenient for Israel to expand and to gain rewards. And don't bother me. I'm engaged in a delicate peace process, in delicate negotiations and so on. And again, they got all the rewards in advance. Everything they wanted. And the peace process proceeded to become a very punitive process and destroyed the very foundation and the objective of the negotiations. Still now people tell us, you have to go back to negotiations. What negotiations? So now that everything has been in many ways negated and all the promises and all this miraculous solutions, all you need to do is recognize Israel and see what happens. It's like David Friedman telling, what was it King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? Why don't you issue a peace initiative and talk about recognizing Israel and you will see how the whole world will stand. Now, many people are telling us, why don't you just sit back and accept the occupation and say all we want is equal rights and the whole world will stand with you? My answer, and I told you that before, when we are being killed and our land was being stolen and civilians were being bombed and innocent people were being sniped, the whole world didn't stand with us. They didn't say this cruel occupation has to end. Just because they're practicing discrimination which they're doing anyway. You think the world will stand with us and say the Palestinians are really right, they need the state within Israel or they need equal rights within Israel? I haven't seen a single plan that is workable to create a one state solution. Have you seen a plan that's still workable to create a two state solution? The plan was there and it was workable but there were no people, there were no takers and there was no political will to implement it. It is the most planned thing. That's why I said it is a convenient plan but reality is the most difficult reality generated by the two state solution. While the one state solution is the most theoretically discussed, the most, I've read so many works from Mossberg to others on the one state solution but I haven't seen a work plan. I haven't seen a political agenda. I haven't seen a conversion of the Palestinians into a willingness to live within Israel and struggle for equal rights. You ask me my personal opinion, I don't want to be an Israeli. I don't. I want to be a Palestinian, I want to be free. I want to end the occupation and then I will see whether I want to re-engage or not with the Israeli. I know it's becoming more and more difficult to end the occupation but at the same time what's happening is a de facto one state. But Israel as it exists is already an apartheid state and the basic law, the nation state basic law has demonstrated it clearly that this is where they're heading. This is what they want and Israel has had a long history of discrimination I guess indigenous Palestinian people in Israel and it's a very intricate system of discrimination and they are citizens of Israel and they have no rights, economic, political, legal and now they are legislating against them in more ways than one. So if we turn our struggle not into a struggle for liberation, for freedom, for dignity, for self-determination we turn it into equal rights with Israeli citizens. What is the plan? How do you want to achieve overlapping sovereignty? How do you achieve parallel sovereignty? Who are your partners, who are your takers? What is the legal foundation? What are the basis on which you work? So now we have a very limited hand to deal with and we don't all agree on everything frankly. I just came, we had a long, long series of meetings but we had several committees and I was in charge of working on a committee on how to deal with the Americans and the international community and one on how to redefine our relationship with Israel. First, we have to stop taking any money from Israel and we should have stopped taking money for security in the first place from the US, from America, from the US because they still see us as the guardians of Israeli security and we still see the Palestinian security unable to protect the Palestinian people but held responsible for the security of the settlers and the army. And I can give you thousands of examples that has undermined not just the security forces themselves but the Palestinian leadership as a whole. So the first thing we should have refused was money from the US for the security. All we need is a civilian police force since we are in a functional state where all you do is deliver services and build institutions and civilian police force that's all to maintain law and order, protect property and so on people's lives, fight crime. Why should we have these inflated security? This is one thing. We define the economic relationship with Israel and we are doing that and we have several plans on the issue of the Paris Protocols that have maintained the relationship of dependency. The civil relationship and that is extremely complex because in addition to the security of course because the civil relationship involves many things including the birth of the popular people, population register and so on and the issue of the land and the issue of water there are all sorts of things that now we are looking into. I don't want to talk about all the details but it is, we are working on something that is a game changer. Now, Abu Mazen said it openly that once we begin implementing these plans that there'll be a big price to pay. Because we are changing the rules of the game. We're saying he said it in a very simple way at the UN where he said nobody, I mean the Americans are in act on their commitments. The Israelis violated all agreements. Why should we be held accountable? Why should we be held responsible for an agreement that doesn't exist by the way? That an agreement that should have ended a long time ago. So in addition to all these things we're thinking of as I said the population register, the land register, all sorts of things that even the currency when it comes to the Paris protocol and so on. But it means that we have begun to see that the world has ejected this approach and have allowed Israel to destroy it. So we are trying to find another approach. But it's very serious because if the consequences are enormous then you are violating your responsibility to maintain people's ability to stay on the land. And I told you this, to me this is very important. Palestinians have to stay resilient. And you said this, they're not going away anywhere. Palestinians are staying and they may be oppressed, they may be bashed, they may be deprived and so on, but they're not going to surrender. And nobody can deliver us whether it's MBS or anybody else, that's an illusion. And I think they discovered that despite all promises made to the Americans, when the Americans touched the issue of Jerusalem, they placed their own allies face to face with their own constituency. And with the rest of the Arab and Muslim world and so on. So they made it very difficult for their own allies to play the American game and to deliver the Palestinian. So now there are different approaches. We can talk about this later. Once we discuss them in the Central Council on the 28th and 29th, you will see a new approach but that's not an approach that deals with one state or two states. That's an approach that says, how do we protect the Palestinian people? How do we maintain the integrity of the cause? And primary among that of course is healing the rift and the division. But that takes two sides also to heal that rift and non-interference by others. But right now already plans are being carried out to deliver to Gaza through Hamas and through the UN. Funding and so on. And they've already begun that. So it's as if they're acting de facto as though Gaza is already a suffered entity. Hanan, we're just about out of time and I do wanna give Daniel and Andrew a chance to say a last word on any of these questions and I really have to apologize deeply to the audience that we're not gonna be able to take more questions because we're always very committed to ending on time. But Daniel, Andrew, do you have anything you wanna add on the questions that were raised? So, I do take issue with the depicting of Trump's statement as being carefully constructed. It was... And Jerusalem. Not just because those words always go together. But it was very blunt. It talked exclusively about Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. It did not say where Israeli sovereignty ends and Palestinian sovereignty begins. So there wasn't a window there. Just to comment on your question, Deborah, I think, and I'm just touched on it. This isn't about selling out Palestinians. It's not about selling Palestinians, that's not new. The question that was raised now is, can you buy the Palestinians? And that they couldn't deliver on. However, I would also point out that in the Israeli domestic political context, and there's all kinds of things going on in Intel cooperation that's unprecedented and in spyware and... With Arab states. With Arab states that being able to repress your own publics, et cetera. Israel's a market leader in this. But when it comes to Bibi's narrative, he's got what he needs. As long as he can point to some delegation every so often, some ambassador sitting next to someone, someone appearing publicly with someone, he's selling point to the Israelis is, I have managed our global equities in ways that no one thought possible, certainly not under circumstances of pursuing this kind of policy to the Palestinians. Just to briefly address what you asked, I don't think it's swapping out the Jews for the evangelicals. It's important that you have a cohort of Jewish Republicans who are born into this. And it's important that, and I think this is still a truism. That they're minority. Well, they're a minority and that's the orthodox minority in the community. But I think it's also important to point out, and I think it is true to say, that the center of gravity of the involved American Jewish establishment has not shifted dramatically on this question, on how one relates to Israel and the Palestinians. And a significant and deeply disturbing proof of that is when you see organizations like the ADL lining up with devastatingly egregious efforts to redefine antisemitism in ways that can only be understood as closing and policing a conversation about Israeli policies, Israeli violations of international law that have nothing to do with antisemitism. And in this environment, in the environment of America in 2018 and the kind of forces you see on the ride to be playing that kind of a game with antisemitism, that's sick in my judgment. And so unfortunately to my mind, those changes aren't happening enough, but the bet, the bet that Netanyahu is making is if there is a silent majority that is disgusted by, amongst American Jews, that is disgusted by this symbiosis between Netanyahu's Israel and Trump's America, Israel will not be an important enough issue for that constituency. And that's the bet he's laying. He's laying a bet that he can lose not just liberal American Jewry, but liberal Jewry around the world. And that is okay. So if you detain Peter Beinart of Ben-Gurion Airport, if you spend a heck of a lot of money on delegitimizing the liberals who do care about Israel, that's good enough. Lara Friedman is following this very closely. Bear in mind that it's not just US governmental aid money, but look at what is happening in terms of trying to create a whole new legal infrastructure for rendering beyond the law and making it impossible to fund work in the space of defending Palestinian rights here and globally. And these are very significant forces which doesn't detract from the fact that one should be optimistic and confident and encouraged by what you pointed to by the people who aren't saying, hey, how do we get back to status quo anti but rather how on this issue and a number of other issues, how does one look forward? And why that has the potential of being significant is that along with the narrative about, look at what I'm achieving, that Netanyahu's narrative, look what I'm achieving in the region with the Gulf States, et cetera, that's a broader narrative about progress that Israel under his leadership has made internationally. But one has to bear in mind all those other relationships with, whether it's with what I call anti-Semites for Israel, in Hungary, in Poland, elsewhere, whether it's thugs like Duterte in the Philippines, whether it's in very important powers, like Modi's India, like China, those relationships are transactional vis-a-vis Israel. The relationship with America was always more than that. And if you play with, and always more important than any of those other relationships put together, and if you play with this relationship and it goes south, you have undermined one of Israel's most important global equities, that's the gamble he's taking and it's up to Americans to decide whether it works out or not. Andrew, do you have a last thoughts? Just three quick points on the questions. One, in terms of Trump's statement on Jerusalem, I think whatever ambiguity existed that could have been constructed has since been defined away. I mean, he's explicitly said multiple times he's taken Jerusalem off the table. And that doesn't make sense if you're talking about West Jerusalem. West Jerusalem was never on the table. There was never a Palestinian claim in modern times to West Jerusalem. So it seems pretty clear that he's moving towards taking all of what we understand as the original boundaries of Jerusalem and vesting it in Israeli sovereignty. Second, in terms of the reaction to that decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem, it's actually been fairly underwhelming. Vanuatu, the great power of Vanuatu, are recognized Jerusalem as a capital. They don't even have a presence in Israel so there is no embassy. Guatemala is the one country that has moved their embassy since then. Paraguay was going to and then reversed the decision and then there's been a lot of other talk but you haven't seen the flood of recognition that Netanyahu thought would happen. He thought America was a golden key and as soon as we recognize Israel, all of these other countries would line up behind it. So far that hasn't happened. We'll see what time does if present conditions continue but we haven't seen that immediate reaction. And then finally on the question of the Arab states, I think generally speaking it's unlikely that the Arab states are going to formally recognize Israel or take those steps but as Daniel notes, that's not what BB needs for his domestic political purposes. I will note one caveat though and this was not a caveat I would have introduced it say a year ago. MBS as we've seen is completely unpredictable, completely impulsive. The idea that Saudi Arabia would recognize Israel in any shape or form prior to us would have been unthinkable two years ago but can we really put anything past MBS? I mean what we've seen so far is that- King Salman is still alive, just saying. King Salman pulled them back and August put on a statement saying- Took the file from him. Yes. I told him the Palestinian issue is not yours. And he came out and said Jerusalem, there needs to be a capital in East Jerusalem, there needs to be a fair equitable solution to the refugee problem but King Salman won't be around forever and if MBS assumes the throne and he continues in his reckless ways, you can't rule out the possibility. I'm not saying it's a high likelihood or probable but we can't completely dismiss the possibility that Saudi Arabia could do something like that. And I don't think that means others fall over in the wake. I don't see Jordan accepting the terms even though they have relations, I don't see Egypt doing it, Iraq isn't, Syria isn't going to do it, Lebanon isn't going to do it, North Africa isn't going to do it but in Saudi Arabia, you have this unique combination of circumstances but broadly speaking, the Arabs are getting what they want from Israel, they don't need to take that step. As Daniel alluded to, they're getting the cooperation they need, they're getting the diplomatic support, why pay more than is necessary? So for the most part with that one exception, I think that trend is going to continue. Please join me in thanking our panel, Dr. Hanana Shourie and the lady.