 So good morning and welcome to the 2023 North University Peace and War Middle East Summit. But thank you very much for your attendance, for those that are here in person and for those of you that are joining virtually, we welcome you and glad you're able to join us from all over the United States and the world. So welcome. So it is my pleasure to introduce the third session. My name is Dr. Travis Morris. I'm an associate professor here at North University and I'm the director for the Peace and War Center. And we've had two fantastic sessions already this morning and very much looking forward to the session and the insights that our distinguished guests and our own faculty members will bring to this particular session. So the way the session will run, I'll just do a quick interview. I'll introduce, excuse me, introduction. I'll introduce our panelists. And then the format will be our two distinguished scholars. We'll give about a 15-minute presentation and then we'll have an eight-minute discussant comments and then we're going to open it for a question and answer from you in the audience. So you see these two mics and when we get to the end of the discussant's comments, please feel free to move forward and ask your questions. This is a unique opportunity for those of you that are in the room. So it is my distinct honor and pleasure just to introduce our panelists. So Dr. Guy Zeeve, he's an associate professor at American University School of International Service where he teaches courses on U.S. foreign policy, international negotiations, U.S.-Israel relations and Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. He has received multiple outstanding teaching awards and his current research project focuses on civil military relations in Israel. He has a background in policy and has worked on Capitol Hill and for Israel Policy Forum, which is a non-for-profit, non-partisan organization that promotes American efforts aimed at resolving the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. His articles have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, blogs and major newspapers and news sites. He also appears regularly as a commentator in leading media outlets. Welcome. Our next distinguished panelist, Dr. Jeremy Pressman, he studies international relations, protests, the Arab-Israeli conflict and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. He's co-founded and co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium and Event Counting Project that has tallied and made publicly available data on all manner of protests in the United States since 2017. He's published several books and I'll read several titles. The Sword is Not Enough, Arabs, Israelis and the Limits of Military Force, Security, Point of No Return, the Deadly Struggle for Middle East Peace and Warring Friends, Alliance Restraint and International Politics. He has also published journal articles in Cooperation and Conflict, Diplomatic History, International Security, Perspectives on Politics, Science Advances, Social Movement Studies and many other publication venues. Dr. Nicholas Roberts is a historian of the modern Middle East and the Islamic world. He is an assistant professor of history at Norwich University. And for this academic year, 2022 through 2023, the inaugural W. Nathaniel Howell Post-Archival Fellow in Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia, he's the recipient of that prestigious fellowship. His current book project, A Sea of Wealth, Said Said bin Sultan, his Omani Empire and the making of an oceanic marketplace draws upon research in a dozen archives across four continents. This book uses the reign of Oman's longest serving ruler as a lens for highlighting the Omani Empire's formative role in uniting the Atlantic and Indian oceans into a shared oceanic marketplace. And this is a crucial step in modern global capitalism's rise. Let's give them all a round of applause. And I welcome Dr. Zeve to the podium. The floor is yours, sir. Thank you, Travis, for the nice introduction. Thank you, Professor Aku and the organizers of this wonderful summit. I have my phone with me here, so I'm gonna try to stick within the 15-minute allotment of time I was given. I've been asked to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. And since there hasn't been any peacemaking in many, many years, I'm gonna talk about the ideas that are out there, which are not really new, but nevertheless continue to stir debate, especially among academics and policy analysts as to how is this conflict, is this conflict ever gonna be resolved and so how? And traditionally, the two-state solution has been seen as kind of the paradigm for resolving this conflict. And we've seen one U.S. president after another from Bill Clinton through President Biden endorsing this sort of solution as have most Israeli prime ministers and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. However, the peace process has really not materialized since April 2014, which is when it last collapsed. And so with more and more settlements, Jewish settlements spreading in the West Bank and with all around pessimism among both Israelis and Palestinians, there has increasingly been this kind of notion out there that the two-state solution is quote unquote dead or dying and increasingly people have spoken about the one state, the so-called one-state solution. So that's the focus of my talk this morning and the paper I wrote that coincides with this talk. Today, there are over 500,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank that's a 16% increase over the last five years. And that has led many to conclude that a contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank is no longer an option and that therefore the one-state solution, a state that is equal to all is kind of the way to go. And what I argue is that given the disparate versions of this so-called one-state solution and the fact that it is very unpopular among both Palestinian and Israelis, it's basically a non-solution. That's kind of my main argument here. What we are seeing is a binational state in the making. And so even though it is not a solution, we are seeing Israel becoming de facto a sort of binational state. Geographer, I'm known so far, he's a very prominent Israeli geographer just last August so that there are now 7.53 million Arab Israelis and Palestinians and only 7.45 million Jews which is less than 47% of the population in the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. So we're talking about parity in Israel essentially heading inexorably toward this kind of binational reality which would be a blow to the Zionist project. The idea that Israel was meant to be both a Jewish and a democratic state and that is increasingly coming under attack for multiple reasons that are beyond the scope of this presentation although I'd be happy to address questions about the current legal overhaul in Israel which is contributing to this kind of threat that Israeli democracy is facing. Now the idea of a Jewish Arab binational state is not new. We have seen its origins dating back to 1915 with the Hashomer Hatzair movement, a movement that was comprised primarily of Polish Jews and exile to realize a binational socialist society in Palestine was their dream. In the 1920s, there was a small organization called Britshalom which was composed of primarily Jewish intellectuals that aimed to create a state for two nations. And there was even a political party in the 1940s called Ehud that advocated a binational state. The problem with all these kind of binational or one state solution advocates at the time was they never really had any Arab takers and even among Jews in Palestine it was a very unpopular position. And so organizations like Britshalom for example never really numbered more than a hundred despite the fact that as I mentioned some of its advocates were actually well-known figures in Jewish society. So one of my main arguments here about the kind of modern rendition of the one state solution is that given the disparate ideas of what that means it is not really much of a solution. So one model that I look at is the model that I call political inclusion with equality. And we have seen a number of Arab as well as Jewish intellectuals embracing this idea given that the two state solution does not appear to be very viable. And we've seen Zionist cyber a long time Palestinian intellectual who used to advocate a two state solution give up on that idea and instead support this idea of a binational state. The late Edward Said in 1999 said that a separate Palestinian state was simply unworkable and instead both Jews and Arabs would need to learn how to share the land in a truly democratic way with equal rights for each citizen. Jewish intellectuals as well Tony Jude, the late Tony Judt and Ian Lustig currently an academic who's been writing a lot about the kind of death of the two state solution and also advocates the one state solution. One of the problems with this kind of idea of an inclusive state with equality for everyone is that very few Palestinians support it about 26% of Palestinians today favor the solution and even fewer Israeli Jews support it only 14% Jewish Israelis favor of it even as their support for a two state solution has dwindled. And it is specifically a highly problematic concept for Israeli Jews. One of my colleagues here who's gonna speak after me, Jeremy Pressman noted as well in one of his writings why would Jewish Israelis willingly forfeit the advantages they enjoy in a system that privileged them and there is a Fatah activist, Ahmed Naim who once pointed out that in one state one of us Israelis or Palestinians will feel the need to dominate the other. And I think this is one of the kind of driving forces behind the opposition in Israeli society to this sort of solution. There is also a different model out there in Israel among the more religious or conservative Israeli Jews and that is this idea of political inclusion with a Jewish identity. In other words, they're looking at annexation of the West Bank or at least parts of the West Bank and full rights for both nations. So this is something we saw for example, several of the Likud, the dominant Likud parties Knesset members have embraced this idea. The former president of Israel Ruby Rivlin also embraced this idea. It would be a fully democratic state as far as they're concerned but they wanna make it clear that it would be a Jewish state as well. And finally you have a model of political exclusion. So this would be a Jewish state with no pretense to having any sort of equality for Arabs in this kind of new state if such a new state were created or the existing state of Israel plus the West Bank, equality would simply not be something that they would be interested in. Here we see in this kind of most extreme solution actually some of the current far-right ministers in the new Netanyahu government embrace this vision and that includes finance minister Bezalel Smotrich who said, if we have to choose between democratic and Jewish, I have no doubt what I would choose. Others such as Itamar Ben-Gvir who's a national security minister think likewise. And as I mentioned at the start, the idea is very, very unpopular. None of these visions, none of these models of a one state solution are popular with either population. And so this last model that I mentioned has only 22% of Israelis favoring it even though that has gone up from 15% in 2017. Alarming to some advocates of democracy of course but still we're talking about a relatively small population in Israel who embrace it. So to conclude, several kind of takeaway points here. One is that the visions of the one state solution that the various visions that are out there are simply not compatible with one another. They're irreconcilable. There is no widespread support for a one state solution regardless of the political model that is envisioned here. And no agreement means no solution. So even though Israel as I mentioned is moving inexorably towards this kind of binational one state reality, by no means should we call it a solution. This is a recipe for just more strife and we've seen quite a bit of it taking place not just between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip but also within Israeli society itself including Arab citizens of Israel and the Arab residents, the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. And so if the one state solution is not a solution and is not viable and is not likely to take place, what about the two state solution? Is it really dead? And here the jury is still out. The Journal of Foreign Affairs had a little symposium recently that pointed to major disagreements over this question. Scholars and other intellectuals who were invited to participate were pretty much split on this question. And what I can tell you is that the Israeli security establishment, and I'm referring specifically to the Israeli security community of former senior members of the IDF, former generals, former heads of the Mossad intelligence agency and former heads of the Shin Bet domestic security agency are basically the agreement that a two state solution may not be in the cards right now but that the idea for the two state solution can be kept alive by steps that they would like to see their government take that their government has not yet taken that may be unilateral at first before there is a resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians, but steps that would prevent Israel from turning into a binational state that can keep the two state solution alive. And even today where trust is at an all time low and there's plenty of pessimism on both sides, the idea of a two state solution is still the most accepted solution even if it's not embraced by a majority on either side for resolving the conflict. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Dr. Pressman, the floor is yours. First, I just want to thank the center and Norwich University for a warm welcome and a kind introduction. It's really a pleasure to be with you today. I'll take a quick drink of water and get this frog out of my throat here. You know, I'm going to move to kind of the big picture of U.S. foreign policy. One critique that we could think about would be the kinds of questions about the ethics of meddling in other countries and that's really important but I want to in just the next few minutes I have focused on a different type of question which is a practical question which is about does U.S. military intervention in the region even work or is it possible that U.S. intervention over the history of U.S. foreign intervention has actually just continued a cycle of instability and insecurity. And personally I tend to lean towards the idea that it has although I have to say I at least today want to think about some of the plausible pathways and leave this question with each of you to think about because I think it's one of the central questions we need to always be thinking about in terms of U.S. foreign policy, the practicality of it. I specifically address this question in terms of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. I selected this case and there's other cases that we could talk about but I selected this case because I think it helps tease out the particular aspect that I'm interested in and that aspect is thinking about if it's true or if it's plausible that U.S. policy sometimes leads to greater insecurity. What are the specific reasons that that's the case? I mean even if we make some broad contention that it worsens the situation, what might the specific pathways be that do that? And I consider this question against the backdrop of a number of scholars over the years who have thought about this not just in the Middle East but thought in general about the way in which the use of military force can backfire. And I wanted to mention just a few things quickly. First of course I want to mention the late scholar Robert Jervis, one of the foremost U.S. international relations scholars of the late 20th and early 21st century who passed away relatively recently. And I often gravitate towards Robert Jervis' work on the Spiro model and the deterrence model. If you haven't read it I'd be happy to share the PDF with you or the citation. It's a little bit of a dense reading but I think it suggests two basic ways of thinking about international politics and the one I want to focus on today is Jervis' Spiro model. And if you've studied the security dilemma, there's a lot of overlap here between Jervis' understanding of the Spiro model and the security dilemma. The idea that the effort that one makes to improve one's security situation can often end up in an outcome that leads to greater insecurity. That the counter moves and counter mobilizations that one's rivals and adversaries take may make the situation worse, not better. Now Jervis also posits a different model with different understandings, but the deterrence model. But in the interest of time I'll move on to a second scholar that I just want to mention briefly, which is a book that got a lot of attention about 20, well time flies, doesn't it, about 20 maybe even 23 years ago by Chalmers Johnson, which was about called blowback. And you've probably heard that term blowback. Johnson was particularly focused on CIA activity and the possibility that sometimes US CIA activity negatively affected US outcomes. I've also written about this in the context, not of US foreign policy, but connecting with Professor Zee's wonderful presentation, writing about it in the context of Israeli, Egyptian and Palestinian decisions, that sometimes decisions they've made that are meant to make the situation more secure have actually worsened the situation. So getting back particularly to the case of Iraq, I want to think about it in terms of what might we learn from that case to think about how we could end up with a worse situation rather than a better security situation, and I'd want to suggest four, I'll give you the list first and then I'll talk about each of them in a little more depth. The first possibility is that military intervention creates new enemies and new rivals. The second possibility is that military intervention reshapes the balance of power in unfavorable ways, potentially strengthening and emboldening US rivals. The third is that US military intervention becomes fuel for hostile fundraising and membership recruitment by other organizations. And the fourth is to think about opportunity costs, the possibility that one intervention uses up resources that could be used for other domestic or international endeavors. And I want to stress the domestic, I think the international is kind of straightforward, I want to stress the domestic a little bit too, because one of the things I think about not as an expert, more as a layperson, my expertise, there is an expert here about the political economy of this. But to think about the ways in which some of the resources that are used in other places might lead to neglect of some of the pillars of what it takes to be a great power in the international system, to have an advanced system of higher education that you're experiencing, to have advanced scientific endeavors going on and we could go on. But let me just take a couple of minutes to go into each of these that I've mentioned. In terms of thinking about the creation of new rivals, I think the Iraq 2003 case steers us directly towards the Islamic State and the fact that within a few years the United States was fighting a new rival. And I don't just generally connect this because of the geography. I think the geography is important. But there's two points I wanted to highlight in particular about the Islamic State. One is the emphasis that some have pointed to of the role of disaffected, ex-bathist soldiers and military personnel, largely Sunni soldiers who had been a key part of the regime of Saddam Hussein and were let's just say left out in the cold after the U.S. invasion. Some of whom maybe didn't provide the ideological fuel for the Islamic State, but provided some of the expertise and technical know-how. And the other piece is that toppling a regime generally creates a vacuum and while the toppling of the Iraqi regime in 2003, I wouldn't argue caused the Syrian Civil War. I think there's many other causes that we would point to in a separate discussion. When there was a vacuum nearby in Syria, the fact that we had disaffected bathists and others contributed to the development of a new U.S. rival. The second idea I mentioned was the idea that it changes the balance of power when you pursue military intervention. And I think as we've talked about a lot today, we've talked about the country of Iran. And I don't think there's just a simple story about how the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 either helped or hurt the Iranian strategic position. I do just for the sake of argument because I'm just trying to sketch out something plausible. I want to note two points. That the United States knocked out Iran's primary rival. Remember, as many of you know and may have studied that Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war from 1980 to 1988 and that the United States was not disappointed that two of the key potential challengers in the Gulf were engaged in fighting each other. So we could think about the way in which the United States helped Iran in terms of knocking off Saddam Hussein. But also, and others here have much more expertise on this than I do, thinking about the rise of pro-Iranian influence inside Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, whether we're talking about Iranian influence in the Iraqi political system or potentially Iranian contribution to training certain militias inside Iraq. The third point that I suggested was about fueling hostile fundraising and membership recruitment. I think this one is really difficult to judge because it's very difficult to isolate. It's first, it's difficult to isolate just the effect of U.S. foreign policy on organizations and then it's difficult to isolate the effect of U.S. policy towards Iraq from U.S. policy towards other states and other participants in the region. There is maybe some tentative evidence that I won't go into now that this helps. But again, I think it's difficult to isolate just the U.S. invasion of Iraq, excuse me. And then lastly, as I said, the idea of opportunity costs and thinking about what are you forgoing by pursuing military intervention. I've seen estimates ranging from $2 trillion to $8 trillion in terms of what the U.S. intervention in Iraq will ultimately cost the United States if we think about all the continuing costs of care for the military personnel and others who served in Iraq. But if we think about the lives that were lost, the lives, the Iraqi lives, the American lives, the British lives and the lives of other countries that participated in the conflict, if we think about the trauma that was inflicted and the continuation of people living with that. And so my point isn't to, there's nothing unique about the Iraq intervention in the fact that there are human and financial costs when we go to war, but we should be thinking about potentially what choices we're making to devote resources to one situation as opposed to any others. So just to think about wrapping up, I do want to offer a couple of clarifications or caveats maybe about the particular case that I briefly sketched for you. One is that one could certainly go further back just in Iraq. Dr. Roberts, who will be presenting his paper in a panel this afternoon in his paper, talks about interactions with Iraq going back to the 1950s and 1960s. So there is a risk or a utility depending on how you look at it about going into a deeper history in some of these relationships. And I think the other thing I want to say was there's different arguments for why you might look at other cases as well. The US relationship with Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in the 1980s or maybe even looking, sorry, 1979 and the 1980s or even looking earlier, the US relationship with Iran, of course. We've heard a lot about that going back to the Shah of Iran and the dramatic shift before and after the 1979 revolution. So I do want to suggest that there's many other places we could certainly look to think about US foreign policy in the region and the extent to which it's been helpful or hurtful for US national security. I just wanted to close by saying that I think this should lead or remind us to have a healthy skepticism about assessing contentions by the US government or by any government if we owe allegiance to another country about claims about leaders talking about war. Excuse me. That we should just remind ourselves and I trust that those of you in the room, the students here, you are not only gonna be leaders of tomorrow but you're gonna be leaders who have some of the highest level of knowledge and skills that you've acquired here and in your subsequent career. But remember that that's not all of the public. All of the public isn't as interested in international affairs it turns out as we are. And so I would just remind you that maybe the default public position should be one of healthy skepticism to assume that or remember that war results in high costs that work and have long duration and multiple spillover effects. And that that's something we should be asking as an informed citizen be very conscious of. So thank you very much for your time. I look forward to your questions. Thank you very much, Dr. Pressman. We're gonna have Dr. Roberts is gonna come to the podium and to offer his remarks and reflections. And then again, students after Dr. Roberts's or guests, students or guests, welcome to ask questions during the remainder of our time. So please prepare your questions. So Dr. Roberts over to you. Thank you, Professor Morris and thank you to Professor Ziv and Professor Pressman for their papers and presentations. I admire their work and it's a privilege to comment on it especially given that I am their junior. In his paper, Professor Ziv provides an overview of different positions regarding the idea of a single multinational state in the land of Israel and Palestine. He does an admirable job of showing the different complicated positions, very complicated positions. So admirably in fact that if I did have a criticism of the paper was that it was too short but that's of course not his fault. One of the things he raises is something that I think we can discuss more in the question and answer period. This state right now of the Israeli government. When we think of the Middle East extremism often comes to mind synonymous with how Americans understand the Middle East and Islam. But the Israeli government as we speak is dominated by self-described far right extremists. As someone at the DC based Israel Policy Forum recently said to me, they never thought in a million years that they would say that Bibi Netanyahu represents the left of the Israeli government. Another thing I think we could talk about more is kind of the elephant in the room which is Christian Zionism. The role of Christian Zionists in the United States in shaping the conflict. But I'm going to backtrack a bit now before I get to the crux of my big question for Professor Ziv. And I'm going to say that I have sympathy actually for those who work on Israel or Palestine. In scholarly and professional terms I remain purposefully detached. It's so polarizing that I like to genuinely respond when someone asks me about it with, I don't know, I studied the Arabian Peninsula hundreds of years ago. It is as a historian though I would say very unfortunate that I can say that I think it's a myth that history is used in the United States to shape present and future policy. I'll never forget when I graduated Georgetown for the first part of my graduate training. I was in DC having lunch with a very prominent former government official. And I told him why I thought my training as a historian equipped me for a career in public service. He responded, Nick, no one in this town cares what you learned about history in school. I think the history of US foreign policy proves him correct. The reason government officials and many others might not really like having historians in the room is that we're really good at saying not so fast. We by default probe assumptions and ask really difficult questions. But since Professor Ziv is not only a distinguished scholar of policy, but also a practitioner of policy in a very friendly way, I'm not gonna let him off the hook so easy. I'm going to set up a thought experiment to ask him to share more of his ideas with us, especially because this hypothetical thought experiment might not really be so far-fetched. So for this thought experiment I want this to be crystal clear. Let us assume that we are departing from a position of wanting a vibrant, healthy, strong Israel and a flourishing life for Israeli citizens. I want that to be crystal clear. Departing from that assumption then, let us also assume for our thought experiment that the two-state solution is dead. So for the thought experiment there is now one state, Israel. So now what? What steps does Israel take to continue to flourish? Do Israeli government officials dispense with the idea of being a liberal democracy? Or do they embrace the idea of being a two-tiered state? We can talk about this in hard, concrete policy terms, like how do you ensure equity in public schools? How do you ensure equity in healthcare or infrastructure? But I'll end here on an admittedly thorny philosophical question. And I'm prompted to raise this question because it is one that I listened to my Jewish friends and colleagues around the world debating amongst themselves and for themselves. If there is one state, Israel, what might it come to mean from the pens of historians centuries from now that Israel came to exist born from the oppression of Jewish peoples in European history, by means of eliding the existence of another political human community? It's a tremendously difficult question, of course, but as I said, it's one that I listened to my Jewish friends around the world always having. I'll turn now to Professor Pressman's paper, which is very timely, of course, given that it is the 20th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. Professor Pressman uses the 2003 invasion in suing occupation of Iraq as a policy case study and alluding to his far broader body of scholarship, but also alluding to an overwhelming number of examples from world history. He argues that military intervention usually does not make a state more secure. I admire the human element of his argument, that while the American invasion harmed the United States in terms of deaths and casualties of its own service members, its own economy and its own reputation, it overwhelmingly harmed the Iraqi people. Citizens of a sovereign state that was invaded on a preemptive case rooted, as we now irrefutably know in myths and disinformation. Today's interventions, as he says, often create tomorrow's security threats, or as he says, if they solve one thing, they might also create other problems, a string of many-headed hydras perpetuating a persistent demand for military intervention. This has been something of a categorical problem for any military throughout world history, but there's also distinctly American elements to it. The United States is in fact a global empire today. No informed person on the right or the left, whether they think it's a good thing or a not-so-good thing, denies that. The United States controls one-third of the world's wealth. It has 750 military bases and three-quarters of the world's countries. In 2021, the United States spent $801 billion on defense, more than the next nine countries combined with seven of those nine countries falling firmly within the U.S. defense orbit. Now let's be blunt here about what that means. The militaries of states such as South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, or the United Kingdom are essentially extensions of our own. The idea then that the United States could have easily toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 and then reconstructed Iraq to look like an American-style liberal democracy might easily have not seemed far-fetched to the officials in the Pentagon planning it all. The power and the wealth and the capabilities of the United States military is overwhelming. It's difficult actually to comprehend. But those Pentagon officials and the ones in that building right now, I would submit, could have used a dose of education from the theorist, Michel Foucault. Perhaps the most important modern or contemporary intellectual for understanding the nature of power. In a sobering thought, and hang with me here, in a sobering thought, Foucault instructed that human beings are aware of what they do. Unlike other species then, human beings have self-awareness. Human beings are aware of what they do and humans are aware of why they do what they do. But as Foucault said, human beings are not aware of what what they do might do. In other words, we have no way of knowing the future and its unintended consequences. When ISIS came about, there was a debate amongst historians regarding using the adjective Islamic to describe it. Sure, we can call it Islamic, but we can also call it a lot more. As Professor Pressman might argue, the immediate conditions for allowing ISIS to come about in the first instance were because of US actions in the Middle East to be certain, given the staunchly, aggressively secular autocracies of Syria and Iraq before 2003, it would take a wild act of imagination to imagine how a group like ISIS would come about to the extent it did, unless the United States had created the conditions for anarchy in the region. So I'll end with a real softball of a question like I did with Professor Ziv. If we know that military intervention usually does not lead to greater security and in fact that protracted military intervention, like the 20 year global war on terror actually harms and weakens our military, why then does the United States continue to approach every global issue through a military lens? Has the history of militarily intervening in the world, beginning with the expansion of the United States across this continent becomes so fundamental to the function and economy of our state that to not militarily intervene would mean the dissolution or degradation of the engine of its economy to such an extent that the United States might not continue to exist at the level of flourishing we have grown so accustomed to. Thank you. So Dr. Roberts, thank you for your reflections, your insight and I would also say just your powerful questions that could take the rest of the summit to answer in depth, but there are people in the room that could address those. So we do want to turn it over to just Q and A for just a little bit and so if any students are interested in asking a question, please go ahead and move forward to the microphone and it looks like we have a student. So Jacob, go ahead please. And the mic should be on, just go ahead. Testing, okay. So we hear a lot about the one state solution between two states, Israel and Palestine, but I recently got into contact with a different group which sees that state being actually belonging to Syria and being a province of Syria and the same could be said with Lebanon and Jordan. What do you think about the solution to prevent one Arab, one Muslim control and one Jewish control instead of being a secularized province of Syria? What do you think about that? Am I supposed to answer also the discussants question or is that for, how would you like me to proceed? Let's see if you address this and then if we don't have any student questions then we'll go to the discussant questions. So I think in order for any solution to take place, it has to capture the imagination of the public and it has to be accepted by at least a plurality if not a majority of the public. Otherwise the solution is not viable. So this is something that I don't think is a prominent solution. It's not one I've heard of. It's an interesting one and I'm intrigued by it but I think at this point we're talking about one of the longest, most intractable conflicts in history and so we don't need to necessarily reinvent the wheel. I think that the contours of a solution are out there and I think what we are lacking is leadership that is willing, world leadership, that's willing to take political risks to create a peaceful solution for everyone. Thank you very much for your question August. All right, so first I wanted to say thank you to all three of you for making my job presenting later easier. Your comments played directly into the paper that I'll be presenting on so thank you for that. I wanted to ask a question about the one state solution. Has it been considered to sort of model after the model of Bosnia and Herzegovina or would that sort of be out of the question? No, I think the people bringing up the Bosnia situation are the opponents, a lot of the opponents of a one state solution who warn that that was a preview. The bloodshed you saw in the form of Yugoslavia is a preview of what would happen if Israel is going to become a binational state. It is usually not held up as a success, a successful model for a political solution to this conflict. And I just to build on that, one thing I might add is, like and I think you bring this out in my senior paper, theoretically people often talk about either more of a kind of communal solution, right? So it's one state, but each community has some prerogatives that they reserve, whether that's about holidays and language or education or those kind of things. And you might contrast that with a one state solution that's more individually based, more about you and I regardless of our ethnic and religious identity, each have the same political rights. So those are at least two of the kinds of frameworks that people talk about. Thank you. Thank you for your question. Sean, please. Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you first, Professor Ziv, Professor Pressman and Professor Roberts for presenting today. I wanted to direct this question to Professor Ziv regarding the one state and two state solution related to the United States. And this kind of harks upon the information given by Professor Pressman. What role, during your presentation, you talked heavily about the internal perception of between the one state versus in its multiple forms and the two state solution for the Israeli and for Palestinian perception. But what role does the US have to play when it comes to perhaps killing the two state solution or efficating any variant of the one state solution? And as future leaders and military political governance, what minefield should we avoid given the fact that as Professor Pressman pointed out clearly, our intervention may have unintended consequences? Excellent question. I think the US has an essential role to play in the conflict, in mediating the conflict. And the US is the only actor that can serve that role as an honest broker. And by honest broker, I'm not referring to neutrality because the United States has never exactly been neutral when it comes to the Arab-Israeli Palestinian conflict, but honest broker in the sense that we have successfully mediated several of the disputes in the region. Had it not been for the United States, Israel and Egypt would not have a peace treaty. Israel and Jordan would not have a peace treaty. And more recently, the Abraham Accords would not have been signed. So I think the US has an interest in A, promoting stability. And so bringing about a peaceful agreement would absolutely be in America's best interest. But in addition, we often focus on the common interests that Israel and the United States have. We don't always focus as much on the common values. And that's becoming more prominent today because of the internal debates and deliberations in Israeli society about the future of Israeli democracy and the legal system and the courts that the current government is trying to gut. And we were just talking on the way over here about the phone call that President Biden had in the last 24 hours with Prime Minister Netanyahu where he reminded him about the importance of democracy and how that is something that we have in common. And so I don't think we can divorce domestic politics from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. And so there's a very important role, leadership role that the US has played in the past and will need to play in the future if there is going to be any sort of solution, which is why we saw this with the Clinton parameters. President Bush had the roadmap for Middle East peace. Obama tried his hand and I think President Biden is on the same page. But obviously President Biden has other priorities right now. And so this is not necessarily a high priority given the other challenges of US foreign policy. Thank you. Just one quick addition that the United States has tremendous leverage with Israel and the United States as it is done with most, excuse me, most of its allies has usually chosen not to use that leverage. And that's a decision to make, but it has consequences in terms of the ability to influence the direction of the Israeli-Palestinian future. Thank you so much. Thank you for your question, Annalise. Mike should be on. Thank you. My question is for Dr. Pressman. You kind of went over four reasons why military intervention may cause more tensions in national security. My question was primarily focused on opportunity costs and I just wanted to ask at what point do you believe that the cost of military intervention outweigh the results that we're looking for? Kind of going off of what your topic was about and what Professor Roberts said, we sent troops into Iraq based off of a preemptive case that we eventually found out was false and it cost thousands of Iraqi lives, US forces lives and British lives. At what point do you believe that cost kind of outweighed the result we were looking for? And at that point, why do you believe that we couldn't or didn't stop? Well, I think it required, in this particular case, it required recognition on the part of US leadership that there were initial mistakes, right? And that there were factors that the United States took into account such as the possibility of some kind of existing nuclear program or nuclear weapons program that didn't pan out. But, and I'm not, I wouldn't just restrict what I'm about to say to the case of military intervention in Iraq. I would say it in general about politicians that it's very hard to decommit from a policy, especially one like that that was the core of President Bush's foreign policy. So I don't think we should be surprised or that there's anything unique about that president or that administration that they were unwilling and some of them to this day and some of them to their death, like if I think about the passing of former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, that they never saw the downside, the costs, the missed opportunities that resulted from that. I think it requires a certain kind of ability to self reflect and public politics, being in the public spotlight doesn't lend itself to that. We as a public often are very harsh on politicians who admit that they made some kind of major mistake and especially one that has the kinds of human consequences that decisions to go to war have. Thank you. Thank you very much for your question. And, you know, anytime we talk about the Middle East, particularly Israel and American foreign policy and the relationship within Israelis and Palestinians, we are often left with more questions. Dr. Roberts put two very important questions on the table and as I mentioned, we could spend the rest of the summit discussing those and we wanna leave this session with a final question from Professor Martin and whatever the question may be, we just have about 30 seconds or less, so just a quick sound bite. So we'll leave this particular session to your question, please. I appreciate that and I deferred to students for theirs first. I happen to be an English professor here and I wanna just maybe won't respond to these questions or the primary question. I'd like to just synthesize the two talks and I appreciate how much you packed into these very articulately. I'd like to synthesize two questions. One is American foreign policy and one is the situation in Israel, Palestine specifically. And this is sort of a complicating gesture. The US is the chief provider of military arms to the state of Israel. And so I think that complicates the notion of its neutral broker ship. And I guess the question that I think would be worth thinking about for this audience is, what is the state within that context for efforts to reach a piece? What is the status, the legal status of Israel's settlement building and acquisition of territories that were conceived to be part of that second state? Because my understanding is that they're in violation of international law. So those are just some thoughts, but I will not expect too much from you today in terms of time. Thank you. Like I said, we'll end with a question and our guests will be around for further discussion for the rest of the day. And so thank you so much for your insights in your paper and Dr. Roberts, thank you so much for your excellent response and also powerful questions. Let's give everybody a round of applause, please.