 Good afternoon. Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm Peter Bergen. It's really my pleasure to introduce Patrick Tyler in many ways, needs no introduction. Patrick is an author of multiple books on China, the Middle East, and most recently the very excellent new book, Fortress Israel, the inside story of the military elite who run the country and why they can't make peace, which is a really excellent account of the last several decades of the kind of Israeli national security establishment. And obviously it's a considerable interest right now given the recent events in Gaza. In addition to his work as an author, Patrick has had a distinguished career at the New York Times where he was chief correspondent. He was also Baghdad bureau chief and London bureau chief, Beijing bureau chief, Moscow bureau chief, the list goes on and on. And so Patrick is going to talk about the big themes of his book for around 20, 25 minutes. And then I'll ask him one or two questions and it'll open up to you, the audience for questions. And since C-SPAN is covering bear in mind that you should wait for a mic and identify yourself and ask a question or make a statement. Thank you. Thanks very much for that introduction. I'm very grateful to the New America Foundation for organizing this event and for all of you coming out on this blustery morning. Fortress Israel is my second book on the Middle East and as you know the Middle East is a topic that compels anyone who pretends to any level or at least to recite a little prayer before one holds forth. And I like the one that the late Mo Udall used to use. He would say, Lord give us the wisdom to use words that are gentle and tender for tomorrow we may have to eat them. Probably a pearl of wisdom that Susan Rice probably thinks today she would like to have taken with her into that hearing a few months ago. A book called The World of Trouble published in 2009 by Farrar I wrote about American presidents from Eisenhower forward and how each tried to understand the Middle East and how each tried to impose a surprisingly discontinuous agendas with often tragic results. And while that book is about America's political system Fortress Israel is a biography of Israel's political culture which is an undertaking one has to make with humility as an American. Going back to Tel Aviv over several years driving up the hill to Jerusalem and up and down that Mediterranean landscape I became fascinated with how the generals and the intelligence chiefs and the political figures of the ruling elite look out at the world and how strong what I call a martial impulse beats in their chest and how self assured they are in dealing with us the superpower as if they were the superpower in the relationship that would be reversed. And this book is of course not about the Arabs who comprise the largest culture in the Middle East. The Arab states are responsible for their own substantial shortcomings on the peace front but also for a legacy of hatred and incitement against Israel that has to be dealt with in advance. It must be said the Arab leaders have shown a deep hostility to the idea of Jewish nationhood and unlike their forebears in history who protected and sheltered Jewish communities they have shown little empathy for people devastated by annihilation and holocaust in Europe. So this book is about Israel's political culture and is most pointedly a biography of a modern Sparta the story of a military society and a powerful defense establishment a ruling elite who have found it very difficult over the decades to engage in the processes of peace and who events a warrior kind of ethos that overpowers every other institution in national life. The ruling elite in Israel is not a large class and only ten prime ministers since David Ben-Gurion if you do the double counting and so it is possible to introduce them as characters in a group biography and that is what I have tried to do. We must always remind ourselves in looking at any nation's history that all politics is local. And in Israel during the first decade of statehood the pioneer spirit began to flag when Israelis were short of water short of good agricultural base and when the bright sheen of Ben-Gurion's leadership began to fade because young people were less and less interested in pursuing military service as a career than they were in pursuing what young people everywhere are interested in career, relationships, etc. Ben-Gurion needed in the mid 1950s and he realized to re-mobilize the country and so he began preaching about a sense of new national peril as a voice in the wilderness. Most of his peers crucially at the top of what became the Labour Party Golda, Meir, Leviashkoal, Moshe Sheret opposed his new militarism especially Sheret who became Israel's second prime minister and he was a man who most Americans have not heard of and he believed passionately that Israel's security could only be assured through a strategy of peaceful integration which required compromise and accommodation with the Arabs. Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian military dictator who had taken over in 1952 carried on a secret correspondence with Moshe Sheret facilitated by our Central Intelligence Agency whose officers believed that Israel and Egypt could come to terms yet at the time Sheret's policy based on diplomacy, negotiation, integration was anathema to Ben-Gurion where Ben-Gurion said we should get ready for war as a nation his cabinet however under Sheret's leadership said no its members were listening to Sheret who was listening to President Eisenhower and to John Foster Dulles about a new world order of the UN Charter about the strategic importance of peace and of conflict resolution by means other than war and conquest in other words an end to militarism that had marked the century and so with the help of a one-eyed general a young man named Moshe Diane and others Ben-Gurion sought to undermine and destroy his successor's political career a willful and remarkable visionary Ben-Gurion understood that the accentuation of national peril was good politics better politics he wagered than what Sheret was selling diplomacy and negotiation Ben-Gurion understood that to prevail one had to win elections and from this period forward the period of the mid-1950s he never strayed from the narrative of grave threat and peril that kept his core constituency in lockstep with his vision from that period forward he also orchestrated the greatest military buildup in the Middle East and set out with secret French help to build a nuclear weapons complex near Demona and he laid the foundations for the modern IDF Israeli Defense Forces and for its doctrine of pre-emptive warfare within a concept of deterrence that is unique to that military culture understanding the more fully revealed context of Ben-Gurion's tenure as Israel's paramount leader how he nurtured and employed the warrior class that included stars like Diane, Ariel, Sharon, Yisak, Rabin and others allows us to understand better today that Israel remains a nation enthralled to that original martial impulse a sense among the political elites that the military option is the best and most certain to get results that it is the best way to keep the country and its supporters abroad mobilized that negotiation and diplomacy are a kind of appeasement and surrender this ethos, the ethos of Sparta one could say always being on the hair trigger for combat has given rise to succeeding generations of leaders who are stunted in their capacity to wield or sustain diplomacy as a rival to military strategy one of the first interlocutors I engaged during this period of research was Mike Herzog who had spent some time here in Washington at the Washington Institute and he served as chief of staff to Ehud Barak he comes from one of the founding families and I put this question to him of how the Israelis look out at the world and the lack of the weakness of the diplomatic side of their civil institutions he looked at me very straightforwardly and said we don't have American culture here you should start with that we are still in the process of developing civilian bodies but for now the whole culture of decision making revolves around the military it's as simple as that in Israel today the foreign ministry stands as the only bastion of Israeli diplomacy it is the house that Moshe Sherrit built yet the person who occupies the Sherrit chair of statesmanship and diplomacy is Avigdor Lieberman who is a man that I think you could safely say is not that interested in diplomacy especially with the Arabs and if he had a policy it is more likely to have abdicated expulsion of the Arabs than engaging them so to a great extent in the legacy of Ben-Gurion's organizational decade has made in Israel the army as the country a civilianized army and a militarized civilian culture and for half a century standing at the center of this martial culture have been the Sabras those native born Israelis whose parents come as pioneers from all over Europe these young Israelis grew up socialized to violence they didn't bring the intellectual baggage of their parents they grew up on the land defending farms standing watch at night these young Israelis fought with the local Arabs with whom jousting over land and grazing rights and when the Israelis declared their war declared their state in 1948 the Arabs attacked them from all sides as arms and volunteers flooded in the Israelis discovered a searing truth that war delivers tangible gains for a victor a Jewish army for the first time in 20 centuries had fought and won delivering statehood that was immediately recognized by the United States and the Soviet Union Ben-Gurion was not happy with the boundaries seized in the first round of war and that's what he called it and he referred to the second round and the third round that was inevitable in his view but they were boundaries that he had not imagined during all those years prior to 1948 when he and the leaders of the Zionist movement crisscrossed Europe in search of homeland support for a homeland Diane, who became Ben-Gurion's favorite officer was the prototype of the Sabras he had grown up in poverty he had fought the Arabs in the region of the Sea of Galilee in the Jezreel Valley where they used stones, clubs and knives in adolescent combat a thoroughly secular man Diane in his lifetime came to read the Bible incessantly especially the Old Testament because for him it was a manual for war he loved the stories of David and Goliath of Samson and of the conquest in the Book of Judges and he had thought he would become a farmer until the British recruited him as a military scout for their forces and he found his element there the British assigned him to the Yorkshire Rifles Battalion that was protecting the British petroleum pipeline that went across Palestine up to the ports of the Med and the local Arabs kept blowing up the pipeline protesting British policies for Jewish immigration to the Holy Land and the British were determined to put an end to it and the British commander was a heavy drinker and brass colored whiskers and he instructed Diane to go to the local Arab chieftain with an ultimatum he said, tell that bastard that if there's any further sabotage of these pipelines I'll blow up his house and if they continue to sabotage I'll blow up every house in his village well when that didn't put an end to it Diane suggested there might be a more subtle way to deal with the to win Arab cooperation and the British officer wheeled on him and said I didn't come here to teach British soldiers how to crawl in your bloody country I came here to teach the bloody Arabs how to operate many years later when the Israeli army began blowing up Palestinian houses as a means to punish and put down rebellion people asked where they'd learned such a vile method of collective punishment I told this story on a BBC interview the other night and there was silence on the other end of the line for a few minutes for Westerners Israel presents a difficult problem of perception a broad swath of Americans not just Jewish Americans have admired the pluck and the determination of the Zionist enterprise but while we have been encouraged to regard Israel as a tiny and embattled democracy in a sea of Arab hostility Athens with its many shared values it was not Athens as much as Sparta that Ben-Gurin turned to as the model for his state Zionist revolutionaries had once aspired to be a moral beacon a light unto nations in a benighted region that yearned for development but after witnessing the destruction of European Jewry and with the pioneer spirit flagging in the malarial swamps of Israel's coast Ben-Gurin dramatically shifted his focus in the first decade building a different kind of polity a society organized as an army under a concept of self-reliance for continuing warfare and military buildup it was a notion that the struggle with the Arabs would be very very long and that they wouldn't understand that they could never succeed until they were defeated on a serial basis in less than a decade after its founding Israel had fielded the most agile and powerful armed forces in the Middle East and had made secret plans with the help of France to become a nuclear power by the time the United States and this is an interesting and important point by the time the United States got deeply involved in arming Israel in the late 1960s Israel had already defeated the Arabs in two rounds of war the war of independence and Suez and was preparing to do so for a third time in 1967 and was working urgently to fashion its first two French supplied atomic explosives to use in case something went wrong in that war the legacy of those Zionist revolutionaries who had enraptured the parlors of Europe and America is not the light unto nations that the early romantics envisioned they instead have bequeathed to the Jewish world and to the West a highly militarized dependency a state that has achieved great feats of cultural and economic development but has failed to build a strong enough institution to balance the military zeitgeist with imaginative and engaging diplomacy this state of affairs I would argue represents one of our greatest challenges in the West why because here we are a decade after our last big military intervention in the Middle East on the knife's edge of making the decision of whether about we go to war with Iran or acquiesce in Israel's decision to launch such a war against Iran and let me connect this history to the present one more time Diane who led Israel to victory in the 56 Suez crisis and the 6 day war 67 believed in what he called the detonator strategy I'm quoting from him now it was a talk he gave to his general staff after Suez when someone wishes to force on us things which are detrimental to our existence there will be an explosion that will shake up wide areas and realizing this such elements in the international system will do their utmost to prevent damage to us he acknowledged that this was not a very constructive thesis but it is a thesis he said that we should be a kind of abiding beast capable of developing a crisis beyond our borders if anyone tries to harm us the explosion will do damage to others and trying to assess whether Israel will launch a pre-emptive attack on Iran's nuclear complex possibly triggering a broad Middle Eastern war and a new shock to the global economy western leaders need to take into account Israel's capacity to play this detonator role which is still intrinsic to the military outlook and it's a strategy which now closely conforms to how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to posture his government by demanding red lines be drawn in the case of Iran as a trigger for war Netanyahu and his like-minded departing defense minister Ehud Barak have been in charge Netanyahu keeps a portrait of Churchill in his office one of the former Mossad chiefs likes to remind me Barak sees himself as the Bangurian of his generation both are products of the Israeli Barak was the single most decorated officer in the IDF and Netanyahu served in a commander unit that he headed and though the Israeli military and intelligence chiefs have gone to great lengths to say that much of the officer corps opposes an attack on Iran Netanyahu and Barak have half the world convinced that they will launch a military strike as early as perhaps next spring but the harsh reality is that a prime minister has to obey the law of local politics Netanyahu remembers that how forcefully the military hierarchy turned against him in 1999 when more than 100 generals joined political parties to drive him out of the prime minister's office they thought he was a reckless prime minister he is working to prevent a repeat of that by seeking a strong majority if not unanimity in his security cabinet for any war strategy against Iran from my discussions with Israeli military and political leaders I believe that despite the drumbeat the chances of an Israeli attack remain remote every study of the military problem Israel faces in mounting air strikes far from its home territory reveal tremendous risks for the Jewish state against palpably insignificant gains in setting back the long-term Iranian ambition to develop a nuclear industry by only a year or two. Netanyahu in my view will not risk the catastrophe of war but the danger of miscalculation is growing. The West can and must oppose a decision by Iran's leaders to enter the military realm of nuclear development but the United States and other nations will have little credibility if the net effect of our actions is to redline the technological development of another state. Young Iranians who risk their lives for reform and who admire Western democracy in some cases pain for that admiration with their lives in 2009 are also fiercely nationalistic in defending Iran's right to develop technologically. I like to tell the story of the night that the Imam Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989. I was by a fluke the only Western correspondent in Tehran and we were out at three o'clock in the morning driving back and forth across the city looking for checking at all the hospitals to see which one had a parking lot full of Mercedes in them indicating that Khomeini was inside and we came around the corner near one hospital and ran right up against a Pasteran checkpoint, road checkpoint and there comes this heavily bearded, fierce looking young man with a Kalashnikov and comes to my side of the car and taps the muzzle of it on the glass indicating that I should roll it down. I rolled it down he looked at me with those ferocious eyes and said what is the best university for electrical engineering in the world? It's a reminder that in our analytical work from which the public sometimes takes a sense of demonization about other cultures that young people everywhere want pretty much the same thing. There are of course fanatics, there are extremists but we have lost touch with a great deal of some of the cultures that we find ourselves embattled with. I'm trying to however the Iranian crisis turns out this winter next spring it's not as important as the profound problem that we face in dealing with the potential detonator strategy emanating over the long run. No country has made a greater commitment to Israel's security than the United States but nearly every president since Eisenhower has regretted that he didn't push harder for Israel to more fully engage the Arabs by developing institutions of diplomacy and compromise. President Nixon said he would give Israel the hardware of weapons if Golda Meir would supply the software of diplomatic flexibility before the Yom Kippur War. She disappointed him. President Ford said this, the philosophical underpinning of US policy toward Israel has been our conviction and certainly my own conviction. She gave Israel an ample supply of economic aid and weapons. She would feel strong enough and confident, more flexible and more willing to discuss a lasting peace. But after serial wars, Ford lamented, I have begun to question the rationale for our policy. Israel deserves our undivided attention and protection. But 60 years after its fall, the depth of which has given rise to succeeding generations of leaders who embrace only worst case scenarios in a process that magnifies the sense of national peril, encourages military preemption, covert subversion and undermines any chance for a more engaging strategy, diplomacy based on compromise and accommodation. Both Americans and Israelis should build a monument to Moshe Sherratt, this shadowy figure in Israeli history. A lifelong diplomat whose political career was destroyed by the circle around Ben-Gurion. Sherratt admonished his countrymen that the question of peace must not be lost sight of for a single moment. And yet Israel in the modern era is in danger of losing sight of peace. A new generation of generals covert subversion, covert operations and the acquisition of new weaponry as the only effective national strategy. And the West must face the prospect that Israel may not be able to rebuild the strategic consensus for peace, like the one that Sherratt built very briefly in the fifties and like the one Yitzhak Rabin imposed on the military establishment in 1992. An act of courage for which he paid with his life a few years as the Jewish state and its military establishment become more hardline, more religious, more prone to propagate a vision of peril and threat, constant peril and threat. America will have to lead the world with an act of courage as great as Rabin in rebuilding that strategic consensus for peace. Rebuilding it in Israel, rebuilding it in the Congress here and among the Jewish and fundamentalist Christian communities who so closely and often blindly advocate militarism or applaud it. That will require presidents and presidential candidates to put the security of Israel the issue of Israel's security into a new category of bipartisanship, a very tall order for our society. But the Muslim world and Israel are pulling away from each other and that's the danger and imagine a region in which they were pulling together. If Israel only develops the institutions for war and continues to neglect the institutions of diplomacy peace will remain a distant prospect. Militarism cannot be a foundation for peace and Americans can militate for peace. As President Eisenhower did, as Kennedy did, Johnson, Nixon Ford and most of the rest and we can do so without fear of criticism for it is in our country. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for that excellent overview of your book. You know, why is it that so much of the pushback on a potential Israeli operation against Iran has actually come out of the national security establishment because that would seem to be somewhat at odds with one of the big themes of the book. How do you sort of square that? From the core of the security establishment but that is an indicator I think I would argue that that very establishment is delaminated and over the last 15 years has been delaminating to a certain extent. You have sabras who are now on the hard militarists and believe that what they learn from the suicide bombers of 95 and 96 is that peace is a distant prospect and they've gone over for a very long time and they've had the same kind of adversaries. Others continue to work behind the scenes and in their jobs and believe deeply in engagement with the Arabs. I think also you've got political elements here when Mayr Dagan who was the Mossad chief who basically authored much of the covert action that has set back the Iranian military program. It takes a great deal of pride at the front. He simply believes as a matter of logic that war is more dangerous than the results they're getting from the covert side and that he doesn't trust Netanyahu to use the war instrument in a neutral way for national interest as opposed to a personal political having a personal political factor in it. So there's a great deal of mistrust for Netanyahu and in a parallel sense and for different reasons the same mistrust applies to Ahud Barak who's probably now going to leave this government because he basically has no base if they go into new elections to return to the parliament in a way that would justify him being the defense minister. So there's a great deal of factionalization that has occurred in the military establishment which has never did line up fairly strongly in the first decades. It is now all over the place and you have factions within the military establishment itself. What's your assessment of we know from David Sanger's reporting one of your former colleagues that it's Olympic Games is the kind of code word for a whole set of covert operations against Iran. What's your assessment of how successful that was and the extent to which some of these assassinations of people involved in the Iranian nuclear program has that set them back a year or two or is it hard to tell or is it a game changer or not really? It has certainly set them back a year or two it is certainly very hard to tell but it's also certainly a double edged sword. The extent to which that we go after their industrial base excuse me could I get some water? Hey Jennifer. Thanks. To the extent that we go after their industrial base it incites a certain national reaction that is going to work against any kind of efficacious long term program to try and take down this nuclear program. Thank you very much. Take down this nuclear program by action in other words it can backfire. When I referred to the nationalism of the younger generation there it's a very strong factor and very much recognized by the leadership and they're playing on it even though the 2009 elections in Iran were such a disaster for the leadership what they found was that there's this enormous national pride in the nuclear program I think the essential problem with the nuclear program is that is where to set the threshold for nuclear development. The Iranians insist on being able to enrich uranium for the national power grid for the nuclear reactors they'd like to build to make electricity medical isotopes and other things while at the same time Netanyahu would like to set the bar much lower the threshold bar much lower and prevent them from staying in the uranium enrichment business because it is such a brief sprint from there to military technology. Some of that showed up in our presidential campaign there seemed to be a slightly esoteric discussion of whether the red line should be whether it was capability or being close to having a weapon can you kind of pass for us a little bit about kind of what Netanyahu's red lines appear to be and what are U.S. government red lines are? Is there a difference right now between those two? There certainly is I'm not sure I can parse it as finally as it certainly exists in some classified form but basically the technology of enrichment itself once you get to 20% enriched uranium-235 you then have a very brief period of time to get it up into the 75-80% range that you can start using it to fabricate a crude initial nuclear explosive. I think the Iranians argue that we've foresworn nuclear weapons and that we want this technology to produce electricity to produce medical isotopes and to demonstrate that we have the technology and also to preserve our oil resources by using nuclear power to feed the national grid to run the national electrical grid and then sell our oil resources for a hard currency. I think the Obama administration recognizes as you look across the planet across the globe that you've got so many countries that are at a technological level that you can't go redlining them and saying you can't proceed past you can't proceed to the point of enrichment. You can't proceed into nuclear development. After all we were the early promoters of nuclear development with Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace programs and others that followed it. So I think Netanyahu wants a hard determination that the Iranians can't be trusted. Any nuclear work they're doing is an indication that their goal is weaponization and he would like to set the bar to get what uranium resources they have under control and to prevent it from being enriched and also they use this term of the impunity what is the phrase it's the impunity factor or something like that once they bury their centrifuges so deep in a mountain that you can no longer go in even with penetrating bombs to destroy it and once that line is crossed they can enrich to their heart's content they can shut out the IAEA inspectors and dash for an enrichment to a high level that they can use to fabricate their first bombs. I think Netanyahu's formulation and his red lines are based on a very determined conclusion that Iran is after a weapon. Is there any reason to doubt that by the way? I think that's extremely hard to tell I think we've had these relationships with countries and allies that we suspected were developing weapons, South Korea, Taiwan and Pakistan and Israel. Ben-Gurion came to the White House more than once and looked into the eyes of American presidents and said no that's a plant that's going to do some water desalinization and medical isotopes. You don't have to worry about us. So, very hard to say you have a fatwa from Ayatollah Khamenei very important indication in their culture and in their religion that at the top of the policy a decision has been made. In the revolutionary guard structure which has its own power centers, it's hard to say whether they're in a complete ideological alignment on that question and hard to understand to what extent they have the authority to push the technology farther as a way of contingency preparation for the day when the Ayatollah may change its mind. Yeah, and I've heard Gary Sik refer to sort of a Japanese option where you're six months away but you're not actually at the point where you have a weapon that you're very close. Sure, and I think that Obama, if you read what is coming out of the White House over the last two years, would not like to get that far advanced with Iran but would like to acknowledge some way to be able to state publicly that the United States perhaps developing a new grand bargain with Iran is not adverse to the level of technological development that Iran ostensibly articulates and that is developing a national industry of nuclear power for electrical production and other peaceful purposes. What did you make of the timing of the kind of Gaza events? Was there any particular point to the timing or was it just random happenstance? Usually you mistrust any instinct that there's randomness in that relationship because it is so closely monitored and controlled by Israel. They had an enormous amount of intelligence about the new Gaza missiles that had been smuggled in since the end of the 2009 invasion of Gaza and how complicating that might be in some future contingency in which Israel saw itself going after the Iranian nuclear complex and worrying about being hit at home from both ends of the country by al-Fajr missiles coming out of Gaza and al-Fajr missiles and other longer range missiles coming out of the Hezbollah controlled territories of southern Lebanon. You know, I can tell you the questions I ask myself. I ask myself whether Netanyahu wasn't clearing the boards, clearing the decks in a way in the same way that he has pulled the election forward. He will take a very strong mandate. He will replace part of his government with a more right wing set of characters so that when they do come up for what they have forecast will be their final decision making process on whether they attack Iran he will have his ducks, his political ducks at home lined up. You have to then ask yourself the question was Gaza another piece of that pacifying the southern front, eliminating the missile threat by going in and dropping bombs, taking out the tunnels putting them back so far that they can't rearm to an extent that the southern part of the country will lie as exposed as presumably the northern part of the country is going to be if Hezbollah cuts loose in any Israeli assault on Iran. I looked at it in those terms but there are other undeniable factors in play. They were in the middle of an election campaign and all of the opponents from the labor side from the more liberal factions were out campaigning on domestic issues, on economic issues, on jobs and prosperity and quality of life. And it was like a zipper went across the society and the only image was Netanyahu and Ehud Barak dealing with the very serious issue of security and if you are a politician in Israel the mantle that you want to be wearing is the one of Mr. Security because it lines up and unifies the nation it mobilizes the country behind your leadership and people forget however temporarily that there are other issues facing the country because security burns at the center of everything. When is the election scheduled now? January 22nd I believe. The peace movement is sort of dead in Israel? No, I don't think the peace movement is ever dead in Israel it is certainly hard to find and certainly below a periscope depth but the polling continues to show that there is a majority in both communities Arab and Palestinian and Israeli that is interested in a deal provided that certain threshold requirements for each constituency are reached such as security for the Israelis and for the Palestinians return of lands the division of Jerusalem and some compromise on the right of return. I tell people who are pessimistic about this issue to remember the Cold War. We all believe that our generation would go to the cemetery still fighting Moscow over the division of the world in the Cold War and one morning we woke up and it was gone and if you look at the trajectory of conflict in the Middle East from 1948 up until when Jimmy Carter closed the deal on the Egyptian front to Bill Clinton who nearly closed the deal in the last literally the last days of his administration the world is about that close some very tough issues and large compromises to make but the world come about that close to a settlement in the Middle East it's possible Israel is at peace with Jordan it is a time when peace another peace accord a final status accord could give Israel an amazing new set of relationships in a region that has now awoken for a new political era and would if you take away that searing core issue that has animated politics for the last 40 years the Palestinian dispute everything seems possible in the wake of that Patrick you mentioned the Arab Awakening and to what extent does that make it more likely that peace might in some way move forward and to what extent is there a discussion in Israel about how Israel's position in the world has changed as a result of the Arab Awakening I think it's a very crucial moment in history and a very dangerous moment it is very easy and certainly there is a large class of Israelis who look at the Arab Awakening as extremely threatening as a return to enmity as a growth of the Islamic threat in the same way that we look at al-Qaeda and fear that they are doomed in some way to endless warfare to protect themselves to an unlimited future and then there are other groups that see opportunities in this Awakening but you can't move on engagement of the Arabs at this crucial period in the way that Israel needs to engage the Arabs to be helpful, constructive and fruitful in its quest for kind of laying down the foundations for a new set of relationships in the region without getting back solving the core issue of the Palestinian problem and that's got to come first in a way I'm not sure that Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't see it that way a large part of his of the political majority in Israel today doesn't see it that way but just the emergence this week of Sipi Livni with her determination and spirit to take on Netanyahu again with this as the centerpiece issue of the Palestinians she's going to lose, she's going to lose badly but it shows that the spirit is alive and if a constellation comes together again, a political constellation and who knows who's going to lead it whether it might be Barak coming back or Sipi Livni if she learns how to be a a more clever politician she hasn't been up to now that peace majority could re-emerge the same way it did under Yitzhak Rabin in your previous book, World of Trouble it was really an assessment of every American president relationship with Israel how would you assess the Obama first term just overall in terms of the issues of peace relations with Israel and what do you think the second term may bring you can't look at the Obama first term and not see that he raised expectations remarkably and then he didn't fulfill them and that that was a great disappointment to him and to most of the people in the Middle East and certainly the Americans who were interested in promoting a peace agenda there I think he, like many presidents you come into office with a very steep learning curve and that Obama is an intellectual who believes that the thing you do as a president is get the policy right and then try and line up the politics and really it's the inverse of politics before you can start thinking about what policies you can squeeze into those within the brackets of that political formulation George W. Bush recognized instantly as a political man what 9-11 had conferred upon him in terms of political opportunity you could see it in his face those first two days of 9-11 I mean certainly it was a national tragedy but there was a sense of exhilaration in the man that his place in history had been elevated in terms of the potential he had just been handed to unify galvanize the country and move it in some direction we can debate how he moved it but he was given that great opportunity so Obama hasn't had that opportunity he thought he could create it and he thought he could take the good will that had been generated around the world by those speeches and the interviews he did and Netanyahu to overcome his recalcitrance to take the steps that were necessary to return the parties to the table in the Middle East and he got defeated essentially by the Israeli government by Netanyahu and by its supporters here in Washington in our country and in the Congress the one criticism I would make of the first four years is when he realized that he was going to have to put it on the shelf remember he had said at the outset I'd rather start on it early than wait like Clinton did to the last the last months when he was forced, when he realized he was going to be forced to do that he didn't come up with a bridging strategy or a bridging dialogue with the region that could maintain the faith as it were and instead he started parroting the lines and repacked talking points on the hill and whatnot in a way that I think was extremely frustrating to all those people who had projected their hopes on him in the first term now all that being said I think in the second term the level of expectations is probably more chastened but it's still there it's still very high I think that Obama is an idealist in the same way that Jimmy Carter was Carter is more derivative of his religious upbringing his devotion to the notions of peace in the Middle East whereas Obama I think comes out more intellectually but more as someone who has lived outside of America and looked back at it and sees it has seen it the way other people in the world do and therefore understands more intensely the importance of this issue to the world and so I think his idealism will compel him forward but that being said he is now facing towering domestic issues economic issues and every president has to look at the Middle East and say do I want to get up on that high wire while I can't afford to lose one senator or ten congressmen on the votes that are coming on the avoiding the fiscal cliff straightening out the long term that reforming the entitlements programs all of those domestic issues that we know are crucial to our future as a country and it's a very very tough balance to strike so my suspicion is it's going to get kicked down to the last months of his administration and if he takes he'll make a calculation in his last year about what are the legacy swings I can make like a batter at the plate trying to hit a homerun what are the swings I can make in my last months to try and close something and it will depend on who's the prime minister in Israel at that moment and how strong he is and where the congress is on the issue because he will have to and no president can undertake this without some kind of base in congress open up to the audience wait for the microphone identify yourself ask a question and we'll start with some of the ones in the back and then move forward last point doesn't the urgency of the Iranian situation and the view from many Arab countries that Iran represents the greater threat to them as opposed to Israel create an earlier opportunity for peace with Arab countries previously aligned with the Palestinian Arabs perhaps providing the kind of pressure that was needed at the end of the Clinton administration but applied in the context of the Iranian threat early in the second Obama administration as a force for peace my impression in watching it over the years is that you can't peel off the Arabs from the Palestinian issue by arguing that there are more important fish to fry in the Middle East we diluted ourselves and certainly the neo-conservative movement diluted itself in the George W. Bush administration by arguing that a realignment of the region toppling of Saddam Hussein a complete makeover of the region a democratization in Iraq that perhaps would have spill over effects would simply push away over power the Palestinian issue but I think it is sometimes difficult for Americans to understand how radioactive it is at the core of politics in the region there are many things going on and you can find any Egyptian on any given day thinking more about what his country is going to be like in the next year and in the next five years than what's happening in Gaza but as soon as you turn on Al Jazeera and he sees what's going on in Gaza it brings it all rushing back because it's a central it's not just about the Palestinians it's about the relationship of the region to the great powers also and the demand that has been so profoundly powerful in the region that the great powers respond on this respond to that so I think there's a great deal of urgency with the Iranian issue I think America has to have to work as the middleman one side relationship basically a restraint preventing Israel from going off half cocked on a mission that will drag us into something that we will all regret and at the same time dealing with the Arabs who are coming to us looking to us for leadership in solving the Iranian crisis I sense a lack of urgency in the White House more than in the sense of scaling back and we don't know what secret circuits back channel circuits that are active in communicating to the Iranians that the outlines of various kinds of compromises on their nuclear program and so I don't see it as an issue that can pull the two sides together by somehow shunting the Palestinian issue to the side This lady here on the blue I was wondering about the op-ed that Yossi Bailin published in the New York Times on Monday saying that the United States should support the Palestinian bid for recognition at the UN as a way of undermining Hamas and strengthening the PA I think What is your point of view on that The United States has opposed the bid basically because Israel opposes it but would it really be in our interest to support it and I'm a little bit confused I'm very supportive of the Palestinians but I'm a little bit confused about whether this is really in the Palestinians interest although I certainly think it would be in their interest if they had the ability to use things like the international court for rights purposes I think the statehood issue is somewhat of a diversion there are plenty of people in the world who would like to upgrade the Palestinian status at the United Nations mainly as a way to give them a measure of support, buck them up a little bit because they're going through a long period of stasis in which they are powerless and divided and unable to control events in any way it is a diversion anytime you go down a road that can't take you to what the essential equation has to be and that is two parties at a negotiating table working out a final status agreement that creates the Palestinian state and so I think it is a little bit like a formal intifada it is the leadership class of the Palestinians trying to throw off the strictures that bind them from getting anything else done, from making any progress and from showing their people that they can get any kind of results if they can promise that they might get the result of increased recognition and that would be an overall good thing I think if you're a political advisor to Abu Mazen say why not, let him go for it, it agitates it keeps the issue alive, it agitates people, it shows the great powers that if they don't work on the important front that we have our own detonator strategy that will blow something up politically at the UN that will take months for you to clean up so it's a diversionary symptom of the lack of progress on the main event we're coming, we're moving forward, you'll get your time I can see you I'm Ed from American University why all this emphasis on Iran and their enrichment procedure enrichment, enrichment, enrichment that's all we got what's important is not enrichment but their delivery system what about the delivery system beholden to the US and Israel and the European nations, do they have that capability or is it just enrichment that's all we hear they're working on lots of capabilities you know China over the last since I've been a newspaper man has been selling missile technology to Iran if you remember the tanker war during the Iraq war back in the 80s when the Iranians were firing these big Chinese made silkworm missiles out over the waters to blow up oil tankers and try and shut down the oil commerce through the straight of Hormuz they have been building their own indigenous ballistic missiles they're working on, they worked on the Shahab 1, the Shahab 2, the Shahab 3 they very recently had a series of test launches to demonstrate that there'll be a serious contender to launch long range ballistic missiles which is the threshold in which you demonstrate to the world that you can carry a military warhead in such a vehicle they also have aircraft delivery systems today in our modern world it's hard to think through what all of them might be but they're asymmetrical possibilities of using low tech delivery systems if you've ever been in the Persian Gulf you know how close the distance is between the Iranian shoreline and Rastanura the Saudi main oil loading terminal just across the Persian Gulf and how that Gulf is full of maritime commerce I mean low tech maritime commerce like those wooden dowes that Sinbad the sailor used to sail up and down the Persian Gulf you could pack a lot of explosives into one of those and get it close enough to industrial facilities on the Saudi side that you could terrorize the region just by setting one off so uranium enrichment is important in the threshold of nuclear weaponization for military purposes and delivery systems technologies are going apace on parallel tracks Hamid Lelu Middle East Africa analyst for prosol in support of USMC operational culture centered down in Quantico first thank you for your great presentation it was a historical overview in couple minutes we could learn a lot about history of Israel my question is related to the last event that actually triggered the Gaza events with the killing of the head of Hamas security which by the way was behind the release of the Israeli soldier he was working closely with Israeli security to solving other problems so I wonder why kill someone that actually was able to achieve a lot in the interest of Israel and as your title said it they cannot make peace or they don't want to as some people in Middle East say that the state of Israel cannot sustain without the state of war thank you very much well there's a long history of targeted killings in the Israeli security establishment and each one of them is debated internally by around the table with the prime minister usually with his someone from the legal jurisdiction jurisdiction his attorney general but also the heads of the intelligence services in the military and in military intelligence services and they debate and in the case of Al-Jabari who was the military chief of Hamas he had been running those operations for a long time he may have been involved in the holding and the hiding of Galad Shalit the young corpollute was held for more than five years he may have been involved in a number of attacks and the smuggling of missiles and energy into Hamas he may have also evolved as a political figure as there were some reports during that week that he was interested in discussing or beginning negotiations on a truce between Hamas and the Israelis and of course this reflects back to earlier assassinations that occurred in the middle of discussions about whether a truce was about to emerge or that Hamas was in accepting one when the paraplegic preacher Ahmed Yasin who was the founder of Hamas was assassinated in 2004 he had just sent a message made a statement that he was interested in Khudna he had a friendship with an Israeli rabbi named Menachem Froman in which they were working on a religious formula to solve the conflict and even though he was a remarkably violent man he had driven Hamas to a state where it was a terrorist organization he was also a moderate of the Hamas leadership in that he believed that a long-term truce with Israel was kind of like the Shanghai communique if you remember that in China where both sides of the Taiwan Strait the Taiwanese and the Chinese basically put the war issue on hold and just remain doing business for the next 30 years with the Chinese believing that Taiwan would be absorbed and with Taiwan believing it would become independent and you defer the war issue that way and you let the people knit the two of societies back together Sheikh Yasin had that kind of vision about the future and others have in Hamas and there are Israeli intelligence chiefs who understand that and who believe that therefore Israel ought to be talking to Hamas, Efraim Halidi who was deputy head of Mossad under Yitzhak Rabin and was Bibi's first Mossad chief has been arguing forcefully that as Rabin said, you only make peace with your enemy so you've got to talk to your enemy so that being said that when the security establishment spends months preparing an assassination package the momentum to carry out that assassination becomes a political issue within the cabinet and sometimes the momentum of those constituencies those military chiefs who have to go before the Knesset for their budget every year to justify the weapons they're buying, the Hellfire missiles those helicopters from which they shoot the missiles that are used in these targeted killings they have to justify themselves and so sometimes that military Zeitgeist can overpower any competing political argument that wait, maybe we ought to be talking to this guy he seems to be more moderate or he seems to be interested in a truce it's hard to say what happened in Jabari's case he had blood on his hands, they're in a war somebody said let's kill him and Netanyahu said okay because it is the prime minister who makes the final decision it will be a long time before we know what the other factors were on the table this lady here my name is Mary Ann Stein a long time member of Americans for Peace Now which has been trying to persuade both sides to move more towards peace not very successfully obviously but I'm curious to know there have been a number of articles and pieces written very recently that this aftermath of the Gaza the latest Gaza action may actually provide some opportunities some unique opportunities for moving a peace forward and in your comments you said that you thought that it's very likely that Obama will not pick this up which I rather agree with but I wonder if he were so inclined what you think the opportunities would be and how he might go forward and also I'd just like to throw in that there are an awful lot of people now saying he should send Bill Clinton over I can't imagine Bill Clinton would take it up but if he were to he's incredibly popular in the region and there are many people who believe he would use that in his political savvy to advantage interested in your opinion on those two points the first one is just hypothetical which I won't spend too much time on if now were the time to do something what would you do well I don't know call them to Camp David call Abu Mazan and Hamas leader and Netanyahu to Camp David Netanyahu wouldn't come if Hamas was going to be there if Hamas joined Abu Mazan's government plenty of ministers and Netanyahu's coalition would say now it's a terrorist government we can't do business with it and try and set preconditions and overcoming preconditions is a lot of what the work is of getting people to the table Jimmy Carter spent his first year really banging his head about how to do it he was interested in basically convening a peace conference in Geneva and thought he could get the Soviets to help him pull the parties together and he completely failed and Diane and Began and everybody even Golda Meir came out of retirement and started slashing at Carter across the border and he had to walk away from that and then got the idea just to get them and call them to Camp David and start any way he could and thought until the last minute that he had failed so you'd have to start it by looking at what are the greatest points of resistance with each party now and how could we possibly overcome them Congress would be up in arms there'd be letters every day from 87 senators or 95 senators or 333 house members insisting that the president stand up for Israel's rights and it would be hard and you can imagine where the fiscal cliff negotiations would go and that kind of Clinton is an I've heard the same reports with interest the problem and Bill Clinton is extremely popular with the Israelis with certain Israelis he didn't like Netanyahu and Netanyahu didn't like him he tried to jam him pretty hard every time he would come to Washington and the basic problem for bringing Bill Clinton into the equation is how he is no longer the president in the United States and even if he was the high profile negotiator for this president only it's the president and his administration that are pushing for some resolution I rather think that it would be very hard for Bill Clinton to go into that process as effectively as we remember him when he was president and undertook the same efforts in the last days of his administration it certainly helped him a lot it might even be more efficacious if you brought Bill Clinton and George W. Bush who is still missing a legacy in his life and have that bipartisan cast to it it might be an interesting way to approach it very hard to go up against Netanyahu if he comes out of this election with a landslide mandate and a tougher, harder cabinet but that's what makes me think it will get pushed back to the end of the second term Patrick, is there any sense in Israel that Netanyahu tried to jam Obama too much and that it's backfired now that Obama is in the second term? there doesn't seem to be any penalty for Netanyahu who is jamming the president he's popular, his popularity keeps going up you know he may be into a real election fight but the economy is good in Israel which is always an important factor the state of security even though they had some missiles coming in from Gaza is pretty strong Tel Aviv is this great Mediterranean city that lives in isolation to the squalor and oppression that exists within 50 miles in occupied territories young Israelis I'm always startled by the fact that young Israelis are so ignorant of what goes on just over those hills and no longer long cease to care what goes on in Palestinian villages and towns and along that fence and what not and so the separation is intense and it is politically debilitating for the peace process so where the initiative is going to come from is hard to say gentleman right in front very patient we've got two gentlemen start with him thank you Patrick just I wonder for how long do you think that this military mentality will continue a Palestinian who read your book you will think that the only way to peace is to counterattack or to fight but really there is no way for peace should the Palestinians and the Arabs wait for another generation or one or two generations who are when the Israelis come who are really ready to make peace anyway the Gaza Incident I don't call it war proves that still no matter how weak you are and the other party is strong you still can outside powers can limit the power by intervention like the United States and Egypt although I feel the United States is the one really who did most of the pressure I think that history tells us that those times when progress has been made most dramatically there has been some intervention from the Arab street that energized it to some extent and the Intifada being the largest and the most poignant of all of those there was a completely spontaneous event that shocked both sides and had a profound effect on Yitzhak Rabin who had been a Sabra who had grown up within the military system who built the army that won in 1967 and was just about as tough a guy in the Israeli military you could meet and he looked out across those smoking tires the smoke coming out of Gaza out of the West Bank and said there's no military solution to this we've got to come up with a different approach and he crossed the Rubicon it was the first time since Moshi Sherrod's time that an Israeli Prime Minister had crossed the Rubicon like that I don't think you can count Begin although what Begin did was extremely important but he didn't come to a sense that there was no military solution with the Palestinians he wanted to take the West Bank and Gaza because he believed they were part of the historic lands of Israel so he coveted them and he really made the peace in Egypt because that cleared the way for the PLO and destroy Arafat and he thought he would then get a compliant Palestinian community that he could impose peace on but now today you have to ask yourself the question what is Netanyahu waiting for because at some point in the not too distant future the demographics are going to put him in Israel in the position of being what even its own leaders referred to as an apartheid state where you're not granting rights to the Arabs that you rule in occupied territories that are even Israeli citizens and therefore they are subjugated and what kind of moral foundation can you rest the Israeli and the Jewish state for future generations in that kind of configuration Netanyahu doesn't have an answer for that and when you try to infer that answer from the preponderance of his statements it seems that he's still playing a strategy of time and that is something his grandfather said that if you wait long enough you'll only have to give him 2% instead of 22% somehow that it's still politically viable in his mind that you can have a Palestinian entity that is so truncated and so obscure and and invisible with Israel rampant in the territories with the IDF, security, the airspace everything and these contained villages of Arabs who have rights in name only that somehow that's still possible in his mind and that his part of the right wing from his father and Jabotinsky who his father worked for was the founder of the Israeli right believed in that kind of formulation that if you wait long enough you'll win and you'll get the thing you want which is almost all of the land Let's jump in here I'm Amar Masthi Khan I write mostly on Balochistan I would please like to ask you why hasn't the United States and Europe done more to make the Muslim countries only a few countries recognize Israel why hasn't the US and Europe prevailed upon the rest of the Muslim countries to recognize Israel another is the way Israel looks upon nuclear arms of Iran why isn't it concerned about the nuclear arms of Pakistan there was a time in this city when it was extremely concerned with the nuclear arms of Pakistan I remember when I came to town back in the Carter years the books that were being written at the time about the Islamic bomb there was a senator from California and who spent a great deal of time holding hearings about the threat from a Pakistani bomb and there was a sense that it was it had to be opposed there had to be strong non-proliferation interventions I think he's asking about why isn't Israel more concerned about the Pakistani bomb Well I was giving the American answer but I think in the same parallel existed in Israel at the time but why is it today? it's a very good question I think it believes that the United States the US relationship with Pakistan and the effective American Cezernity and the Gulf region as the preeminent military power is a prophylactic against the dangers of that bomb I don't think they accept it as something that's inevitable for the long term and if they had their druthers they'd be happy if it disappeared but they're pragmatic about the fact that it exists and there's nothing they can do about it but they have energized their friends and supporters here to make sure that there's a very active American policy and probably a lot of intelligence sharing to make sure that that program doesn't become a threat to Israel your first question was it American pressure to get more Muslim countries to recognize Israel? I think that's kind of regarded as a counterproductive exercise given that the Arab League and most Arab states believe that the only leverage that they can hold having given up the leverage of war is to withhold their recognition of Israel until the Palestinian issue is addressed and resolved in some manner that satisfies the region I think any Arab leader that would call for recognition would have to calculate very carefully the reaction of this domestic constituencies even in Egypt holding on to the treaty that exists is quite a difficult and laborious exercise for the new Egyptian president because there's so much sympathy for the Palestinian cause in Egypt I think that's just a question of leverage it's long term the Arabs want to trade recognition for the establishment of a Palestinian state and that's the core of King Abdullah's offered when Serone was prime minister of the Arab initiative in 2002 was to trade recognition for a return to the 67 borders practically so to create a Palestinian state and have permanent peace between Israel and the region I want to thank Patrick very much for his really presentation his books are outside I'm sure he was willing to sign them if you buy one