 As we get started, the first thing I'd like to do is thank the Ford School and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies as well as Dean Susan Collins for helping create an environment where frank discussion on difficult issues is not just tolerated but welcomed and encouraged. Unlike some of the other centers on campus, one of the things that we're trying to hope to do here at the Ford School and the International Policy Center is really encourage debate about some of the issues that folks may have a difficult time with. The Obama administration's stated policy goals in the Middle East are numerous. From their own literature, Ford that come to the top include helping the Iraqis build a unified, stable, and prosperous country. Second one is working against terrorists and their state sponsors as well as working against the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Third one is supporting effort to economic and political reform writ large in the region as a whole. And a final one, one that has been at the focus of US policy literally for decades in the region, has been renewing progress towards a two-state solution to the Palestinian and Israeli conflict. Now all of these four goals that I mentioned and others that are either stated or implicitly there are deeply intertwined. I think all of us have a good intuitive understanding of that. But either the core or in the background though of each of these policy interactions where the United States is involved in this vol region is Israel. Israel and Israeli politics and US foreign policy are inexorably intertwined and in fact US foreign policy and regional foreign policy in the entire area. What we're going to do this afternoon is we have two speakers here. Each of them is going to open up with some brief remarks, probably take about 10 minutes each. Then I'll pose a couple of questions to get our discussions going. And then what we're going to do is we're going to turn to questions from the floor because I think particularly in these kinds of issues rather than hearing either of our two speakers lecture you about the way they think you ought to think, I think it's in fact far more important for them to hear from you about what you think are the important questions. Our first speaker is John Mirsheimer. He's the Wendell Harrison Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He's also the co-director of the program on international security policy there. Professor Mirsheimer graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1970 and then served on active duty in the United States Air Force for several years. Subsequently he received his PhD in government at Cornell University, my alma mater. So it was a bond that he and I share as well as having both been in the service. He's a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University Center for International Affairs. He's a research fellow at Brookings, he's worked at Rand Corporation, he's been a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and he's a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He's published numerous books, most important of which I think include probably his first called Conventional Deterrence, one of his later books The Tragedy of Great Power Politics and for our purposes though the most important the Israeli lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy which he wrote with Stephen Walt of Harvard University. This book which is unusual for a political scientist actually made the New York Times best seller list. It's been translated into 21 different languages and that book is why Professor Mirsheimer is here today. So, Professor Mirsheimer, turn the floor over to you. Thank you very much Al. It's a great pleasure to be here at the Ford School and to be sitting next to two old friends Al Stam and Juan Coles and I'd like to thank all of you for coming out on this outset of beautiful afternoon to listen to me talk. Subject I want to talk about for the next 12 or so minutes is U.S. policy toward Israel and how it affects our broader Middle East policy. I think that at least for the past 10 years the Middle East has been the most important area of the world for the United States and inside the Middle East the country that is by far the most important for the United States is Israel. In fact Israel and the United States have a special relationship that is unprecedented in history. There is no other example that comes close to America's special relationship with Israel. And what I mean by that is number one the United States gives Israel a huge amount of foreign aid and of course it gives diplomatic cover in the United Nations and in other international institutions as well but it's not simply all this foreign aid and diplomatic cover that makes the relationship so special. It's also the fact that the aid is given unconditionally. This is almost unheard of in international politics. When I say the aid is given unconditionally what I mean is that no matter what Israel does the United States continues to give it that aid so that if Israel goes out and does something that the United States is unhappy with the United States does not cut the aid does not cut the support. This is the basis of that special relationship. And of course what's going on here is that this special relationship not only affects how the United States treats Israel in terms of foreign aid and diplomatic support it affects our policy towards the entire region. My argument is and this of course is Steve Walt's argument as well in the book that we wrote it's often in ways that are not in the American national interest. My argument is that the United States pursues policies and of course it's a large part due to the influence of the Israel lobby here in the United States that it would otherwise not pursue. It took away the Israel lobby I believe the United States would have different foreign policy in fact a very different policy towards the Middle East. Now I think there are really sort of five big issues that it would be nice to talk about in an ideal world. One is the Palestinian issue or the question of the two state solution. Second is Egypt, third is Iran, four is Iraq and five is Syria. I'm not going to say anything about Iraq but I would like to talk a little bit about the Palestinian issue, the Egyptian issue, the Iranian issue and the Syrian issue. Again what I want to do is I want to frame it in terms of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. It's not with the Palestinians. Every American president since 1967 which is when the Israelis captured the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has opposed the building of settlements in the occupied territory. Every American president, nevertheless we have been unable to put any pressure on Israel to stop building settlements. Now it's important to understand that one of the principal reasons the United States is opposed to settlement building in the occupied territories is because we believe it's not in our national interest. Indeed we believe it is one of the principal causes and to be clear here I'm not saying it's the only cause. It's one of the principal causes of our terrorism problem. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told the 9-11 Commission the principal reason that he was interested in attacking the United States on September 11 is not because he hated American values or hated American democracy, it was because we supported Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinians. There's no question that the United States is going to ameliorate or solve its terrorism problem. It has to deal with the whole question of how Israel treats the Palestinians. This is an important issue but of course the question is why can't we do anything to pressure the Israelis into allowing a two-state solution and the answer of course is the lobbying. What would be possible alternative arguments is to why we can't pressure Israel. The United States is a remarkably powerful country, it's much more powerful than Israel is. Israel is heavily dependent on us for economic and military aid. Furthermore it would be very easy to assemble coalitions of countries around the world to help us put economic pressure on Israel to give up the occupied territories. The reason we don't do that is because of the lobbying. Some people say that the reason we don't do it is because the American people love Israel and they demand that American politicians support Israel no matter what it does. If you look at the survey data and there's an abundance of it on how Americans think about Israel, there is no question that the vast majority of Americans have a favorable view of Israel. But there's no evidence whatsoever that the American people favor the special relationship. In fact, I think the most important finding in the survey data is that roughly 70% of Americans think that the United States should favor neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis in their conflict. That finding of course flies in the face of the argument that the American people demand that we support Israel on condition. Some point to you is with regard to the Israel-Palestine conflict, we are unable to get our way Israelis because of the lobbying. Let's talk a little bit about Egypt in recent events in Egypt. As you know, the Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown in a bloody coup. When the coup took place, the United States government, the Obama Administration went to enormous lengths to intervene and to convince the generals who are now running the Egyptian government not to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood, not to in effect have a bloody counter-revolution. We thought we would be successful, but the Israelis intervened and the Israelis went to great lengths to tell the generals that they could crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood and the lobbies would make sure that aid to Egypt was not cut off. As most of you know, the United States gives about $1.5 billion per year in aid to the Egyptian government, and the generals were very fearful that if they cracked down in a bloody fashion against the Muslim Brotherhood, after the Muslim Brotherhood had been removed from power, that $1.5 billion of aid would be cut off. Both the Israeli government and the lobbies went to great lengths to make sure that that did not happen. And for those of you who are wondering why we never cut off the $1.5 billion in foreign aid to Israel, I mean to Egypt, it was because of the power of a lobby in Washington, D.C. I believe this, too, is not in America's interest. We switched gears and talked a little bit about Syria. As you know, Barack Obama got himself into a lot of trouble by drawing a red line back in August 2012 on the whole question of what would happen if Syria were to use chemical weapons. One of the principal, if not the principal driving force behind the creation of that red line was the Israeli government. The Israelis were putting great pressure on Obama. It was during the election campaign. Remember, November 2012 was the election. This was August 2012. The Israelis were bringing great pressure to bear on the White House to draw a red line on Syrian use of chemical weapons, and of course they got their way. When chemical weapons were first used on August 21st of this year, the Israeli government and the lobby, especially AIPAC, went to enormous lengths to make the argument that the Syrian government was behind this. I'm not denying that the Syrian government was not behind it, but the point I would make to you is that the lobby went to considerable lengths to make the argument that Syria was guilty right off the bat and to start pushing the United States to attack Syria. And of course, up until about August 31st, when Obama began to get cold feet about an attack on Syria, the lobby, along with a number of others, were pushing hard for an attack. And then when Obama went to Congress and it looked like he was going to be defeated in Congress and not be able to use military force against Syria, the lobby switched into high gear and it began to work very hard to push for an attack on Syria. If you look at who was pushing for us to go to war against Syria, it's hard to find many players in that game. The Black Caucus was opposed to going to war against Syria. The military was opposed and the American military was opposed to going to war against Syria. The intelligence community was opposed to going to war against Syria. It was hardly any enthusiasm in the broader public at large, as you know, and this is reflected in the fact that Congress had little interest in attacking Syria and Obama surely would have been defeated in the House and he might have even been defeated in the Senate. But who was mobilized and prepared to go to Capitol Hill and lobby strenuously for an attack against Syria? It was APAC and the other key organizations in the lobby. In fact, there is a flood of newspaper stories talking about the fact that APAC was going to flood Congress and put great pressure on Congress to back Obama to attack Syria. Of course, the Israeli government did the same thing. At first, the Israeli government said this was a domestic American affair and they were not going to intervene, but Obama then called up Netanyahu and Netanyahu was calling members on Capitol Hill, pushing hard to get the United States to attack Syria. And of course, the Israeli government was filled with newspaper stories that said that the Israeli government was deeply disenchanted, deeply unhappy over the fact that the United States was not going to attack Syria. The basic argument that I would make here is that both Israel and the lobby were deeply committed to pushing us to attack Syria. Now, very importantly, the United States did not end up attacking Syria and Obama stood his ground and this highlights that the lobby does not always get its way. When Steve Walt and I wrote the book, people said that John and Steve are describing the lobby as a cabal or arguing that it gets its way every time. The lobby is not a cabal, the lobby is an interest group, just like the National Rifle Association, the Farah lobby, the Cuban lobby. It is playing good old-fashioned American politics. There is nothing illegitimate about what the lobby is doing. Our argument is that the lobby pushes the United States to pursue foolish policies. And by the way, we believe those policies are foolish for Israel as well as the United States. We believe that not having a two-state solution is not in Israel's interest as well as America's interest. So the case of Syria is one where the lobby and the Israeli government did not get its way. But nevertheless, the point that I'm making is that they were pushing the United States to pursue a foolish policy. Finally, in conclusion, I'll say a few words about Iran. This one has not played itself out yet, but it will eventually reach the point I believe where Obama will push hard to cut a deal with the Iranians. As you all know, on June 14th, the Iranians elected a new president, Hassan Rouhani. He's a moderate by Iranian standards, and he's gone to considerable lengths to make it clear that he would like to work out a deal with the United States. Both the lobby and the Israeli government have no interest in working out a deal. And it's quite clear if you look at how the Israelis and the lobby have acted since Rouhani was elected. Israeli press is filled with stories dismissing Rouhani's election and making the argument doesn't matter at all, and the United States, if anything, has to get tougher with the Iranians over time, not work to reach some sort of diplomatic compromise. With regard to the lobby here in the United States, shortly after Rouhani was elected, the House of Representatives passed House Resolution 850. It passed by a 400 to 20 vote. It had 378 cosponsors, and it called for the United States to put much tougher sanctions. And as you know, we already have very tough sanctions on the Iranians. It called for much tougher sanctions on the Iranians. This is how the lobby and indirectly the House greened the election of Rouhani, who said he was interested in working out some sort of diplomatic settlement with the United States. In the Senate, there was an APAC-sponsored letter signed by 76 senators that called for pursuing a confrontational policy toward Iran and give anything a toughening of the sanctions. So what you see here is we have a situation where if Rouhani is true to his word and he wants to work out a deal, and Obama is able to craft the deal with Rouhani, there is going to be a big battle between the White House on one hand and Congress on the other. And the principal reason you're going to have that battle is because the Israeli government and the lobby have no interest in the deal. They have enormous influence on Capitol Hill. And I believe they will fight Barack Obama to the nail on the issue. And I believe that is not in the American national interest. And again, I wanted to be clear. I do not think that's an Israel's national interest as well. So my bottom line is that U.S. policy towards the Middle East over the past few decades has been misguided. And that is due in large part, not completely. It is due in large part the influence of the lobby in Washington, D.C. And if there is any hope of America pursuing a smarter Middle East policy, it will require the lobby to behave in smarter ways, smarter ways for both the United States and again, Israel. Thank you. Thanks very much, John. Our next speaker and our other guest is Juan Cole. Juan is the Richard Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History here at the University of Michigan. For the past three decades, Juan has sought to put the relationship of the West, of which the United States is part, and the Muslim world in a historical context. His most recent book is Engaging the Muslim World. He also recently authored Napoleon's Egypt Invading the Middle East. Juan has been a regular guest on numerous news shows, including PBS's Lair News Hour, ABC Nightly News, Nightline, and many others. He takes his responsibilities in academic to try and convey better understandings of history and the region to people of the United States very seriously. He's written widely about Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and South Asia. He's commented extensively on al-Qaeda and the Taliban as well as the Iraq War and the politics of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He continues to study and write about contemporary Islamic movements, whether they are mainstream or radical, whether Sunni, Salafi, or Shia. Professor Cole has fluent command of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, and he also claims to read some Turkish. He knows both Middle Eastern and South Asia Islam. Most importantly though, for a contextual sense of contemporary events, he's also lived in the Middle East for up to almost 10 years and continues to travel there widely. Professor Cole, thank you. Well, thanks so much to Alastam and the court school for inviting me to speak. It's a great honor to be on the same podium as my old friend John Mearsheimer. And our charge here is to talk about U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East in the context of the U.S. relationship with Israel. Let me address some recent issues in the Israel-Palestinian relationship as it pertains to the United States. Let me lay out what I think has been happening. The first thing to say is, I don't want to give you a history lesson. It is a very complex history. But my analysis of the central problem of the Israelis and the Palestinians is that it's around issues in citizenship and that it is rooted in European atrocities and practices of the 1930s that have been resolved everywhere else in the world, but not here. So in the 20s and 30s, it became a fairly common instrument of statecraft for states to denaturalize populations. So Franco denaturalized the Spanish left. Any of those who had the Spanish citizenship taken away from them. The new Soviets denaturalized the white Russians. The Lazarus loyalists often had their citizenship taken away from them. There were Eastern European populations like the Romans who were either denaturalized or under threat of it. There were millions of people by the late 30s in Europe who had been denaturalized. And when you're not a citizen of anything, you have no rights. And our rent and others in this tradition have said that the citizenship is the right to have rights. Because if you're not a citizen of anything, the courts won't back the rights. You don't have standing to go to court. You don't actually really own any property because it can always be taken away from you by a real citizen. You become less than human by human status. And of course when the socialist take power in Germany, they went wild with this thing of denaturalizing people. And they denaturalized a lot of people including the Jews. And as the Nazi empire in Europe expanded, they denaturalized more and more Jews. In fact, in the late 30s, there had been so much Jewish immigration in the 30s, mainly in fear of the rise of fascism into Palestine that there was in 1936 to 1939 a revolt among the Palestinians. They were saying that we're all these illegal aliens coming from. They're horning in on our territory and the British are just letting them. And the British had a real problem on their hands in 1939. They issued a white paper which envisaged putting the brakes on the Jewish immigration. And the argument that was made against this white was that, well, as the Nazis are expanding in places like Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, they're denaturalizing more tens of thousands of Jews. And it's exactly the wrong time to prevent Jews from coming into Palestine, which the British had as a mandate after World War I, precisely because there are so many more disadvantaged, stateless Jews as time goes on and they needed more times to go. I would say whereas in the early 30s, most Jews who came to Palestine and there were a relatively small number, they doubled their period. But most Jews who came to Palestine, I would say there had been about 200,000 by about 1932, had dual citizenship. They had citizenship in some places besides the residence of British Palestine. By 1940, probably all of them were stateless, except to the extent that the British recognized their right to be in the great Palestine. So ironically enough, the rise of Israel in 1948 resolved this issue of Jewish statelessness definitively. And even those Jews who had been in Nazi camps and death camps and survived, their position was liminal after the war. It was clear what would happen to them and they were left in the camps. People don't realize there were a lot of them there two or three years later. And it was the Israelis who organized a transfer of population so that they came to what was called Israel. So this settled it. The Jews had citizenship in the state even if they had been denaturalized even after the horrors of the Holocaust and so forth. But as a part of 1947-48, there was a civil war in Mandate Palestine in which some Israelis and some Palestinians went to war with one another, the Arab League intervened. Not very much except for the Jordanians seemed to have been a side deal with the Israelis and the Syrians or the Lebanese were much of an asset to Israel. But as part of that civil war, the new Israelis, the Yeshua, organized itself militarily and it ethnically cleansed Palestinians. There had been 1.1 million Palestinians, 400,000, 500,000 Jews. These numbers are all very political and people argue about them, but that's false. And something on the order of 720,000 Palestinians were expelled from what was called Israel and after they were expelled the borders were closed and they were left on the outside in refugee camps. And they became stateless. They became stateless in Lebanon. They became stateless in most places. All over time eventually many of them who were in Jordan proper, not on the West Bank, in Jordan proper, got Jordanian citizenship, not in Syria, not in Egypt. And the Palestinians remained in Israel that citizenship. But after, as John said in 67, the Israelis captured the West Bank in Gaza. They detached those from the suzerainty of Egypt and Jordan respectively. In 1972, as a result of the Arab League agreements, Jordan relinquished all claims on the West Bank. But the end result of this was that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank were again made citizen without citizenship, stateless. And over time, Israelis were encouraged to move into these places and to colonize them, to set up communities, to grab land, to grab resources like water. They would dig there too well as deep within the Palestinian village so it's well to dry up. And they gradually were dispossessed and politically they were dispossessed because they were without citizenship. So many of the things that the Israelis did to the Palestinians were torts in international law or even in any national law. But the Palestinians could never go to court about these torts for the most part. There were a few patients when they succeeded in going through Israeli torts. But for the most part, they had no place to sue these wrongs against them because they were stateless. They had no standard. And when the Oslo Accord was made in the early 90s, with the Palestinians, it was an accord between a state and a stateless people. And it was reneged on. The current Prime Minister Netanyahu posted about the agreement. And of course, one of the reasons it could be reneged on was that the Palestinians are stateless and have no standing and there's nobody to whom they could complain and anything can be done to them that you would like to do. So would you like to carve up their territory and to stand, establish roads that only Israelis can travel on, put up checkpoints so they can't get to the hospital in time to be treated or have a baby? You can do all of those things to them. And say, who to you because they're without standing, they're stateless. Well, a couple years ago, the Palestinians went to the United Nations Security Council seeking to have their status at the UN, which was a non-member observer entity, a change to being a non-member observer state on the UN Security Council, of course, the United States of the United States. And then they went back the following year to the last year to the UN General Assembly, which voted on the status. It's the same status as the Vatican has, the non-member observer state. Why was it important for them to become recognized by the UN as a state? It's because as of 2002 we have the Rome Institutes, the Rome Treaty, which established the International Criminal Court. And theoretically, the Palestinians could take Israel to the International Criminal Court if Palestine is a state. And they tried in 2005 to go to the ICC and they were rejected because they were not recognized by the international community as a state. So now the Palestinians could go to the ICC and most of the things that Israel is doing to the Palestinians are illegal in international law and illegal according to the Rome Statutes. So the ICC could rule against Israel. This is the first time that there might be an international body that might adjudicate some of these problems in which Israel wouldn't just be given a free pass as it is in the United States that the UN constantly vetoes any resolution against Israeli actions. And the Palestinians haven't followed through on that application to the ICC. They've been threatened by the Israelis. In fact, they were punished for having gone to the UN's General Assembly last year by having their funds cut off. And the Palestine Authority doesn't have an organic relationship with the Palestinians. It's an institution set up by the Americans and the Israelis. In fact, the Palestine Authority in West Bank is the result of an Israeli and American coup in 2006. There were elections. The Bush administration, the Sharon government agreed that Hamas would be allowed to run. It's a party, a fundamentalist Muslim party. It won. Sharon was very unhappy about this outcome. She wasn't very happy about either, although they had pushed for Hamas's inclusion. And so the U.S. and the Israelis connived in a coup in the West Bank that put the PLO back in charge of the West Bank. They tried to do the same thing in Gaza, but they failed. Hamas managed to stay in power there. Now all the newspaper articles you read will say that Hamas is in Gaza because it made a coup, or it took over Gaza. It wasn't like it just so happened that the coup in the West Bank couldn't also succeed there. So for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, John Kerry, the Secretary of State, decided to try to start back up international negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. I think the Palestinians may have been willing to do this at this point, partly because they now feel that they have the possibility of an international criminal court membership as a negotiating board. So that the Israelis might be willing to give up some things in order to avoid the Palestinians going to the ICC and avoid putting Israel in a position where many of its actions could be declared illegal in the international court of law. And indeed, one of the things that the PLO wanted was that there are thousands of Palestinian prisoners. Some of them are terrorists and should be in jail, but others of them defied an Israeli curfew, or they protested Israeli settlement expansion, or did something like that, and Israelis would just round them up and put them in jail, including children. So the PLO wanted those guys out, and they got a lot of them out this summer as part of these carry negotiations and as part of the, I think, the stick of the ICC. But in the course of these negotiations, it's now been leaked that the Israeli side suggested that the Palestinians could have about 60% of the West Bank. And the Palestinian position is they get all of 67 West Bank or the equivalent in land, if the Israelis wanted to give them some of Galilee, that would be alright, along with some Arab population. The Arab Israelis are Galilee not happy about this. And so they wanted all, and then I don't think they were compromising that way and just accept 60%. I'm not sure how Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, could possibly get such an agreement through his cabinet anyway, all of whom basically have said that they're not giving up the West Bank. And including the new bright light on the Israeli political scene, Yair Lapid, who represents kind of moderate middle class Israeli points of view, but he's not actually very good on the West Bank issues, and it shows you how the Israeli mainstream has spunk to the right. So my guess is that the Palestinians don't want to use the ICC membership because it's kind of a nuclear option. It forces all the issues at once. The Israelis and Americans will cut them off and it's a kind of declaration of legal conflict. But I think that these negotiations with Kerry were a last chance. I think they will go nowhere. And I think ultimately, next year this time or two years from now, you will have a Palestinian leadership that goes to the ICC. And I think that will be the beginning of the throwing of this conflict into the international, away from the grasp of the United States. Because the United States has revealed in the WikiLeaks cables is an unreliable partner for the Palestinians. The cables show U.S. consular officials in Tel Aviv just doing whatever they can to implement Israeli policy, including the illegal civilian blockade on the people of Gaza, half of whom are children. And the Israelis did things like figure out what was there, what was the basic caloric intake of the Palestinians of Gaza and would allow only that much food in a truck. So as to avoid them starving to death and making humanitarian prices, but keeping them on the edge of subsistence. I mean, that's creepy. And the U.S. supported that. I don't deny that Gaza is a security problem for Israel. Rockets come out of there and Ciderot and other towns are attacked. And it's no fun to have your factory have a rocket come through it. And you can understand how the Israelis want to do something about Gaza. But preventing their children from having chocolate, that's an odd response to the blockade. So I think that the likelihood is that time goes on. Precisely because the United States seems to be paralyzed or permanently one-sided on this issue, that to the extent that there's going to be a negotiated settlement, it's going to migrate to international institutions, to the ICC. And to the European Union, the other big thing that happened that I think provoked this current round of negotiations is how am I doing because I don't have a clock? Two more minutes. So the other big thing that happened that provoked these negotiations, I think, was that the European Union has decided to start taking the illegality of Israeli actions in the West Bank seriously. Now in international law, it's not illegal to occupy territory as part of war. So the occupation itself is not illegal. But under the Hague Convention in 1907 and under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which were intended to prevent more atrocities like what happened in World War II, it's not allowed for the occupying power to alter the life ways of local people in occupied territories, not allowed for them to transfer their own citizens into occupied territory. And so the Israelis are breaking international law by their policies. Israeli lawyers will say, well, it's not really occupied territory because what state did it belong to before we took it? If it didn't belong to a state before we took it, then it's not really occupied. Well, you've got 4 million people living under occupation, so I don't think you can just erase them off the blackboard that way. And I don't think the conventions or the law says anything at all about the prior status of the occupied territory. It's not about who owned it before. It's about how the people living in the occupied territory are treated. But I think by now, the Israelis have so vigorously challenged the norms of international law with regard to occupied territories that the occupation, their pursuit, isn't illegal. And certainly the plan of the right wing to annex that territory is illegal. So the European Union has made a decision that they're not going to give any aid and they're not going to give any tariff reductions to Israeli goods produced in the West Bank and exported them to Europe. And this is a big danger for Israel far beyond what it might seem because the West Bank and your prices are not that big a part of the Israeli economy. But the Israeli economy is more and more deeply involved in companies that run enterprises on the West Bank. And so this EU boycott could willy-nilly start being applied to other corporations just because they have a piece in the West Bank. And 50% of Israel's trade is with Europe. A lot of Israeli technological advances because of transfer of technology from Europe access to European conferences and so forth. So this EU step is seen as deadly dangerous for Israel from the point of view of the Netanyahu government. And Kerry has been putting pressure on the EU to back off at least until this round of negotiations works out. So I think although the Palestinian situation looks very dire there have been some developments in the past two years that do suggest a different atmosphere in the international side. Thank you very much. We have a couple of our graduates here that are now collecting and collating the questions that have passed in. And while they're doing that I'd like to pose that I have a question for each of our guests here. First one's for Professor Meersheimer. I start with an observation that if we took the people out of the United States our US foreign policy would certainly be quite different. But the United States is a democracy. People matter. People are supposed to matter and we have a competitive system which I think we do both a competitive economy but we also have a competitive electoral system. Why should we be disturbed that one group of people are more effective than others in affecting, in helping shape US foreign policy? Whether it's domestic foreign policy or otherwise. Put in another way, what is it that's so pernicious about essentially as you referred to the normal functioning of the American democratic political system in this area? I never used the word pernicious. Very clear up. The American political system was set up in a way that guaranteed that interest groups would yield significant power. And that has been true from the very beginning. And I believe that the gun laws that we have in this country or the absence of the gun laws that we have in this country makes no sense at all. It makes me very mad if we don't have what I would consider an enlightened gun policy. And I think the principle reason that we don't have an enlightened gun policy is because of the gun law or the National Rifle Association. But I would not argue for one second that the NRA is doing something that's illegal or immoral or unethical. It's operating in the American system the way other interest groups are operating in the American system. I just don't like the policies that they're pushing. And the same thing is true with the Israel law. This is why I would never use the word pernicious. They're not pernicious, right? What they're doing is practicing American politics. And it just happens that I think that the policies that they're pushing are not in America's national interest. Any more than I think that the policies that the Farm Lobby or the National Rifle Association or the Cuba Lobby are pushing are in America's national interest. But in this country, if you criticize Israel you criticize the U.S. Israeli relationship or you criticize the lobby, you get attacked for being an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew or for making arguments that are deeply unethical or unprincipled. But what have you? And I think that this is wrongheaded. I think that the lobby should be free to exercise its right to try to influence U.S. foreign policy in a particular direction. And I should be free and Juan should be free to criticize or to support that policy as we see fit. So I think the basic principles of democracy should be applied to the critics of Israel as well as the lobby itself. Well, that's why we brought you here. Now, the second question I have is for Professor Cole. The history of modern humans is the history of people moving around and being moved around. Is the problem that you're describing about the Palestinians and the relationship with the Israelis and Jews in the region somehow particularly special or unusual? Or should we be hopeful that just as in other places and with other peoples, things are essentially eventually going to work themselves out? Or put another way, should we feel some special obligation as Americans in the context of U.S. foreign policy to try and do something in the Middle East given our need to attend to difficult challenges we have here at home in the U.S.? Well, my argument is that the statelessness of the Palestinians is peculiar in contemporary world. It wouldn't have been peculiar in the 1930s, but it's peculiar now. UN High Commission refugees has begun doing a database on stateless people and there are only a few million of them in the world. And often they're in transitional positions. So the Taiwanese guest workers in Japan in 1971 were rendered stateless because Japan recognized the one China policy, so they recognized Beijing as China and therefore the Taiwanese, who didn't want to be Chinese in that sense, were left without representation or without any legal status in Japan. And I know one of them and ultimately this situation was finessed and they were restored their rights. And little while they were stateless. And a lot of women end up stateless in the world because they marry somebody from another country and they're not accepted. They lose their own citizenship and their new citizenship isn't accepted and their children sometimes end up stateless. But it happens to individual families and it's now an issue in feminist scholarship because of that. But there's no other population of five, six million people who are stateless as a group. This is weird. And being stateless is a human rights problem for the whole world. That is to say, I remember back in the 80s I had students and colleagues who said, well, the Palestinians, you know, their problem is being solved and some of them settled in Kuwait. That solves that problem, right? Because they're like, they'll become Kuwaitis. Well, they were never given citizenship in Kuwait. And then in 1991, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Palestinian leadership, the Arafat and so forth, supported Saddam. Most of the Palestinians in Kuwait didn't. But nevertheless, after the war, the Kuwaitis considered that they had been perfidious and expelled them all. Many of them now live in Amman and Jordan. And so when you're stateless, not only, you're constantly being made homeless again. I visited Nathril Barad in northern Lebanon. It was a refugee camp from 48. I interviewed people who had been kicked out of their apartments in Haifa by Zaytas Cadres. And they had built it up to where it was fairly nice, Nathril Barad. And then 50 guys got together and they started robbing banks in nearby Tripoli in Lebanon. And then a couple of them announced that they were al-Qaeda. And so the Lebanese army was encouraged by Washington to invade Nathril Barad to go after these 50 guys. It's like something out of the Old West. And they destroyed it. I mean, just completely, the buildings were all knocked down and these people with them were made homeless yet again. Everything that they had built up was lost again. And Jordan, about 30,000 people who were given citizenship who were originally from Gaza have just been denaturalized by Jordan. So being in a group like that of so many stateless people, it makes your citizenship rights unstable even where you pro forma have them. And it's just not allowed for these people to go on like this. It is a human rights problem unique in the world. And of course, the United States should be resolving it. And we have. Not only haven't we, but we have mightily contributed to the ongoing plight of these stateless people. And that's one of the reasons, as John said, that we have a bad press in the Muslim world because nobody can understand why would you want to do that to those people? Why would you want to keep them stateless? Why would you want to injure their interests and beg their children? Well, how mean would you have to be to do this? This is the way that the issue is framed in the region. And I guarantee you, we went out and just did a poll. Most Americans don't know the Palestinians are occupied, much less that they are stateless. Thanks. I have a question from the audience for Professor Mirshimer, though you feel free to chime in on. Can you be more specific about which Israel lobby you're referring to? Many liberal Zionists do not affiliate themselves with APEC, but instead with groups such as J Street and Peace Now. What is it about APEC in particular and what is your opinion on other liberal organizations and about why they don't seem to have the effect on U.S. foreign policy that you described to some Israeli groups? As Steve and I make clear in the book, the lobby is comprised of individuals and groups who work assiduously to push U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. And that obviously includes a variety of different organizations. And if you take J Street on one hand and the Zionist organization of America, on the other hand, you're talking about two groups that are quite different in their attitudes towards Israeli policy. The Zionist organization of America is very hardline, basically in favor of the present government's policies, whereas J Street is deeply committed to a two-state solution. So you have quite a bit of variation inside the lobby. The question is why are organizations like APEC so much more powerful than J Street? The reason that APEC is so powerful, I believe, is that hardline American Jews, I believe, in general are more committed to Israel than liberal American Jews. And therefore it is easier for the hardliners in the community to organize and to raise money and to wield influence on Capitol Hill. I think that most liberal American Jews who I would categorize as being part of the lobby are not as deeply committed in general as people on the right. What makes all of these groups, in my opinion, part of the lobby, is that they are unwilling to allow the United States government to get tough with Israel. They back the special relationship. This is why J Street is doomed. J Street, as you know, is in favor of a two-state solution. And I believe the two-state solution is the best solution by far for both Israel and the Palestinians and, of course, the United States. But J Street is unwilling to allow the president of the United States, Barack Obama, in this case, to cut off aid to Israel if it doesn't stop building settlements and allow for Palestinian states in the occupied territories. Well, if you're not willing to cut off aid to the Israeli government, they're just not going to stop building settlements. They're just going to go on their merry way. And that means, in effect, that APEC is going to be the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and J Street is going to matter on the margins and nothing more. So what we have inside this variegated group of institution and individuals is a lot of variety. And nevertheless, the situation where the hard lines, especially APEC, wield much more influence than the more liberal individuals and organizations like J Street. And the end result of this is that the situation that Juan describes, in my opinion, is going to go on for a long time. I do not think it's sustainable over the long term, but I do believe it is sustainable over the next couple decades in large part because the lobby is so powerful, and it's those institutions like APEC in the lobby that can outmuscle the J Street-type organizations when the push comes to show. Sure, sure. I just would like to suggest also, I mean, it wouldn't be fair to call me a Marxist, but maybe a little Marxist sometimes. I think class... Graucho Marxist. Yes, yeah, yeah. Graucho said that he wouldn't want to be a member of a club that would let him in. And probably it's the same with me, but I just like to suggest that the Israel Lobby's issue, and I like to call it with an S Israel Lobby's because I don't just emphasize how diverse they are, but it's a problem of class to some extent. Who has the big money to give? I mean, this thing is not driven by convincing argument. It's because we have a corrupt political system that the NRA can block, can pass laws in Iowa that you can't stop blind people from carrying concealed weapons in the street. I mean, this is because those guys in the Iowa legislature were bribed by campaign contributions and the threat of their being withdrawn or being given to their opponents and so forth. And it's the same thing with the Israel Lobby's or with any lobby in the United States. We have a corrupt political system where it's all right to take money in politics and therefore money speaks very loudly and therefore the vast majority of American Jews is disenfranchised on Israel issues because they don't want these hardline policies. It's very clear in all the opinion polling that the vast majority of what John says maybe stated slightly differently would be mainstream Jewish American opinion often. But who's got the money is Chaim Saban and Sheldon Adelson and people like that. I don't think it's just that the hardline is people on the Zionist side are more committed than the liberals. The liberals are very committed. They do all kinds of things in American society that take commitment. They've often been at the front lines of anti-war movements which is dangerous nowadays. The reason that the APAC and the more right-wing and hardline of these organizations is the most successful in Congress is because I think there's a kind of Vagarian elective affinity going on where the billionaires, not all of them, but they tend to be increasingly on the right, let us say. And you can see that just go down the Forbes 500 and here's Larry Ellison and Mayor Bloomberg and so forth, but most of them, let's face it. And on the Israeli side, that means you would be the crew. Sure, I'll respond to that one. Given that we brought money into the equation, this makes it one of our audience members questions particularly. And it is, and this is for both of you, why don't the Arabs have an equally powerful lobby? They also have the money. The United States has transferred literally trillions of dollars of US wealth to the Arab Petro States. They have oil exchange currency leverage over the United States. They have a network and so forth. Why don't we see an equally effective Arab equivalent? Or do we, and they have a different set of issues they're concerned about? There's two dimensions to the answer. One is, I think the question is talking about Arab governments. When we talk about the Israel lobby, we're not talking about the Israelis or the Israeli government. We're talking about Americans who happen to be our lobby. And by the way, not everybody in the lobby is Jewish. If you look at the neo-conservatives, the court constituency in the lobby, there are a substantial number of non-Jews. So the point is you're dealing with Americans. So talking about the Saudi government, people will say, what about the Saudis? The Saudis don't have a lobby. There's no Saudi lobby in the United States. The Saudis go to Washington and they hire a lobby in Washington to do the lobbying for them. The operative question is what about Arab Americans? Or what about Palestinian Americans? I'll give two answers there. One is an answer that Rashid Khalidi gave when I was asked this question at Columbia didn't have a really good answer. He stood up and he said that he thought a large part of it had to do with the fact that Jews came to the United States in very large numbers in the late 19th and early 20th century and over time they had assimilated into the American mainstream and very successful in business and therefore they're well positioned to intervene as an interscrew. He said that Arab Americans have come much later after World War II in recent decades and most of them are just scrambling to get integrated into the American mainstream and are not well positioned to influence that but that will change with time. That was his argument, which I think is a good argument. My argument, which I spun out at the time which I think is correct, is that if you look at the Arab American community it's much more fragmented, right? We're not just talking about all-Palestinian Americans we're talking about Arab Americans who come from a variety of countries have a variety of different new points on the same issue and therefore it's very hard to get them together and to mobilize them the way it is possible to mobilize a large slice of American Jews to squeeze them. By the way, just to pick up on one quick point that Juan made, I want to be clear that when I talk about the Arab, I'm not talking about the American Jewish community like the American Jewish community and one of the things that stunned me when I first started examining this issue is it probably about one-third of American Jews do not care very much about Israel at all. It's not like every American Jew cares greatly about Israel. It's quite surprising how unimportant Israel is the substantial slice of American Jews. So we're just talking about those people who are deeply committed to Israel. Well, with regard to the alternative somebody on the other side which I think James Madison would have expected. There are always to be multiple lobbies on any issue and one of the reasons we get a very one-sided result in this issue is that there's only really one player. First of all, I mean it's not true that the Arabs didn't come earlier on. We have probably 5 million Lebanese Americans but they assimilated in a different way than the Jewish Americans did because 90% of them were halfway and they just interneuried with the Irish and the French so that you meet a lot of Americans whose one grandmother was Lebanese but then they don't identify as Arabs. So in a way I'm making a melting pot argument about the Christian Arabs who were until the last 30 or 40 years the Christian Arabs were the vast majority of Arab immigrants. The Muslim Arabs only started coming after 65. So I think it's because Arab Christian identity is difficult to maintain in the United States where one would tend to intermarry with other ethnic groups of the same denomination and Muslim identity might have more legs but in 1965 there were 100,000 American Muslims so they just weren't very many of them and now there are many more but then you have the problem that some of them are Albanian and some of them are Indonesian and not all of them are really interested in Palestine and then they have the physicians are they supporting Hamas or is it supporting Israel? But I mean that was true of the Jewish American community in the early 20th century too. It was very fragmented to Germans and the Russians used to get along very well on the whole. So over time it could be that the Muslim Americans would emerge with a voice on this issue but it's decades out. So I'd like to turn a little bit here and look a little retrospectively about presidential leadership in the United States. Some time ago George Herbert Walker Bush, the elder, was held loan guarantees from Israel over settlement issues in part and a couple of other issues as well. We haven't seen similar behavior by any of the subsequent presidents. Now does this reflect a failure of leadership on subsequent presidents or is this a growth in the strength of these Israeli lobbies? I think that Barack Obama from the very start went to considerable lengths to challenge Israel on the subject of settlements. Between out of the gates, he picked a fight with Israel over settlements and he was deeply committed to a two-state solution and he understood that Netanyahu and company were not and he was going to put pressure on them. By my count there were four big battles between Netanyahu and Obama in his first administration. You can look at Peter Bynart's book on the crisis of Zionism. You can look at a new book coming out by Josh Rubner. You'll detail these fights quite clearly. What happened in every case is that Obama was decisively defeated. In fact, he was humiliated and that's why he's effectively given up and it's no accident that his first trip in his second term was to Israel and he went over and he basically played very nice with the Israelis and did nothing to put any pressure on them to stop settlement building and to move towards the two-state solution. Barack Obama has given up but he did not behave that way in his first term. The question you want to ask yourself is how is it that a president of the United States went toe-to-toe with Benjamin Netanyahu who's the prime minister of a very small country that's highly dependent on the United States and the president lost all four times? The answer is very simple. It comes down to one word, a lot. And this is not an Israel's interest. I want to make that clear. I do not for the life of me understand what the Israelis and their supporters in this country are doing supporting the creation of a greater Israel. It's going to be if it isn't already in apartheid state and this is going to be a disaster for Israel. Israel should be working overtime and its supporters in this country should be working overtime to create a two-state solution if you believe in the survival or the welfare of Israel. Where we're headed is not good at all to put it mildly for Israel and I just don't understand what's going on. Your optimism here leads to our next question. Demographic trends in Israel may make Israel as a democratic but also Jewish state untenable in the coming decades, giving current differences in birth rates in different groups within Israel. First, do you buy into this assessment and if so, will the sheer numbers force some kind of true compromise and emergence of a two-state solution? Well, the demographic issues in Israel are as follows. Israel, the political framework for Israel was mainly formed by a left of center Central and Western European Jews and so the history of the labor union and the labor party, all of those things and they were very secular. Ham sandwiches are a big industry in Tel Aviv and people don't think you need to turn off the lights on Saturday for the most part. Jerusalem, yes. But the framework for Israel was a secular framework and over time this has changed for several reasons. First of all, you had as a result the rise of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians, there were kind of subsidiary riots in other Arab countries and other Muslim countries in Tunisia and Yemen and so forth where Jews sometimes felt exposed and the Middle Eastern Jews had never really supported the idea of a Jewish state but they got roped into this thing really nearly and so many of them went to Israel. So now the population of Israel is roughly the Jewish population is roughly a million of the Ashkenazi of the European secular minded Jews and about two and a half million Eastern Jews from the Middle East originally or from Spain and Portugal and so forth and then there are about a million who came from the ex-Soviet Union from Russia and Ukraine and so forth many of whom they're not fairly religious but among the more religious groups were the Orthodox or the Haridim they don't like to be called Orthodox, they think Orthodox would be enough and they were a small group originally in the early 70s there were the 2% of the population they're kind of like our Amish in their social position in society but they have large families and they've grown very fast so they're now 8% of the population so they don't have exactly the same ideas as the founding fathers of Israel and then the Palestinians who stayed after 48 were allowed to stay in Haifeng and Galilee and so forth and became Israeli citizens also are growing and by 2030 the Israel Census Bureau suggests there'll be about a third of the population well if you've got an Israel that's 20% Haridim which is what looking out we probably have in the 2030s and 30% Palestinian that's not Netanyahu, it's Israel and what exactly its policies will be or how life will be there is in question and a lot of the Haridim this is changing to some extent but it still can't be dismissed they're not that Zionist they're not that committed to an Israeli state in fact there have been journalists who have asked Haridim who settled in the West Bank you know if the Palestinians got statehood by some miracle would you be willing to stay here under Palestinian rule rather than go back to Israel under that circumstance they would say no I'd rather be here Israel not that end all in the off again so I think people like Netanyahu when they look at these demographic trends are very worried and Avigdor Lieberman who's the disgraced temporarily not the minister of foreign affairs because he's under corruption investigations actually has a program where he wants to go to the Palestinian Israelis and say will you pledge allegiance to the state and be a loyal citizen and if you won't sign the pledge of allegiance we're going to denaturalize you so it's like when Michelle Obama said that Defford Barak was elected for the first time she felt proud of her country Lieberman's point of view would be take her citizenship away so that would be one way of dealing with these demographic changes if I can just say something very quickly when Juan was given that figure 30% of Palestinians he's talking about inside Green Line Israel right now between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean the Israeli government estimates that there's slightly more Palestinians than Jews so in greater Israel which is here to stay in my opinion you have slightly more Palestinians than Jews even if you don't buy that if the Israeli Jews have an advantage over the Palestinians the number is quite small second as we were talking about before there are estimated to be somewhere between 750,000 and a million Israeli Jews who do not live in Israel and most of them are not expected to return to Israel lots of Israeli Jews have left so if we just look at Jews and Palestinians and what's going to happen over time given birth rate it's going to be a majority Palestinians for sure and this is why if you have a greater Israel which I think is a reality, regret it it's going to have to be in a part of that state the only thing you want to remember and this just picks up on Juan said that the average Orthodox or Herodine woman has 7.8 babies so much of the Jewish birth rate is being fueled by the Herodine so you're going to have a huge slug of Orthodox Jews who as he said quite correctly are not terribly enthusiastic about Zionism but the state of Israel and then you're going to have a majority of Palestinians and this I believe will cause many secular Israeli Jews to leave for the United States and you see lots of that here at the University of Michigan as there is at the University of Chicago there are many places like that and also as I was saying before the European Union is now giving passports to Israeli Jews who can trace their heritage to the palace settlement in Europe or to Europe in general well a huge number of Israelis can trace their heritage to Europe and they get good passports and Europe is a very desirable place to live and the more Israel becomes an undesirable place to live because of the growth of the Palestinian Orthodox population the more I think we can expect those secular Israelis to leave so I think when we look at the demographics of this situation it is not a pretty picture for the Israeli people again this is why I think it makes eminently good sense to move as fast as possible through a two state solution from Israel's perspective I'm going to follow up on your comment John about pessimism about in the New York Times this past Sunday I and Lustig who works at the University of Pennsylvania had an extended op-ed piece on Israel and Palestine and the title of it was the two state illusion and Professor Lustig makes the case that the current negotiating points in the peace process that Juan you said is somewhat inexplicably Kerry and the State Department seem to be wanting to pick up on our outdated and no longer possible could you both maybe we have a couple more minutes left talk a little bit about your pessimism about the prospects of any prospects for a two state solution and maybe Juan you could close up with perhaps a little bit more optimistic hopeful view on that or that you just bring the whole thing down on it down on it I would argue that if you look at the present Israeli governments past Israeli government public opinion in Israel and this is related to the demographic story that we were both telling this is a country that has been moving to the right over time and will in my opinion continue to move to the right and as Juan said this is a government that is filled with people who are adamantly opposed to a two state solution and are fully in favor of a greater Israel and that is not going to change there is no meaningful opposition in Israel it is deeply committed to a two state solution there is no equivalent of jester in Israel so Israel itself is driving this train Israel is a state of Palestinians with stateless people Israel is in bed with the United States and Israel is going to get a greater Israel so that's point number one point number two is many people will say to me well John public opinion polls show that the Israelis are in favor of a two state solution well that's true but in principle it's very easy to be in favor of a two state solution the $64,000 question is what does that two state solution look like the Palestinians have to be given as Juan pointed out before virtually all of the west bank and Gaza they have to get East Jerusalem the Israelis have to get out of the Jordan River Valley and the Israelis have to give up two of the really big settlements Arielle and Malah Dumim which drive deep into the west bank they could keep a number of the other big settlement plots but those two have to be given up Netanyahu himself has made it clear he's not giving up the Jordan River Valley he's not giving up East Jerusalem he's not giving up Arielle and Malah Dumim and he's a moderate in his government and even if you can find 45% of the population in Israel that's in favor of giving up those two settlements the Jordan River Valley and East Jerusalem there is enough opposition and that opposition is determined enough that no politician could possible get it through so you are in a situation I think this is a tragedy where you're destined to have a greater Israel and as I said before for demographic reasons that state, that greater Israel will be, if it isn't already an apartheid state I do disagree with John a little bit with regard to Israeli public opinion I agree that there's not a big constituency in Israel for a Palestinian state unless certain conditions could be met in the Israeli mind that it would be demilitarized that it wouldn't pose a threat that you wouldn't have guerrillas coming over and blowing up students at Hebrew University's cafeteria which happened earlier in the last decade so they really would be concerned about security issues but I really think that this push to expand settlements and to more or less annex the West Bank is coming from a minority of Israelis and it's coming from very wealthy people who have investments there, I mean I think it's the same as in American politics in a way Israel has caught the American disease that its politics has been captured by the super-wealthy one of my Israeli friends when I was there said we have 18 billionaires in Tel Aviv now the Israeli pocket is deeper than the American pocket but those 18 billionaires most of them, you know they have investments in the West Bank and they're promoting this thing and then they're the ones who fund Omarik and Netanyahu and if you think American politics is corrupt you should meet Mr. Omarik although in some ways his policies in the West Bank were much more reasonable but in fact while the Justice Minister and has formed her own party she used to be in Fadima which broke with Likud over this issue of the two-state solution so there are sections of these really right who really wanted a two-state solution they asked Zippy what would you do about Ariel and so forth if there were a Palestinian state agreed to and she said that is what police are for so she was perfectly willing just to move them out so and I really wonder whether her being Justice Minister isn't partly involved in bringing Kerry back in and negotiations but as John said if Netanyahu could be convinced to make a deal probably his cabinet would dump him he really faces a lot of opposition he might be shocked that's what happened to the far right so I think it's really a hard it's a hard argument to make that there's going to be a two-state solution anytime soon the political conjuncture in Israel and Palestine are not favorable and that's when there's been breakthroughs it's never been because US government intervened heavily it's been because Sadat wanted to change the rules of the game and Beijing could be convinced to do that so you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink and I think Kerry is in the unfortunate position of trying to make the horse drink but here's another thing to say is that I think you just have to have a long view of this stuff these are all human beings the Israelis, the Palestinians their private lives and their aspirations and their hopes many of them are fair people in their own context there are a lot of Palestinians I've heard praise the Israelis I know a Jordanian who was deported by the Israelis one time and he said you know they treated me like human beings they're not beasts like my government so the thing that I would say is that probably they're stuck with each other they do go to an apartheid situation which is the glimmers of which are already there I think a lot of Israelis in the long term just won't find that acceptable themselves and then you might get a reaction against the Likud and so forth when the full horror of this situation becomes obvious and I think you should be remembered that in South Africa between 1976 in Soweto and the change in the early 90s there was a change in consciousness and among the Africaners and it was Africaners who made this deal in the end not just the ANC so if you want optimism I find it in the future and I'd just like to point out of an opinion polling more liberal parties and pro-two-state parties at the margins right now are coming up if the election were held today according to Israeli opinion polling Meretz which is a liberal party would double its seats Livni would double her seats she only has a few but from one to the last Israeli politics has often been deeply divided and Netanyahu could lose one of his partners Lapid could be a swing vote this is not something that's going to happen next year or in the near future but over time over a decade over two decades there may be a positive settlement just because Palestinians and Israelis themselves are decent people and they won't want to see a long-term atrocity continue thanks very much we've come to the end thank you for coming