 All right, well, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to USIP. I'm Lucy Kurtzer-Ellenbogen. I'm the director of our Arab-Israeli conflict programs here at the Institute. And on behalf of USIP and also on behalf of the Center for New American Security, welcome to our discussion today. It's wonderful to have you here. It's almost like something had just happened on this issue area to get people interested. So we're thrilled to have everybody here and looking forward to a thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion. The jumping off point for today's discussion is a report recently released by the Center for New American Security and authored by our panelist, Ilan Goldenberg. There are copies, if you haven't seen it, available of the report outside the room. There's a table immediately outside the room. And its title, Lessons from the 2013-2014 Israeli-Palestinian Final Status Negotiations, captures what will be the starting point and the basis for our discussion today. It's also important to keep in mind, of course, that when the context allows, and this context of diplomacy in the Israeli-Palestinian arena does, that lessons learned should be cumulative and ideally not repetitive. And to weigh in on that, providing perspective from a long trajectory of engagement on this issue are two eminently qualified experts, Professor Bill Quant and Dr. Tamara Wittes. So the other thing about lessons learned is that they should not be just about looking backwards, but ideally looking forward. And the recent context of elections in Israel provides a good place from which to do just that. So before we begin, I know that, for most of you, our panelists today need little introduction. But I'm going to do a very quick round of introductions. And then, Ilan, I'm going to ask you to start us off with the key strands of analysis and lessons embodied in your report. And then, if I could ask you to add to that, give some thought to some of the US policy options in light of those lessons and recommendations and where we find ourselves today. So starting with Professor Bill Quant, who recently retired as a chair professor of politics at the University of Virginia. In the course of a distinguished career, Professor Quant has served two different terms on the staff of the National Security Council, participated in the negotiations that led to the Camp David Treaty, taught at the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, MIT, worked for RAND, and held the position of senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, something that's going to sound very familiar to you in just a second. But Bill Quant also is a prolific author on the Middle East and US policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict. And I have a feeling that for many in this crowd, whether past, present, maybe potential students of the Middle East, his name will seem extremely familiar. You've probably read many things with his name on it in this regard. From a USIP perspective, I'm happy to say that most recently he co-authored The Peace Puzzle, America's Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace for 1989 to 2011, which was the product of a USIP study group on this topic. Dr. Tamara Wittes is a senior fellow and the director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. She previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, oversaw the Middle East Partnership Initiative, and served as Deputy Special Coordinator for Middle East Transitions. Before joining the State Department, Tamara Wittes was a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. And also, this is another shameless USIP plug or connection, served as a Middle East specialist here at the US Institute of Peace, from where she edited the volume How Israelis and Palestinians Negotiate Across Cultural Analysis of the Oslo Peace Process, a book I should say to which Bill Quant was also a contributor. There's a little bit of a theme going on here. And last but certainly not least, Mr. Elan Goldenberg, who is senior fellow and director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for New American Security. Immediately prior to coming to CNES, Elan served as the chief of staff to the Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations at the US Department of State. Prior to that, he served as senior professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, covering Middle East issues. And from 2009 to 2012, served first as a special advisor on the Middle East and then as the around-teen chief in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. So all in all, I think we can tell we're in for a thoughtful discussion today that's certainly grounded in incomparable experience. So Elan, if I can turn to you to start us off. Thank you, Lucy, for hosting this event and thank you for everybody for being here. I thought what I'd do is talk for a few minutes about some of the key lessons that I took out of my own experiences in the 18 months and many of which are reflected in the report, but also try to draw from those lessons into what does it mean for us today, particularly in the aftermath of the selection, some of the very bold and unfortunate comments by Prime Minister Netanyahu about the possibility of a two-state solution and what this really means going forward. So the first thing, and I go into this very deeply in the report, and people have used this analogy before, I'm not the first to use it, I just think I take it to a more extreme level, is this question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in many ways is a divorce. Really between two sides who know each other at this point incredibly well, but also just don't trust each other anymore at all. I think which is something that was different, perhaps, from the 90s, where when they first started negotiating, the negotiating dynamic itself has taken over to such an extent where I know what you're doing here, I know exactly what you're doing, I know how to press your button, I don't trust you, and I'm just expecting, everything is seen from the perspective of leverage in the negotiation. You saw that all the time. It's very much a zero-sum game. Two parties essentially trying to divide territory. This is the old analogy. It's not about two states living together, it's two states living side by side. Luck, like that divorce analogy, and you saw it in a number of the different issues. I would also say as the American mediators, we were a bit like the lawyers, and you could probably think of the Consul General who's responsible for dealing with the Palestinians, and the embassy in Tel Aviv were almost like these two, the good friend couple of the divorcing couple, each talking to one side and then conflicting with each other, as they came back to talk about what they had heard. But you saw it in the issues, Jerusalem being in some ways like the child in the negotiation, at any divorce negotiation, the most emotional issue, and one that there is no comfortable custody arrangement that actually works for both sides, so you're gonna have to find a way to make it work. The other, Jewish state, which in some ways I compare to that piece of China that nobody really wants in the divorce negotiation. In the beginning, nobody really cares about, but then one side decides, well, maybe I want this, and so the other side decides, well, if you want this, then I want this, because it's useful leverage and distrust. Why do you want it? And you sort of start going up the escalation ladder, and before we knew it, Jewish state, which had just not been an issue in 2000 really, had become this mammoth issue by 2013 through a combination of different steps taken by both sides and how they publicized it. The other thing I'll say on this core negotiating dynamics that I get into in the report is a boss in Netanyahu as leaders and a lack of trust there. I mean, Martin Indyk, who, my former boss, Tammy's current boss, has talked about this before and made this a big point. The lack of trust was just, it's a huge issue. It's hard to see either of these leaders, quite frankly, at this point, ever going towards a two-state solution, but it is impossible to see them doing it together. There's just no trust there at all. Both of them are incredibly risk averse, and as a result of that, neither of them are gonna be, and top of the fact they don't trust each other, neither of them are gonna be the leader that takes their people beyond the comfort zone in which they're currently in and takes those huge risks that are necessary for peace. So that really gets to the first lesson of what should we do now in the aftermath of elections while it's just the first thing we shouldn't do. We should not try to get back into negotiations in any kind of a way. I think it's very obvious that right now the dynamics just don't lend themselves to that, and there really isn't a lot of positive steps that can be taken over the next couple months to try to re-initiate any kind of a process. The next lesson I think that I took out of my own experiences was, it's amazing how much time the parties end up spending on minutia. How many, this is just a habit, I think, of 20 years of leverage and going back at each other, how much stuff is gonna go through the border at Gaza, this checkpoint, that checkpoint, how high, there's old stories about the Hebron Agreement and the height of the buildings in Hebron. I mean, the level of detail, it's amazing. It's like nothing you'll ever see in the US government. The guy who spent a few years working on other issues like Iran, it's just, there's nothing like the bickering that goes on on this issue and the level of minutia that they get into. And as negotiators, your job is twofold. One, it's to try to focus them on the bigger pictures. But two, is to recognize when these things actually become important. And going again to a recommendation for what first thing we should do today, I think is some immediate conflict management and one of these very nibbly minutia issues that could become a very important issue. And that's the withholding of revenues by the Israeli government right now to the Palestinians, which is really in danger of destabilizing the Palestinian government, the Palestinian Authority. And the good news here, they've been holding it for the last couple months, essentially in response to the Palestinians going to the ICC. There is a little bit of good news about the Netanyahu election for this in my view. He won, he won handily. He's got the political flexibility here now to release these revenues if you ask me. And I think he knows better, and I'm sure his security people, I know his security people are telling him, release the revenues, stabilize the Palestinian Authority because this is a very dangerous game you're playing right now. The Palestinians are obviously responding to this by threatening to collapse the Palestinian Authority, which is something, they threaten a lot of things. It's one of the few points of leverage that a boss has is he threatens things. He threatened the ICC, threatened the ICC, threatened the ICC during the negotiations. He threatened going to 15 organizations, they enter the conventions again and again and again. The problem is the more he threatens, the more the political pressure actually builds up for him to act. And I'm very worried that if we don't get some movement on the release of these funds relatively soon, the pressure is going to build on a boss to the point where he actually takes a decision to dissolve the Palestinian Authority and have Israel come in and essentially restart the occupation. Something like that in area A and essentially start going back into Palestinian cities. I don't think it's a high likelihood scenario, but it's a very dangerous scenario, a one that I think would be unacceptable to a lot of people. And so I think that if there's an immediate thing the United States should be doing on just conflict management right now, it's that. In terms of bigger lessons of where we go forward in the negotiations, two other things, at least that I took out of my experiences. One is this challenge on parameters which others have also spent a lot of time talking about. There's this very difficult, I call it the chicken egg problem. On the one hand, you need parameters to negotiate a two state solution. You need some of these very detailed agreements on the toughest issues. Without those agreements on how are we gonna divide territory? How are we gonna divide Jerusalem? What are we gonna do about security? You can never have very detailed, in-depth discussion amongst the experts to really work out the details. The challenge is, if you try to go for parameters, you're putting all the political costs up front. And both the Israeli and Palestinian public will support the two state solution, at least the polling tends to indicate. If you say to the other side, this is done, there's an agreement. Will you divide Jerusalem? No. Will you divide Jerusalem if it's part of an overall package, oh by the way, President Abbas has agreed to it and this is the final deal? Yes, that's I think the difference. So, trying to do the parameters up front is incredibly politically difficult because you're paying all the costs without the benefit. On the other hand, if you basically just try to go directly to a final agreement, now you're talking about putting a lot of people in the room, technical experts to work things out, like how are we gonna divide Jerusalem? So if you could show me an Israeli Prime Minister who's willing to put 15 experts in a room to talk about how he's gonna, or she is gonna divide Jerusalem, I don't think that Prime Minister exists because that type of stuff will leak pretty quickly in advance of an agreement. And again, any Prime Minister would be just incredibly exposed in a situation like that. So you have this very difficult challenge. Put the parameters up front or just go for the final deal and I don't think we ever managed to work that out during the agreement. This is where you get to one of the other things that's being discussed right now publicly, which is should the United States or essentially abstain on a UN Security Council resolution that puts down those parameters? Should the Europeans would be the ones who would actually do it? The United States would obviously have influence over the language. Should the United States be thinking about that? It's a possibility. It would then let the societies think about it. They'll clearly reject it at first. Neither of these leaderships are gonna go for it. But maybe it's the type of thing that starts socializing both sides. Or maybe it's just rejected and actually undermines the ideas altogether. So this is the challenge. I also don't know, I have no idea if the Obama administration is gonna actually do this or not. I think it's a political heavy lift. They have other major issues on their plate like Iran, which I think they'd like to handle first. And the president is a pretty pragmatic guy. And so is he really gonna expend all the political capital on this when he's got a lot of other issues to deal with in the next year and a half? Final lesson and then I'll hand it over to some of my colleagues. Settlements. Huge issue during the negotiations. I think that the settlements early on in the process really soured a boss on whether the United, whether Netanyahu is serious about negotiating, but even more so whether the United States was capable of actually bringing Netanyahu to the table and getting the kinds of concessions that he needs. That he would need in two-state solution. That is something that's just very hard for the Palestinians to grapple with. And they can't accept anything. You hear these ideas, but only outside the blocks, inside the blocks, that makes sense for Israelis. It doesn't make any sense for Palestinians. For them, it's all unacceptable. And in some ways, some of the most provocative settlement construction is inside the blocks. It's in areas like REL, which are gonna be the most contested. The Israelis will say that's inside the blocks. We should build there. The Palestinians will say absolutely not. And so the question now becomes for the United States, is there something that it can do on settlement policy? And I would make two arguments going forward. One is there's always the possibility of security council resolution just focused on settlements. That's another idea that's out there. In some ways, it's an easier lift for the administration because it's an issue that it's been very clear on historically. It's also an issue where there really is a political wedge in Israel and a lot of people who don't support it. And it's something that's clear in terms of American policy and might not get the same backlash in Israel. But more organizationally, and just on a bigger picture strategy in terms of one of the things the United States should be doing right now, is you could see the administration or the United States taking a position that, well, if an agreement is impossible right now, maybe what we need to be doing is taking the types of steps that will deter or dissuade the two parties from doing things that cut off the two-state solution. And settlements seem to be at the very top of that list. So one thing the administration could consider doing going forward would be thinking about what kind of settlement construction really is, does fundamentally endanger the two-state solution and finding ways to make very clear to Israel. That stuff you cannot do, do not do it. Danger is how do you do that without inadvertently creating zones of permission? Short of that, it's complicated. It's not an easy question. We always struggled with this. If you don't say all settlements are bad, then you inadvertently allow some settlements. If we say all settlements are bad, then you're putting everything on the same level. So that's a challenge I think numerous administrations have had, but it's one thing that maybe should be driving American policy now, just how do we preserve the two-state solution? So I'll stop there. Okay, thank you. Speaking of challenges that numerous U.S. presidents have had on this issue, I'll turn to Tammy in a little while to talk about your view on sort of steps going forward. But what I wanted to talk about, Bill, if I can ask you, I mentioned in the introduction the work on the peace puzzle. And actually also out on the table, there was an excerpt from the epilogue of that book, which was titled, Lessons Learned and Unlearned, which laid out, I think it was maybe 11 different lessons from looking at American involvement in this. And it may be good to get into some of the specifics of those lessons later on in questions, but Bill, if I can ask you now to consider those lessons that you and your co-authors drew at that time and put them up against what Alan has laid out, what you've heard here and laid out in his report, and what does this look like to you, whether I don't know if it's fair to ask you to give a score card, but to look at what's new, has the ball moved further along to your view? It's hard to be very upbeat and say, yes, we're hanging in there and making progress. Every one of these failed efforts teaches us new lessons. A lot of this is very familiar territory. I'm sure Elon felt he'd heard about a fair number of these problems in previous rounds. I would say there's a moment right now when we have to take a kind of deep breath and say maybe the two-state solution really isn't going anywhere. So preserving it is something I've spent a lot of time trying to do up until now. I'm not sure that we should think that that in and of itself is gonna get us very far. It's just kind of managing the status quo and hoping it won't get too much worse and that maybe if people come to their senses someday, they'll be in a frame of mind and negotiate. But let me just reflect on a couple of things that are maybe just a little bit different from what Elon was saying. First, it's very tempting to say this is a problem that is driven by a lack of trust. And of course, that's true. As are most conflicts, incidentally, you don't usually negotiate with people with whom you have great relations on problems of this sort. My experience was with Megan and Sadat. These guys did not trust each other. When they were in public together, they could act appropriately. But when they were face-to-face at Camp David, they shouted at each other. There was a terrible relationship. Carter had to actually keep them apart after the first day because the chemistry was awful. So the fact that Netanyahu and Abbas don't get along, Barack and Arafat didn't get along, that doesn't strike me as anything very unusual, nor that we should be convinced that that's the major problem. I think one of the major problems is structural. And it is the fact that Israel has so many of the cards and yet looks at the negotiating conflict as if you start from where we are today and how much does Israel dial back? From the Palestinian standpoint, they have made their big and maybe only major concession by saying we accept that Israel as a predominantly Jewish state will be recognized within the 1967 lines. And that's it. There's not much more we can seed. And so that's our position and there's not very much give from that position because that's everything from us. That's the step we took from liberation from the wall of Palestine to dealing with the reality on the ground of Israel is there and is recognized by most states in the world. So we go into the negotiation saying we want to facilitate a negotiation between these two parties. Well, even if the most moderate Israeli prime minister and the most moderate Palestinian prime minister were sitting down together with those mindsets, we would have a problem because each little step is extremely painful for each of them to make. And this brings me to a second point about the nature of this negotiation and it's fundamentally different from the Egyptian Israeli negotiation which ultimately succeeded because it was able to address the most important final status issue up front and say once we get that, the borders and peace, Israel gets peace, Sadat gets his territory, then the technical teams and all the rest are ready to step in and say, fine, we do security zones here and economic relations here, but the political decision had to be on what will this look like at the end which means where will the border be and what will the nature of peace be in diplomatic relations or. And instead ever since we have been addressing the Palestinian Israeli issue, we have had an incrementalist approach which was built into Oslo which says don't even raise the issue of where this is going to end up because you can't answer that question at this point even though each side has an idea about it. And we as the mediator have hesitated to say, okay, you guys are incapable of framing the picture of how this is gonna come together. All you know is what you don't wanna give up and what you want from the other side. So we as the mediator have this unpleasant task of saying this is the hard trade off. The Palestinians it is essentially going to be the right of return is very, very, very limited. That I think more than Jerusalem will be the hardest issue if there is any gas left in this machine of a two state solution. Otherwise you as the mediator have to take responsibility of saying our judgment not that it's necessarily exactly the way it's gonna turn out is that something like this border in these security arrangements will go hand in hand with the formal act of recognition and end of conflict. That that's the big picture. And since you can't get there in a bilateral negotiation we're going to put it forward and let you argue over it. But that's what we have learned from this process that you need a picture of where this ends so that when you eventually face your publics you can say, yeah, we had to give something up. It's really painful. As I said for the Palestinians it's gonna be to say most of the refugees will get generous compensation but they will not be going back to their prior homes or anywhere close to it. And that's a hard message. That's why they don't talk about it. It's really hard. But the only way you can say that is but look what we get. We get a state with citizenship, capital in Jerusalem and West Bank Gaza which is what we have said for 20 years we will be satisfied with. And then you switch it to the Israeli side and you say we got the end of the conflict we will get recognition from every Arab state. The international community will get off our back over being an apartheid like state but we do have to give up the territory including East Jerusalem. But we don't have to take a flood of refugees back. Unless you can present that package each of the details just feels like exquisite torture. And I think that is conceptually something that if we're gonna play the mediator role we have to get it into our mind that we have to be the bad guy on this and put that out there some time. And maybe it's still worth doing as a way of kind of memorializing what we've learned from all of this. But I agree that if you bring all the technicians in prematurely before you have that doesn't lead anywhere. I think we spent too much time on security and got too little for it because that's the technical kind of thing that everybody can work on. What we should have been working on is a map not percentages. This is my other lesson is whoever introduced the idea of talking about territory in terms of what percentage of the territory that Israel now occupies will be retained or returned without saying and this is what it will look like on the map was doing people the disservice. At the end of the day neither side will ever agree until they see what it looks like on a map. So let's get on with it. I mean people in the real world think tanks and so forth do this all the time. You can go on multiple programs, push a button say 3%, land swaps might look like this, it could look like this, it could, they look quite different. You can have REL in or not. Makes a big difference if you're a Palestinian but the percentage is like one half of 1%. So there are aspects of the US mediator role that troubled me a bit from this last round. I think the Secretary of State showed enormous energy, that's great. We in our previous book blamed the Clinton administration for overusing the president. He was on the phone available any time. He met with RFO endlessly. I think we felt that presidential authority such that it should be used sparingly but then on the big issues. I think on this round unlike perhaps the first part of the Obama administration, the president was too absent. Now I don't know the inside story, this is a very close to the chest Secretary of State so we don't have an awful lot of ideas about what the crucial moments were and how they were played out. But I do think that there are moments when the president's authority has to be brought to the fore and there's something about the detachment of Obama from this recent round as if I know it's not gonna work but the Secretary of State wants to try, good luck to him. That message gets across to people and it sends a signal that this isn't really going to come to a make or break conclusion. I'm sure I had something else. I had something else to say but I will get another round. I don't want to go on too long. This is a great start and actually you raise at the outset the structural challenges. Can I say one more? Yes. It came to my mind. Elon says in his paper that the American team always understood the Israeli side better. We coordinated with them, we spent time with them. From the Palestinian standpoint what that looked like is everything had already been agreed upon by the time it was presented to them. I think that's particularly unfortunate when you're presenting it to the weaker party and way weaker party. They feel like they're up against a superpower and then the regional superpower and it's all been cooked in advance. And one of the points we made in the peace puzzle book is that sometimes the American, the backup team that sort of supports all this process does the hard work, doesn't have diversity built into it in the sense that there aren't people who understand the Palestinian side terribly well. We always have plenty of people in recent years who have a lot of knowledge about the Israeli side. And I don't think that that lesson got reflected in the structure of that echelon. Now you tell me that I'm wrong if I am but it seemed to me just looking at who was there is that you didn't have a problem with people who knew a lot about Israel but you didn't have the comparable depth on the Palestinian side. And I think there's a case to be made for if you're going to be deeply engaged you should be more equitably equipped to deal with both sides and the extreme links which we go now to coordinate everything with Israel first and then kind of present it to the Palestinians. It's bound to create a negative reaction and it adds to the difficulty of getting the Palestinians to engage and to engage in a constructive way. Thank you. And Alana I will let you have a chance to respond that later but if I can move Tammy to you and you know we've raised these structural issues about the conflict and in some way started to get into structural issues of how we have run this process with the U.S. to date. So given that I would love to hear your thoughts on how fixable some of those are what's the way forward. Okay I will do that. I do want to address Bill's last point though and I you know of course Elon should give his perspective from the inside but I'll say from the outside but as somebody who served in the first term of the Obama administration before this effort came into being you know what I saw was a very strong relative to previous efforts, effort to engage with Palestinian politics whether it's Michael Ratney the congen and a far more functional dynamic between congenial Jerusalem and embassy Tel Aviv than I think we've seen in previous rounds. To me that was a big improvement. The way the consul general was kind of factored in and consulted and part of the process having Hadi Amar on the peace team I would say as well and some of the folks who were on the NFC staff have their own experience in Jerusalem with Palestinian politics. So while I don't think that necessarily completely corrects for the structural bias that exists where the United States has a sort of more instinctive understanding and sympathy for the democratic politics of a parliamentary system in Israel than it does for the opaque maneuvering of FATA driven politics in the West Bank I think that structural inequity is still there but I think personality wise at least there was an effort to correct for it in my view. I was glad that Bill raised the issue about personalities of the leaders because of course it's true that negotiations aren't done on the basis of trust and also that trust or lack of trust is not a matter of chemistry. It's something that can emerge in the course of a negotiation but reading the report, this section of the report Ilana put me in mind of this exchange in Thor the Dark World where if any of you know these Marvel movies, Loki, the brother of Thor is the bad guy in the first Thor movie and then in the second movie they team up and at one point Thor says to his brother I wish I could trust you and Loki says trust my rage. In other words, you don't have to trust the other guy the other leader, you do have to trust that you understand what his motives are and what his objectives are and I'm gonna come back to this in a minute because I think it's an important point about what the United States needs to do next time before it launches a new negotiating process. But I wanted to sort of project ahead a little bit because I think in many ways Ilan's report release coincides with this clarifying moment in Israeli politics and in the US-Israel relationship on the peace process and so it's worth kind of thinking about where we are right now and what that means and I think that a number of us have been arguing for some time that the Oslo model, that is the incremental model, Bill but also the model of a direct bilateral negotiation mediated by the United States, that model was exhausted and if we had any doubt about whether it had viability left I think this last round demonstrated it is truly exhausted and that was evident I think even before and Netanyahu pronounced its death but he did that very decisively in his comments the day before the Israeli elections when he said there is no viability to a negotiated two-state solution right now in the current set of circumstances and he laid out his conditions, what needs to change it's not viable, okay so if one of the parties says this model is no longer viable then it's no longer viable and what does that mean? I think it's incumbent on Israel, the United States and the Palestinians to sort of think in some particular directions for the Israelis, I think for the last six years Netanyahu at least formally acquiesced to the goal of a two-state solution and to the mechanism of this bilateral negotiation if he's now set that aside and I think he has, what's the alternative that Israel is proposing to manage its relationship with the Palestinians and Stasis is not an alternative I think we've seen and Ilan laid this out very well in the report the consequences of a vacuum are dangerous and we've already seen that over the last year so Israel's gotta come up with something particularly if it wants American support if it wants to avoid some of the scenarios that Ilan mentioned that have been tossed around in terms of American unilateralism if you will then the Israelis need to have a policy proposal and I would hope that they're working on that expeditiously and I think that the United States also needs to think about what sort of non-negotiated mechanism what sort of unilateral Israeli mechanism if that's what they propose the US would see as constructive, as advancing or preserving a two-state solution and what kinds of unilateralism it might see as unconstructive, retarding or contradicting the possibility of a two-state solution for the United States too though there's been this premise that the US is the essential mediator because it is the one that is close to Israel that can bring Israel along if you're on the Arab side of the Arab-Israeli conflict you would characterize that as the US is the one that can deliver Israel at the end of the day and so it's never been about the US being an even-handed mediator it's been about the US's particular ability to leverage its relationship with Israel on behalf of the talks that's the premise and that's why I think even though the Palestinians are frustrated by that approach where the Americans often cook things with the Israelis in advance they've been willing to acquiesce in it in the hopes that it would get them where they want to go I think we have to ask given where Netanyahu has put Israel and given the state of the US-Israeli relationship right now which again, I would argue is not just about personalities and personal trust it is about policies we have to ask whether that premise still holds and if it doesn't hold today but we still think it's important how do we deal with that the United States needs to think too about if the bilateral US-mediated model is exhausted what do you replace it with not just what's the European role or what's the regional role but how do you create a new architecture that leverages what those parties have to bring to bear to the negotiation to give the two at the core of the conflict more incentive to take risks and make a deal and then finally, you know I remember sitting in a panel that Dan Kurtzer put together a Princeton with Sam Lewis God rest his soul just before this last round began in the spring of 2013 and I said then that what the United States needs to do before launching a new round of negotiations is a set of pre-negotiation discussions that we need to set aside that we all think we know what the final status agreement looks like and go back a little bit to parsing the two sides' priorities not just their goals but how do they prioritize their goals and this is important both to establish some principles but also as Elon was saying in the report they get bogged down in minutia well let's understand how the minutia play out for the Israelis for example what's the priority the amount of territory in the blocks that are going to be retained the number of settlements that are going to be evacuated the number of settlers that are going to be displaced which of those three is most important to them as they weigh various territorial proposals it's those sorts of questions that you have to understand before you can begin to formulate proposals and negotiate them with the parties and I think that for a variety of reasons Secretary Kerry was keen to get the final status talks going and as a result there was not enough pre-negotiation before the negotiation and I hope that that can be corrected next time finally and quickly on the Palestinian side I think one of the dimensions that is recurrent in the Palestinian approach to the negotiations and this is something that Omar Dajani in the book that I edited for USIP wrote about extensively is the sort of partly because of the national narrative but partly because of the history of interactions between Israelis and Palestinians in the negotiation process it tends to be a reactive style it tends to be a style that assigns a lot of weight to symbolic politics and to symbolic dimensions of the issues at stake and that's understandable and it's reinforced by Palestinian domestic politics in a lot of ways but I think we saw that again this time not just in the negotiations but in the way the negotiations broke down and in what the Palestinian leadership has been doing since this emphasis on symbolic steps at the UN that don't get Palestinians any closer to independence or sovereignty and understanding where that comes from is one step but the Palestinian leadership I think needs to figure out how to manage its domestic politics in a way that lets it get beyond that reactive symbolic fixation that we've seen again and again in negotiations and move towards things that advance the ball on the ground for the Palestinian people and that's going to be extremely difficult in this environment not only because of the Israeli positions but also because the Palestinian leadership is we have to be realistic preparing for its own leadership transition and that tends to make this stuff harder not easier to do but I think if we're gonna see more fruitful negotiations in the future the requisites that I just laid out for Israel for the US and for the Palestinians will all need to be met somehow. Sorry, are you? No, no, I'm all right. I'm fine. So I gather by catching the last part I quote that you hadn't actually come up yet with the really how to get everybody back to the table while I was out there. Very ambitious checklist. All right, well, thank you, everybody. Sorry about that. Full proof that this panel can handle itself. I'm talking anyway. I was just vamping about that, it's blathering. I do want to open and give chance for a lot of questions for the audience but I do have some questions if I'd like to start first to pick up on some of the points that were made and also if you have sort of questions for each other on the points that were made. But, you know, one of the things that is interesting, I was looking back at a report that certainly I'm sure all of you are familiar with and some of you, the audience are, that Tau Becker wrote in 2012, which was titled, Is the Peace Process Dead? Question mark. Oh, no, sorry, The End of the Peace Process. I overstated the End of the Peace Process question mark. Tau Becker, as many of you know, has been a senior negotiator for the Israeli team and had been, was also during the round of Annapolis talks. And one of the things that he pointed out, there were two things that have always caught my eye in that report. One is his observation. He described at the outset of the report the peace process as a stage, a theatrical stage on which the differences between the parties were acted out rather than it being a framework for resolving those differences. And the second thing is he structures the reports with challenging assumptions that he thinks sometimes get in the way of thoughtful analysis of the process. And one of those is we've been negotiating for 20 years. And he talks about how that's often used by the parties themselves and by outside observers as a way to raise the cynical point of, come on, this is going nowhere, maybe this is just an intractable, irresolvable conflict after all. And what he does, it's interesting because in making that point of pushing back, he underscores something that you seem to take pains to underscore in your report, which is at that time it was two, now it's three, that there had only been in that 20, now 22 plus year period, two, now three rounds of actual formal final status negotiations. Bringing the parties together to ostensibly talk about and resolve these final status issues. So the question I'd like to post to all of you and after the comments you've made, is this a fair point to me? Does this essentially suggest we do need to get a perspective on how far along we are that this is actually not, there is still rope to be used here, that there is still work to be done and we're making my way to see from your comments that it doesn't sound like we think collectively as a panel that much progress has been made between one round to the other. But is there something there to the fact that 20 years ultimately is not that long a time over which to see this playing out? Well let me start, can I ask, I wanted to go back a couple of things, particularly Bill said and just raised a couple of points. And then also I have a couple of views on this Lucy. And one is, in terms of the American team I just want to associate myself very much with Tammy's comments which I think were pretty spot on. I couldn't have said any better myself, especially Mike Ratney who played such an essential part and such a dynamic and valuable person on our team. But there was, I mean there will always be an American understanding that just understands the Israelis better for the reasons Tammy outlined. Also for the fact that fundamentally we see the Israelis through a broader US-Israel relationship which we have with them on numerous different issues and interests whereas we see the Palestinians often time through the prism of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and only through that prism. And that's not really gonna change unfortunately. I do think in some respects there's been some perverse incentives created where for so long the United States goes and checks things with the Israelis first. I think partially because we are there to deliver the Israelis at the end for the Palestinians. Partially it's habit, partially it's relationship. But at this point the Palestinians expect that. And when you come to the Palestinians now and you say to them, and we did this actually at the very end when the President put down the Secretary talked to a boss when they were here a year to the day before the Israeli elections in Washington having a discussion on the framework when in my view the framework, the final nail in the coffin of the framework which in retrospect when you go back and think about it was a few months prior. We put something in front of the Palestinians that we specifically told the Israelis. The Israelis aren't 100% on board with this. This is our American best guess. And one of the responses was, we'll go check with the Israelis and then we'll let you know. I mean, so there is a bit of a game here on this. Just one other thing I wanna add in addition to refugees in Jerusalem that has changed and I think was very apparent to us in this round. Security is a very different issue now than it was 15 years ago. It's no longer just a technical issue in Israel. I think it has a lot to do with what happened in the aftermath of the withdrawal from Southern Lebanon and the withdrawal from Gaza. It's become a psychological huge issue right up there with Jerusalem and right up there with refugees in a way it wasn't where there's concern that whatever we do, we withdraw, there will be a failed state. There will be terrorists attacking us. It's a really hard one to get beyond. Does that mean Elon that the investment you guys made in putting together that big security team at the technical level was kind of side stepping the real issue for Israelis on security? I don't know. I don't think so. I think we actually, what we were trying to do and Kerry really believed this, that security was the number one issue to unlock the Israelis and maybe it was Netanyahu's perspective of it, was trying to answer every single question that we possibly could and come up with a response to every answer. I think we did do it in a way that was more comprehensive and, in my view, beneficial and one of the things some of us believed and hopefully might happen at some point is getting a lot of this out there into the public domain and having a discussion about it. It's one of the things very much on my mind, especially now that I'm at an organization that focuses on these types of issues very heavily because I think that that's a debate that should be had. I think that what was put to the Israelis needs to be put to the Israeli public and be discussed and debated and evaluated by a lot of outside security experts as well. So I don't know if it was a, if it was, I don't think we were side stepping and we were trying to take it head on. We just maybe took it head on in the wrong way or in a way that clearly didn't work, whatever it was. And just on Lucy, on your question, and there is, I think there is a change in the way things have evolved over the last 15 or 20 years and I don't know it myself because I wasn't in those previous negotiations but talking to some of the people on our team who were there in some of the previous rounds, whether it's Martin or Jonathan Schwartz or others, there used to be this, we're gonna help each other in the 90s. We're gonna do this together. I think this negotiation is different than any other one because it's much more lashed up into the political narratives and the domestic politics of both sides. Much more, I would say, than even Egypt, Israel. And they needed to be able to do things for each other. I'm gonna publicly say this and you're gonna publicly say that and that's gonna help both sides. That's changed. Now it's very much zero-sum game. And I don't know if that was just this Israeli government with this Palestinian. So you're suggesting the relationship between the negotiators has changed over time. At least that's what I hear. I don't have personal proof of it but from people who've been there in previous rounds, that was one of the things they described to me. Well, let's open to a round first of audience questions and let's see, because we're now, I can't, it's four, 25. Let's open to a round of audience questions. There's a mic here if you just raise your hand if you have questions and somebody will bring a mic down to you. Hi, Grant Remling, FDD. I had a question, Tammy. You just brought up that the Palestinian leadership was preparing for transition. I just wanted to sort of explore that a little bit. I would say there's not much of a Palestinian leadership beyond a boss and I think he's consolidating. I think there's gonna be more conversation about who comes next. I think people are drawing lines in the sand and I think he hasn't really given much of an indication as to who comes after him. I was just wondering if maybe we could explore how much that's being talked about in DC, how much that's coming into the conversations. Are there people in offices somewhere discussing who comes next who secures what we're working for now? Well, I would love to hear Elon's thoughts on this. What I'll say is that I see some dynamics within the leadership of Fatah, let me put it that way. Some dynamics that are eerily similar to me than two dynamics that I saw elsewhere in the Arab world before 2011 where you have an aging leadership with an unclear plan for succession and big issues at stake. What happens is that the circle around that person begins to think about each of them, how to preserve their own prerogatives, what relationships they might have with one another the day after. There's a lot of jockeying for position and as a result, everybody's looking inward and they kind of close in on themselves. Obviously, that can't happen to the same degree in the Palestinian leadership that it did in the sovereign Arab states that have much more ability to control their own operating environment, but it is happening to some degree. That's why I said I think it's harder to do some of the stuff that I think is important. It's also why I think that the regional role and the international role is crucial because the Palestinian environment is very, very heavily conditioned by outside actors. And so you can't just leave these guys to kind of figure it out on their own and you can't just sort of sit back and wait and see what comes out. Not if you care about stability. I think it's worth adding that certain Arab states are already placing their bets. Yes, that's true and not always in a constructive way. Given that Israel has a sort of peace, except for the exceptions, that's the trend, and that it is succeeding in expanding the settlements for quite a period of time, what incentive does it have for changing that pattern for the foreseeable future? Yeah, I mean, I can start, that's a good question. I think there is the U.S.-Israel relationship, which I think matters to them in a great sense. The thing is I don't think there's too many other issues where we're tied up with, but it's clearly become an irritant in that relationship. I also think that politically, I think it's a real wedge issue in Israel, so there is an opportunity there potentially. You look at the moderate middle voter, they're not supportive of settlements. They don't like the idea that all this money is being siphoned off into places in the West Bank, which aren't necessarily gonna be part of the future state, and by the way, are also causing more international pressure to come down on them. But thus far, there hasn't been anything that's been very successful in stopping this. Some people, you hear people argue for more international pressure or Europe taking more of a greater role in trying to find some kind of signaling on this front. And maybe that works, maybe it doesn't. Some argue for workout with the Israelis where it's okay to build and where it's not okay to build. And by doing that, you can deter them from building in the places that are really harmful. I see some benefits in that too, but I also think that it becomes a tricky, very, very tricky game for the United States to play. So I don't know, I don't really have any great ideas other than expanding pressure, if others do. But so, I mean, that's the question. Some of this, it seems, gets back to what Bill was laying out before in terms of what needs to be laid out for the Israelis in terms of what they stand to gain. To both sides, what they stand to gain in the face of something that they see as a sacrifice they are making. Does this have to, I mean, there's two things that have been raised. One is the idea of, does that idea need to be better articulated and socialized among the publics on both sides? Sort of what really is at stake must be gained, or do we think that's a well-worn path? And the other thing we seem to be raising in this is mechanisms of enforcement, whether that's incentives, disincentives, accountability for behaviors. How has the US done on that? Can it kick that in now at this point? I think the question is really an excellent one. What's the incentive to do anything different tomorrow from what you've done in the past days and weeks and months that has just won Netanyahu a reelection? I think there are Israelis, I mean, he got 25% of the vote for his party. Most democratic countries, that's not an enormous vote of confidence. But still, in that system, it's enough to get you to be prime minister. I think until Israelis themselves conclude that the course that they're on with this prime minister, that it's leading them somewhere that they don't want to be for Israeli reasons, not just because we're hammering away at them and saying you should behave differently, but that somehow they do begin to worry about, can we be the kind of predominantly Jewish state we've wanted to be and be democratic and still continue year after year after year with no end in sight being a colonizing country. Basically, that's the way the rest of the world sees them and it is the way they're behaving. So unless Israelis say there's something wrong with this, that contradiction has to be addressed and the only way we can address it is either swallow hard and say okay, we're going to incorporate all of the people we occupy into our body politic, which is not gonna happen, but that is a solution to the problem and be democratic and accept the consequences of becoming a binational state. Or we're gonna remain a predominantly Jewish state by either unilaterally withdrawing from 80 to 90% of the West Bank, building our wall and saying you guys run your affairs over there and we run ours here and hopefully someday that will result in peace, but in the meantime it leaves us at least a mostly Jewish state and we can be democratic by our rules. Unless that happens on the Israeli side for reasons that Israelis care about, that we don't want to become an occupying state, we don't want this word apartheid thrown at us in a way that we find now hard to reject because it's actually true. When your own people are beginning to say, we're gonna become an apartheid state unless, most of what that unless says isn't being done. You're not withdrawing, you're not pulling back, you're not negotiating. So I think the first thing that has to happen is something has to happen on the Israeli side to unlock their internal debate. Now we can perhaps help stimulate that by saying, here's what we think and there's a price to be paid for going on with settlements, but what doesn't work is just saying, you know what needs to be done, but there are no consequences if you don't do it and that's what we've done in the past. We use language that if I were to try to translate it, I wouldn't know what to say. We see the illegitimacy of continued settlement activity but we don't say that the settlements are illegal. Now what is the difference between illegitimate settlement activity and our believing that under international law this is illegal? You know, we could change our rhetoric. We could say, actually we do think it's illegal and if it comes to a UN resolution, that's one we could support because it goes back to a position that has been held by most presidents most of the time and at least it signals that there might be consequences for doing that, but we tend not to do that. We're, you know, our politicians are politicians and they want to use weasel wards, but I think the time for weasel wards has perhaps passed. Tammy, let me just add one dimension here. I think there's another component that I saw at least a little bit in this election campaign motivating Israelis not enough at the end of the day and I think labor couldn't capitalize on it but I wouldn't be surprised if we see this component emerging more in the future and that is that Israelis know well that they are stuck. And last summer's Gaza war was a searing experience. I've been in Israel three times since then and the fear of another Gaza conflict is omnipresent amongst the public and amongst the security establishment. The security establishment is fearful of what it will have to do next time because it barely escaped doing it this time and the public is fearful because this war went on a long time and they know that the government does not have a lasting answer to the threat presented by rockets from Gaza. Now, Netanyahu's been making the argument that territorial concessions on the West Bank would create another Gaza in the West Bank which of course makes Israelis more fearful. On the other hand, the very real, I don't think it's merely theoretical or low probability, the very real possibility of a PA collapse, which I would say would be a bottom-up process, not a top-down, I'm handing you back the keys, Mr. Netanyahu, but people whose salaries are not being paid rising up to pressure the PA. You know, it's already threatening a breakdown of security in the West Bank that the Israeli military does not have an easy answer for that the Israeli public would be loathe to face. And the fact is that in the absence of a mechanism for moving forward toward conflict resolution, Israelis already today, responsible again de facto for Palestinians in Gaza, the Egyptians have shut the door and walked away. And if they can't figure out a modus vivendi with Mahmoud Abbas, they are increasingly gonna be responsible for what happens in the West Bank. That to me is the incentive, because the one thing that everyone except the Eritzisraeli Shlema people agree on is that they don't want to be in the cities of the West Bank or in the cities of Gaza patrolling and policing Palestinian lives. Sorry. I wasn't saying it's right. The only problem is that the way these things usually tend to work out is that when stuff like that happens, the exact opposite happens in Israeli society and they end up just buckling in further. But then as soon as the war is over, they say, how the hell did you get us into this? Yeah. But if I can just follow up on that and I think we have a few more questions and you raised the Israeli security establishment and that concerns, there has been a very vocal part of this sort of security elite of the last few years coming out on this issue, saying very strongly that a two-state solution sooner rather than later is within this, is both doable from a preserving as well security perspective and desirable and should be pursued vigorously. You saw a lot of this, you know, Medagan, sort of people that have held very high positions in the intelligence of security establishment. Do you see that? Why isn't that resonating to you? Is there a reason that that security, which has always, you know, the sort of cliche that there's a sort of security elite and Israel have tended to hold sway, capture the imagination of the Israeli public for a long time, where's that message not getting through to your mind? Well, I think there are two components. One is that the opposition has not been able to demonstrate that there's an effective alternative answer. Okay, so if continued occupation and stasis is not an answer, what is an answer? And the best that Isaac Herzog could say in this campaign is, well, I don't know if Mahmoud Abbas is a partner, but I think we have to try. Not very compelling, okay? But the other part of this is what Ilan was saying earlier that security is a psychological issue for Israelis and for Israeli politics. It's not just about what the former head of the Mossad says. Yeah, and there's definitely on this, I think, you know, this election actually, in some ways in Israel, reminded me a little bit on the security question of 2004 in the United States, where you had a strong portion of the security establishment saying, no, the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. We shouldn't have done this, but there wasn't really a strong message coming from the opposition. It was more, most of the key Democrats voted for the war, then we're trying to make these very complicated, convoluted arguments. So even if the folks like Meir Dagan are saying it, the Israeli left needs a candidate who can articulate it and seize it and really take it on board, and I don't think that they necessarily had that. And you also have the classic political consultants, you heard it all the time in 2004, just talk about the economy, just move away from the security. If they ask you about Iraq, talk about healthcare, that doesn't work, you know? If they ask you about Iran, don't talk about housing prices, you have to talk about it in a way that's clear and distinguished. Thank you. Many more questions. Hi, Samira Daniels, I've been interested in this conflict for a long time. I wanna pick up on something Tamara that Martin Endek started with about 10 years ago. And it was a kind of an off, seemingly offhand statement, but for me, it represented what I think is a big part of the security elite that needs incentive to try to expedite or accelerate this process, that what you would characterize as incrementalism. And that is that, and correct me if I'm wrong, that Martin seemed to indicate that Israel was looking for basically the subsidizing of the economy as the entire project. Because it's not willing to do that financially itself. And I wondered whether that is a calculation that you think has sort of been under the radar. That it's looking for the US to subsidize the security expense, if you will, of making peace? To a greater extent, including coalition partners and so on. Well, that's an interesting question. I can't speak to what Martin said 10 years ago, just I wouldn't remember, but let me try and address the general question. And Ilan, I don't know to what extent you guys gamed this stuff out, but in earlier phases of final status negotiations, of course, there was a lot of discussion about how much peace would cost. Compensation for refugees who were not gonna return, for example. The cost of resettling settlers at Woodsprings Act did a big study on the financial incentives that might induce settlers to move from the West Bank back into within the Green Line. So I think that there's been a lot of homework done on various components of this. Who foots the bill? Israel is a wealthier country now than it was during the Clinton years, but it's also a much more unequal country than it was during the Clinton years. And part of what we saw in this election campaign was concern about rising poverty and rising inequality. And so I think that there's still a real role, and also on the Palestinian side, of course, for significant international investment in peace. But I don't know that money is the obstacle at this point. Did you guys talk about this? We talked about it, but I agree. Like, I feel like if the money was actual, if we actually got a deal, I feel like the money would have found a way to get there. I mean, we knew it was huge, but, you know, I think that wasn't the fundamental question. Steve Riskin, we have some more in the back up. Elan, excuse me. In your opening remarks, if I heard you correctly, that you said that the timing for getting the sides back to the table is not right, and we shouldn't be pushing for negotiations right now. In your paper, you talk about the precious little time remains in which to address the core underlying challenges. For the last 20 years or so, when Israeli and Palestinian policy analysts and some officials come to town, and they have used the term, the windows closing, time is running out on the two-state solution. I'm a gadfly, and I always raise my hand, and I say, not that I was opposed to it for it long ago, before it was kosher halal, whatever. But what are you looking at, I ask them, when you're saying time is running out, the window is closing? And not for just academic reasons, but what practically are you looking at? So when you say there's precious little time to address the core underlying challenges, what are you looking at? And Bill, we haven't talked for a while, but it seems like your thinking is evolving vis-a-vis the viability, the needle might be moving on the viability of the two-state solution. So if you could share a little of your thinking as to why that, you seem to be evolving on that topic. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm wrong, and I don't want to put words in your mouth. Thank you. Holding me to what I actually wrote. You're holding me to what I wrote, which is totally unfair. I mean, I think there's more time, the people who go around saying it's running out, it's about to, I'm not sure I buy that, because until you see a real alternative, people have been saying time is running out, time is running out, time is running out for a long time. There are things that are concerning, though. One is especially Palestinian public opinion and the next generation of Palestinians who increasingly just don't believe in the two-state solution and are more inclined towards the one-state solution. And so I think that is a real time marker. I think there's also specific steps that if the Israelis were to take them in terms of specific settlement construction, E1 is the best example, Givat Matos I think is another significant one. There are some steps that can be taken by the Israelis in terms of settlement building that would really make it very difficult to still implement the Clinton parameters, you know, what is Jewish, is Jewish, what is Arab, is Arab. And so there are some specific sensitive things that you can look at. And increasingly, this dynamic of 20 years of negotiating, one of the things I talk about in my report is how perpetual negotiation is just undermining trust. Look at the Iran negotiations going on right now. Another very complex negotiation. You can do confidence building because you haven't spent 20 years doing confidence building. This incrementalism, all the traditional stuff that you do when you're trying to improve confidence and build trust and do negotiations, all those things fundamentally now cause distrust in the Palestinian side. And so that makes it, it creates an almost impossible environment that's only gonna get harder from that perspective unless I guess you reset to something different, which I would love to see what that something is. That's my only problem. I agree. Maybe we do need something different, but some really smart people need to spend some time thinking about that. Maybe they're doing it at Brookings. But, you know, I think it's, but that's, you know, that's the challenge. So, Bill. No, just the it of thinking about whether there's other constructs other than the US being the central mediator. I haven't seen any credible proposals thus far that actually make sense to me. Doesn't mean that they don't exist and aren't out there. But, you know, the construct is pretty bad right now. But I'm not sure like which ones are out there that would make sense as an alternative. And Bill, you were thinking on this. Yeah, my thinking has evolved because I'm more pessimistic. Maybe it's just getting older. But I also think that, you know, we've seen several runs at this now. Not sustained for 20 years, but there are moments of engagement. And each time it fails not for small reasons, but for fairly big reasons. And I guess I had my hopes up that this administration from early on was beginning to kind of approach the issues in what looked like a fairly serious and determined way. And they failed. Now, one of the things I have written about in the past is that for reasons that are structural on the American side, we don't have a whole lot of time in any administration to launch an initiative and see it through. We have these little things called midterms and elections and it is annoying because it means there's a kind of rhythm to this. And everybody in the region knows it. You know, we're in for a timeout because November of midterms is coming up and we've got another November coming up next year. Now Obama doesn't need to worry about it, but every other politician in this country is gonna be thinking about it. And certainly everybody who wants to become the next president. And one thing they don't wanna do is to be taking positions on who should be controlling East Jerusalem and who should be doing this. It either ought to be done and kind of presented and debated beforehand or wait until the election's over. So my feeling is that the Obama administration is just about run out of time. They might in the remainder of this year, make a gesture, put something on the table, do something at the UN, but it's a parting shot and everybody knows that and therefore they're gonna say, why should we react to this as if it's a serious proposal that we need to engage with because somebody else will be president next year and we're gonna have to engage with them when we may as well wait. That's what ruined the Clinton late day parameters gesture because he wasn't gonna be around to see it through. So the parties know that and they're not gonna make hard decisions unless they think it gets them somewhere. So this administration tried and failed. I don't see anybody on the Republican side who would be even tempted to touch this issue and Hillary Clinton has a history on this and it's not one of enthusiastic engagement with something called the peace process. So I would say that our politics also adds to my pessimism. We, I thought, had a chance with this president to approach the issue more aggressively and it failed and nobody's gonna pick it up after this failure and say let's try it one more time with a president who's even less likely to be deeply invested in it. So that's why I'm pessimistic. So I don't have a great alternative. I think the two state solution could have been done in the 1990s. I think when it wasn't done when Rabin was prime minister and then Barack, I think we lost an important chance. We've never, the stars have never been aligned. One of the problems is that the relentless pace of settlement building, it just, it doesn't stop. It's like 10, 15, 20,000 new settlers every single year. When I first started in this business, there were like 15,000 settlers in the entire West Bank outside of East Jerusalem and we thought it was a problem. You know, that you could solve. You could deal with that number. That's trivial. But we've got what, 350,000 maybe? Well, including East Jerusalem you've got, yeah. So it's a huge problem and it's not easy to unravel. You have to be a very, very, very strong politician to say these people went there for political reasons. They're gonna leave for political reasons. You know, Sharon might have been able to do it in Gaza, but I'm not sure even he could have done it in the West Bank. So those are the reasons for my pessimism and it does leave me wondering what comes next. Present situation can go on for a while but there will be more explosions. There will be another Gaza war. There will be another Intifada and each one of those makes Israel look less attractive as a kind of liberal democracy that deserves support from its friends in the West. I'm not Jewish and I don't see this immediately but in my own extended family, those members who are Jewish are much less infatuated with Israel than their parents were and I saw it among my students. If I were an Israeli I would think how much support is gonna come from our natural constituency. We're not the evangelicals who ought to be American Jews as they look at Israel and say that's not the Israel I grew up admiring. I would worry about that because I think it's happening in this country and you can get all the evangelicals supported you want but it's all for reasons that quite frankly if you examine it is not very reassuring in terms of believing in a Jewish state of the kind that most Zionists want. So is there a different third party option that would change this equation that you see Tammy or some other way around this? Because it does also seem to me that yes, while this idea that two state solutions are eroding and I think a lot of somebody said that the support is rising for the one state solution. There are some interesting on all sides of the spectrum who are strong ideological supporters of a one state solution and have various motivations behind that but what I've also seen is that support for the one state solution is very rarely articulated by others as and here's a game plan of how that would play out and why that makes sense either. It's more just a while the two states not happening so that's what we're moving towards. So absent a strategy or sort of a conception of that are there alternatives either for third parties to get there or a different model? Well, look, I think that the phrase one state solution is a total misnomer. Right. So if we contemplate just for a moment what it would mean if that were the political outcome it would mean civil conflict and that's not a solution for anybody. So let's take that as a starting point. Now, alternative architectures for a negotiating process which is what Elon was asking me for and he's asking a good question. Look, I think that the US-Israel relationship probably will continue to be a core component of a successful architecture. It's hard for me to see the Israelis for all that Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman talk about growing ties with China and India. I just don't see anyone replacing the United States in the role of security guarantor in the region or for the Israelis. And so that dyad is gonna be important. Now, you know, look at where we are right now. There's gonna be some repair work to be done at the policy level no matter who the next president is and no matter who the next Israeli prime minister is before that dyad can be an effective component of any architecture. But as I said, I think that an effective architecture needs to bring in in a much more formal and sustained manner regional actors and others in the international community. We've seen, for example, I've seen Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister for the last number of years, shift his views about the importance to Israel of these battles over delegitimation because he has come to understand the importance of Israel's economic ties to Europe. That's not something he embraced as a politician before he was foreign minister. So I think that we need to look at all of the more complicated web of Israel's international relationships. We need to look at what's going on between Palestinian society and the rest of the region and God forbid that Gaza and the West Bank become yet another arena for proxy conflict between Arab states who are fighting out there internecine battles, okay? I already see troubling indicators and I think that one of the things the United States could do by bringing the region in a more formal way is get them lined up in one direction on Palestinian politics and prevent a situation that really exacerbates things on the ground. So what exactly is the architecture that brings those two components in? I don't quite know. It probably has some components that look more like the multilateral component of the Madrid process, but at the core of it you still have this Israeli-Palestinian-American triangle. On this note of bringing the region in and also this goes, I think, to the point that I think, Tammy, you may be forced to always talk about how the security issue for Israelis is a, it's a psychological one as well. And that does seem to bring you around to the idea of the Arab Peace Initiative, the initial idea of the Arab Peace Initiative, which we haven't talked about for about this day, but the question is, is that still given both the state of the region and given where we're at now for all the reasons we talked about, is that still a viable framework to be leveraged as part of this new architecture? And maybe Alain, you could also speak of that in terms of how, you know, I think when Bill mentioned that this latest round actually did show some signs of trying to do things different. One of those seemed to be engaging, trying to engage that upfront. So if I could have all of you or any of you would choose to speak to that component. A couple of things on that. Look, I think the Israelis clearly want more of a relationship with the Arab states. There are overlapping areas of interest, whether it be their perceptions of Iran or threats from the Muslim Brotherhood that they all perceive in the same way. But I think there's some real challenges to this too. One is, you know, first of all, none of the Arab states trust Netanyahu at all in terms of publicly working with him in any kind of a way. So I think their willingness to do this other than just under the table with this Israeli government, highly unlikely. Their willingness to actually engage with Israel on other issues if there's no progress on the Palestinian front, publicly, highly unlikely, maybe under the table. And sadly, I actually think we did a lot, a lot more to bring the Arabs in this round than previous rounds. And I think the outcome was pretty disappointing. We brought them in. Kerry had numerous meetings and briefings with them. We met with the Arab Peace Initiative committee, something like five or six times throughout the process. You know, we talked a lot about how in 2000, there wasn't this buy-in and when the moment of truth came in Camp David, the leaders didn't know and were asked to weigh in and they weren't able to weigh in. Well, here they knew. They knew full well what we were proposing to both sides. And at the very end, when push came to shove, they passed a resolution saying no Jewish state and all kinds of other unhelpful things at a boss's request, because they care about the Palestinians enough to support a boss publicly, but they don't care about the Palestinian issue enough to push him. And they also don't care about the Palestinian issue enough at this point to really give him money, which throughout the process, we were looking for more economic support from them and it never came. There were some promises, but almost nothing materialized. They're just not invested in this. You've seen, I don't know if the reporting is accurate, but data about they gave $23 billion to the Egyptians over the last 18 months. They care about Egypt. Egypt is a huge strategic issue for them. They could certainly give more to the Palestinians if they wanted to, but outside of a political symbol, I'm not sure they're invested. So we can talk a lot about the Arab Peace Initiative and bringing the Arabs in. I'm pretty jaded on that one at this point. I'll tell you if you haven't heard it. I got that sense. We tried. Kerry tried harder, I think, than anybody, and we know when I worked for him in the Senate, he talked all the time about the Arab Peace Initiative as a missing component that we should be emphasizing more, and it didn't work out the way we were hoping it was. Phil, did you have any thoughts on that? No, I didn't mean that sounds about right. I would say that despite all the cynicism in the Arab world about everything's going badly and the Palestinian issues off the agenda, King Abdullah, that is Jordan, did say the other day, if you really want to effectively stand up to ISIS, you've got to get this here, and you know, you wonder, does he even believe it? But he thought he had to say it, and I think it's because for him, it actually does matter. Jordan is affected by this, and Egypt in a different way. Not that they have any sympathy for probably any of the Palestinian leaders. But they know that this can spill over, and Sinai can be affected. They can't be completely detached from it. The rest of the Arab world can pretty much look the other way. But these are the two most important actors to kind of keep in mind if and when you're ever going to crack something up again. And of course, the Gulf Paymasters just keep them from doing too much damage at this point. Tammy, did you have any final thoughts on that? Okay. We are actually, we are at time for this event. So thank you all for joining us. It seems that where, by my account, where we're at is no negotiations anytime soon. We need a new architecture that probably brings in others. We're not sure what that looks like. And while some new things that came out of this process, there are still lessons we are continuing to need to learn, and that maybe what is needed is some new mechanisms going for. There's a book on what's on the table. Bill, we're telling to you too. Yeah, you can start. So stay tuned for the next book on new lessons to be learned, unlearned, and learned again. But thank you all for coming and please take the reports on the table outside if you haven't had a chance already. Thank you.