 This is the title of the program, as you know, is the Gaza War, a different perspective or a different approach to understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Each speaker will make remarks informed by a very unusual and important book that they have co-authored that's recently come out. It integrates a number of different perspectives that explore the dynamics leading to and shaping events around the conflict. One of these dimensions is regional and international system developments. Another is the domestic political situation in each of the participating actors, each of the countries or the actors. And a third is the characteristics of the leaders themselves of the countries and actors that are participating. The name of the book is Arabs and Israelis, Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East. I urge you all to look it up and find it and we're fortunate to have not only the authors but have them taking this approach and bringing together this unusual perspective in a discussion of events during the past summer and more broadly. The three speakers are Dr. Khaled Shikaki. He's director of the Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah. He's a senior fellow at the Brandeis Crown Center for Middle East Studies as well. And he's currently, I'm happy to say, a visiting scholar here in Michigan spending the semester at the University of Michigan as well as part of the time at Brandeis on a Carnegie Grant that we're fortunate to have. Also speaking is Professor Shai Feldman. He's the Judith and Sidney Schwartz director of the Brandeis Crown Center for Middle East Studies. He's also a senior fellow and a member of the Board of Directors of Harvard's Belfair Center for Science and International Affairs. And finally, Dr. Abdulmanem Said Ali. He's chairman of the Board and CEO and director of the Regional Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo. He's also a senior fellow at the Brandeis Crown Center. The program is sponsored. I wanna give knowledge, our ability to have this program. We have support from the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies here at UWM from the Frankle Center for Judaic Studies from the International Institute. As John mentioned from the Ford School and the International Policy Center, we thank our sponsors very much and we're very much looking forward to your remarks. Can you hear me? Good, okay. So what I'm going to do is give you a little bit of a sense of our enterprise, which is to say the book that Mark was so kind to mention as a way of introducing you to the way we approach questions like what can be expected now in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the aftermath of the Gaza, which sometimes people refer to as the Third Gaza War or the Third Hamas Israeli War. Actually, the history, which I'll go through very quickly of this enterprise begins 10 years ago when we established the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis and decided to do something different in the sense that we insisted that the center would be based on the principle of being balanced and dispassionate. And that means that we created a center that attempts to reflect the different perspectives and the different views from the region and about the region. And so when I was asked to create the center, I approached two individuals, colleagues of mine with whom I've interacted for the previous three and a half decades in the case of Obam Dunmunim and two and a half decades in the case of Khalil and asked them to join and to give me a bit of their time. And they both agreed to join. So we were the sort of the founding trio that created the center 10 years ago. And when we discussed what kind of content we would insert into this kind of a unique collaboration, we decided to create a class that again we didn't think there were many precedents for. A class on the Arab-Israeli conflict that's team taught by an Israeli, a Palestinian and an Egyptian presenting a broader Arab perspective. And two of us are in class every class. Normally we deal with the regional dimension or the state-to-state dimension of the conflict. So Obam Dunmunim is there first and we are in class every class for the first half of the semester. And then we deal with the Israeli-Palestinian dimension. Obam Dunmunim goes back to Cairo, Khalil comes from Ramallah and the two of us are in class every class. So the students can get not only a sense of the texts that are available regarding the history of the conflict but also by interacting with us the texture of the conflict. And then following that we decided to translate that unique experience into the first textbook on the conflict that's co-authored by an Israeli-Palestinian and an Egyptian. And this textbook that managed the work on which managed to ruin six of our summers finally came out about 10 months ago. And the book basically, it's a 13-chapter book for a 13-week American semester. And all the chapters have the same structure. And that is that the first third of every chapter is called Main Developments. We could have called it the Uncontested History which is to say that part of the history of the conflict and the history of the efforts to resolve the conflict that is not contested. So these are basically developments in the history of the conflict regarding which there isn't a big war of interpretations between the protagonist to the conflict. How do we know that these are not contested? Because we agree. So by definition, these are uncontested. Now, of course, when you, in talking to certain audiences we found out that not everything we agreed about is completely agreed about. But I would say if 90% is agreed upon, that's fine. The second third of all the chapters is divided into three parts again. And that is about everything that is contested. And as you know, actually the surprising thing, one of the scholars that commented on the book in London said, hey, you know, it's actually quite surprising that there's a third of every chapter that's not contested. And actually we didn't actually think about it but when he said it, we realized, hey, that's true. We didn't manage to write a third of every chapter on the parts of the history that were not contested. The second third actually provides the reader with what is the Israeli narrative? What's the Palestinian narrative? What are broader Arab narratives but also what are specific Arab narratives? Because there are junctures in the conflict where there's a big gap between the Palestinian narrative and Arab narratives. And there are also periods in the conflict where there is a gap between Arab narratives. So if you take the 1970 so-called Black September and the history of the Syrian intervention and Jordan will believe me, there is a very different Syrian narrative about that and the Jordanian narrative about the same development. And then the third provides the students or the readers with a toolbox. We call it analysis which means that's the analytical part of the chapters. And essentially the intention here is to provide the reader, the student. We've been teaching as I said this class now for we're in the middle of teaching this the 10th time to provide the students a toolbox that they can use two years from now, three years from now when they read something if people will still be reading anything or they get a tweet and they'll try to figure out what's caused this thing that now appeared in this tweet. Tweet would probably be outmoded by the time this happens two years from now. But so basically the toolbox is simple. It tells the students that in order to understand any development in the history of the conflict, whether we try to understand the causes of that development or we try to understand the consequences of the development. And when we'll talk about after Gaza, we'll talk about an example of a consequence. The students have to answer for themselves four questions. Number one, which goes along the line of what Mark mentioned a few minutes ago. Number one is what in the international arena happened during this period that can explain that development in the conflict. The second is what happened in the region that can explain what happened in the conflict. The third is what happened in the domestic politics of the protagonists that can explain what happened in the conflict. And finally, what's the role of individual leaders? What's agency? Do individuals leaders have or had that can explain what happened in the history of the conflict? So I'll end my contribution to these introductory remarks by saying that if I try to answer these four questions and try to understand the consequences or where we are now, sometimes we refer to it in the Middle East as the situation. If I try to understand the situation, with a specific question, okay, we're now past this last episode and to call it an episode is an understatement, 51 days of warfare. What are going to be the determinants of the consequences of that? So let me just spend just a few minutes giving you a sense or my sense. And then of course my colleagues will correct me. The beauty of dealing with something that happened after we closed the textbook is that we can all disagree. So what's the story here? In terms of where do we go from here on the conflict? Well, what is the story first of all on the global level? This is a period which is actually quite unique in the history of the conflict. If you look at the conflict over the last six or seven decades, there have been very few periods where the international arena didn't affect the conflict. So if in the 1950s, we had one extreme case which is a conflict under the umbrella of the Cold War, under the umbrella of the U.S. Soviet rivalry, under the umbrella of other things happening in the global arena, like the declining power of Britain and France without which you would not have had the conspiracy of the 56 war. This is a period actually where the global arena is absent in the sense that the only remaining superpower of the U.S. has for the last year and a half, two years checked out, practically checked out. So we are now under, after the second effort of the Obama administration to do something about the conflict, an administration that's burned twice and for the past months, it's basically been absent and it's absent, largely absent now. So that's number one. On the regional level, I would say a couple of interesting. One is, this is again a period that's unprecedented in the sense of, this is a very, very, very different region than the region that we've known in the 50s and 60s and 70s. Whether it was under the Cold War, whether it was the so-called Arab Cold War between revolutionaries and reactionaries between Republicans and monarchies and so on and so forth. These were periods where there was some governing principle or organizing principle that organized the region. Right now, at least if there is some organizing principle, I can't find it. There are so many rivalries right now and divisions going on in the Middle East right now that I would say this is almost the other extreme, very, very chaotic region. Now, how does that affect the conflict? It affects the conflict. I will just say a word about how this affects on the Israeli side. On the Israeli side, there are two kinds of, there's an effect and there's a potential effect. The effect is that this is a region that Israelis don't understand, but they frighten the Israelis. There's so much uncertainty and there's so much slaughter around, whether it's 200,000 people getting slaughtered in Syria, other struggles and so on and so forth. There is a tendency in the center of the map, the political map in Israel, which of course belongs to the third question, to hunker down and to say, well, this is a region we don't understand, it's full of risks and so on and so forth. We're not gonna take any more risks for peace. At the same time, this is a region that presents Israel with unprecedented opportunities because the Middle East is now more consumed by other issues and there is a greater tendency or willingness to see Israel as just another player in the region and actually to cooperate with Israel, whether it's cooperation with Egypt over risks emanating from the Sinai, whether it's cooperation with Jordan over risks in Southern Syria and ISIS and so on and so forth. Israel actually has an opportunity to become a partner in the region. Now, of course, we all understand, at least some of us understand, that that requires something from Israel in relationship to the Palestinians and that then begs the question of, is Israel prepared to do its share to utilize or exploit this new regional environment? So that's number, that's as far as the region is concerned. One more, the issue of Israel Hamas relationship kind of belongs inside of a middle ground between the regional and the domestic and I'll just mention something from again, from an Israeli perspective and Khalil will provide you definitely with a different, another perspective. And again, this is just very telegraphic. Hamas wrote a narrative of victory after these 51 days of fighting and I won't get into the details. Actually Hamas has grounds for writing a narrative of victory and we can get into the details. Paradoxically, I would say that many Israelis buy into the Hamas narrative and see the Israeli performance in these 51 days as leaving something to be desired and actually many Israelis, including the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces have expressed admiration for Hamas's performance in these 51 days. And that is a great gain for Hamas which of course Khalil will emphasize. I'm not sure that in the long range it's actually a gain for the Palestinians because again, what the impact of this on the Israeli domestic front is it made Israelis more fearful. It basically said to the people in the Israeli center, my God, if we had to face these kinds of threats not from Gaza, but from the West Bank which is approximately 80% of the population and approximately where 80% of Israel's GDP is produced, we would be in bad trouble. And that again plays a role into making the Israeli domestic scene more fearful of making the concessions that are necessary to move towards some resolution of the conflict. So that brings us to the Israeli domestic front and I would say about these two things. Number one is all of these things I've already mentioned have caused in my view a turn to the right, not turn to the ideological historical right but turn to the more security right. And the other aspect of this is a very problematic governmental coalition that makes any effort at progress a very, very, very difficult. And so that brings us now to the question of does Israel have the leadership that can actually do something dramatic to take this conflict to a much better situation? And unfortunately with this I have to share with you that my answer is highly unlikely. Highly unlikely because the Israeli prime minister is not the kind of prime minister that has the characteristics or the personality traits that you've seen in past Israeli leaders that were part of two positive breakthroughs in the Arab-Israeli conflict. It wasn't just Sadat in the late 70s, it was also Beggin who had the sense of leadership and theatrics that allowed Israel to respond the way it responded. It wasn't just Arafat in Oslo, it was also Rabin with his military credibility but also his willingness to make a complete about face and sign the Oslo agreements with the PLO that he deemed for the previous 30 years was a terrorist organization. And it's the same bulldozer called Shahan that unfortunately took Israel in the wrong direction both in Lebanon and in the settlement construction project but because he had this strong personality could also take the different direction and take Israel out of Gaza in 2005. I'm not a psychiatrist but I doubt that Netanyahu has what it takes to make that change. So what I just wanted to do is give you a very short telegraphic example of how do we apply this kind of analytical framework to try to understand what happened in the past, what's happening now and to say something maybe about the future that is more intelligent than your average op-ed. Thank you. Oh sure, you have a pocket. Thank you very much for coming to hear us. From what Shahi said, I would understand that basically Shahi is saying, do not expect, do not expect good things to happen in Palestinian-Israeli relations. And I'm going to make it a little tougher. I would say expect Israeli-Palestinian relations to worsen. So I will be making the case for why the future after the Gaza war is looking grim and why things will probably take a wrong turn. I don't know when. I will not say the Palestinians and the Israelis are about to enter a third in Tifada because I doubt very much that there will be anything similar to what happened in the second in Tifada. There might be something similar to the first in Tifada but it might be a little worse than that. So I don't know exactly what will happen so I cannot really define that likely outcome if the three of us are writing a new chapter in the book therefore I would not know what the title would be but it would be something bad. It would be that things will actually worsen. It's not that, in other words the status quo is untenable and the status quo is not about failure of Israelis and Palestinians to reach, to make progress or reach agreements but the future it seems to me is one where there is a growing tension, an escalation in the violence and perhaps even something larger than that. So why would that be happening and what is the relationship between this outcome and the Gaza war? I agree with Shai that at the international level the international community is more or less withdrawing from the scene. Despite the Gaza war it doesn't and despite the short term international engagement as to bring about a ceasefire and to bring about some effort to begin reconstruction in Gaza I think the international community is indeed withdrawing. The only development at the international level where the Gaza war might have contributed is the growing international interest in some places, not everywhere, in some places particularly in Europe where there is a growing interest in finding ways to punish Israel by doing things about settlements. Boycotts of some sort is something that I see continuing and giving comfort to Palestinians who want to wage an internationally supported campaign of some sort. When I come to the conclusion you'll see the importance of this element to that Palestinian efforts but it's essentially another way of saying it is those Palestinians who believe that what is on the ground today in the West Bank and Gaza is a one state reality would like to describe this reality as a system of upper tide that Palestinians therefore should wage a war against and demand one man one vote. This is part of my conclusion but this is where I see this development at the international level, the rising interest in the international community again not everywhere and it's not really something that is no bowling or anything but there is no doubt that there is a growing interest in the Boycotts movement. I was recently in Europe, I went to Oslo to talk to people and to governments and I found indeed there is, well Norway in particular of course has been leading in the effort to try and get the Europeans to try and do something about the settlements. There is indeed, I can confirm my own suspicion that there is indeed an interest but I can also confirm that this interest is not something that will be dramatic anytime soon. At the regional level, the region has also been withdrawing by the way as you probably know since 2011 we had something called the Arab Spring and after that we had all the problems that are associated with the Arab Spring including the rise of political Islam in the region and most recently one expression of this political Islam of course has been violent extremism in the form of ISIS and others. The region at the moment is not looking at the Arab-Israeli conflict, the region is looking at that picture. They are really preoccupied with it. This is pretty much similar to where we were in 87 when the first Intifada erupted when Palestinians looked around and found everyone is looking elsewhere and decided they need to take matters into their own hands. We are in a similar situation. For a while the Palestinians have been saying to themselves we have to rely on ourselves, we have to do things ourselves and this I believe is perhaps something that might have an indirect effect on where Palestinians will go. I agree with Shai that this development gives Israel a role if Israel wants to play that role in the region for the first time since the creation of the State of Israel. The situation is developing in a way that provides a great deal of common interest for Israel and the major Arab states. If Israel wants to take advantage of this opportunity I think the road is pretty open. Israel will find very little resistance in the region, including from the masses. If it decides it wants to be part of the regional interest in combating extremism and but the region will definitely demand a price. Without Israel paying a price for integration in the region becoming a major ally in fact, quote unquote, of the major Arab states without resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict those Arab states will not be able to forge such an alliance. But the opportunity for something like this happening is definitely out there. So at the systemic and regional level there is no doubt that it doesn't at this point seem that the system or the region are really pushing towards a very clear outcome. With the exception of the opportunity provided to Israel there isn't much else that is out there at this level that is pushing for this or that outcome. Now, turning to the domestic level I'm not going to talk about the Israeli side but I share Shai's belief that domestically Israel is not prepared to take advantage of the opportunity and this basically neutralizes that regional environment from playing the positive role that one would envisage for the region if Israel was in a position to take advantage of it. That brings me then to the domestic environment on the Palestinian side and this is where I think the Gaza war had the most dramatic impact. The first and most important impacts which I think is basically fueling the move that I think we are about to take Israelis and Palestinians that is for the confrontation between the two sides to take a more violent turn again not really big explosion of violence but more violent than it is today is the fact that it radicalized the Palestinians. The Gaza war has radicalized Palestinians in ways we have not seen before but any time before it did so in three ways. It dramatically changed the domestic balance of power. It gave the Islamists Hamas in particular a great deal of public support. There has been a shift in public opinion favoring Hamas and he's a massive shift something that as I said we have not seen before. The nationalist, the nationalist Farah which is the mainstream nationalist movement have lost considerable public support as a result of the war. Hamas's popularity skyrocketed. The popularity of Hamas leaders have also skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. The popularity of nationalist Farah leaders have dramatically plummeted to levels we have never seen before. This is a temporary development, no doubt about it but it will, and things will certainly change in the future. We've seen this happening with the previous two wars and it is happening with this war in six months or so. Maybe, maybe if one is to believe the other, the previous strands will recur here. Maybe we will see things returning back but it's possible that they may not and it's also possible that the change will have some residual impact and it's also possible that while it lasts it will trigger some of these outcomes that I've described earlier. The second most important element of this radicalization is the change in attitudes with regard to the role of violence in the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis before the war only a minority of Palestinians in the West Bank that minority was about 25% believed that violence pays, believed that to resolve a conflict with Israel, Palestinians must resort to violence. So this is the only language the Israelis understand. After the war, this 25% became 75% and this trend was strengthened by other trends including trends, questions that are asked in surveys about whose way is the best way to move forward? Is it Tabas's way, the nationalist mainstream way of negotiations, diplomacy and so on or Hamas's way of violence, confrontation and so on? And the answer in the past was basically a tie between the two and now there is absolutely no doubt that the public is moving towards Hamas's way. People have no reluctance to say that they believe that Hamas's way is the best way to go. And in part this is about the narrative that Hamas has successfully managed to present to the public. The public is definitely buying into the Hamas victory. 90% of the Palestinians immediately after the war believed Hamas won the war. The Israeli leaders have actually participated in creating this narrative. Israeli Chief of Staff, Israeli Prime Minister, Israeli Defense Minister, all three of them. In fact, if you are a Palestinian, you would have read during the past few months statements by these leaders to the effect that Israel didn't want to continue this war because it was paying a very heavy cost that Hamas was inflicting on them that Israel cannot go after Hamas or destroy Hamas. The course would be prohibitive that the situation left in Gaza would be such that it would be much worse for Israel than it is when this war started. Hamas believes therefore that it has today a deterrent capacity. It can deter Israel from doing things and the Palestinian public buys into this narrative. This therefore strengthens the view that Hamas has something to bargain with while the nationals do not. Hamas has leverage while the nationals do not. This again strengthens the trend that will say to Palestinians, we need to do something. And that something at this point seems to be, must be violent. The third change, domestically, is the change in the public willingness to accept compromise with Israel. There is a growing opposition to compromises that five years ago, even 10 years ago, there was strong public support for. Regular surveys have shown, among Palestinians have shown, a clear trend towards moderation for a long time. During the last few years, we have seen a reversal of these trends, but immediately after the Gaza war, we saw very clear change in the opposite direction. We're with Palestinians showing. I must say that, by the way, these surveys are also conducted among Israelis and they do also show the same trend. The reason I'm bringing Israel into this picture is because this is an issue about negotiations and whether the two communities, the Israeli and the Palestinians, are ready or willing to compromise. This is not a good time for the Israelis and the Palestinians. At this point, they have never been as distrustful of each other as they are now. They have never been as ignorant of each other as they are now, and they are much less willing to compromise today than the two communities that they were before, which once again, the importance here is that this means on both sides, well, let me say just on the Palestinian side, there will therefore be a search for an alternative way of changing things, and this, I believe, will be in part a turn to violence. There are many other things that I can say about the domestic environment and the impact of Gaza, but I realize I've minimized looking at his watch, too, and he has to say, he has to take, to make his contribution to this discussion today. So let me jump to the third issue that we look at, as Shah indicated, which is the leaders, the individuals, and when we look at 100 years of conflict, and in this book, we selected something like 15 to 20 major turning points in the history of the conflict, and we've looked at the question of why they have happened, what made them possible? In some cases, it wasn't something at the international regional level, it wasn't something at the domestic level. These two levels were sort of permissive. They weren't pushing or pulling in this or that direction, but it was the individual. The individual was the person who, in fact, pushed or pulled in this or that direction, and we know some of the individuals that Shah had mentioned certainly made a difference. Is Abbas an Netanyahu? Well, let me talk about Abbas, is Abbas that kind? No, he is not that. He is not going to make a difference. Of, in fact, Abbas's legitimacy is deteriorating. The Gaza war, as I said, has in fact diminished his legitimacy considerably. His popularity has gone down. His ability to say no to strong and radical forces among Palestinians, but most importantly within Farah, his own political party has diminished considerably. His move to the UN, the change in the language that he uses is something that reflects his own recognition of his diminished legitimacy and his incapacity to lead towards anything that would substantially present the Palestinians with a shift that would also be something acceptable to the other side. The other side is a right-wing coalition led by Netanyahu. I just can't imagine something useful coming out from these two leaders, Abbas and Netanyahu. What I expect, therefore, is not a leadership on the part of Abbas, but lack of it. And lack of it will create these dynamics. And these dynamics will go in two ways. I've already alluded to the first one, and that is the move towards a one-state solution. The move toward a one-state solution is not something that has a great deal of popular support, but indeed, it is a minority view among Palestinians. But it is the view of the youth. It is the youth and the educated. Among Palestinians are turning to the one-state solution. They think the two-state solution is simply not workable. They oppose it, in fact. Those Palestinians who are today between the ages of 18 and 39, this is half of the other population, today says one-state solution, and in fact is opposed to a two-state solution. There is no majority among them for a one-state solution, but a majority is indeed opposed to a two-state solution among this age group. And so they will become stronger because they are motivated and I think the more it becomes clear that this, the current one-state reality, as they would describe it, it becomes more and more consolidated. They will be more and more energized and they will find comfort in the fact that there is a growing international movement to support a boycott movement that they are proposing and some Palestinians, therefore, I believe will be going in that direction. Other Palestinians, I believe, will be going in the direction I described earlier, which is violence. There are triggers to the violence other than the general environment that I've described and part of it I haven't. Those triggers sometimes are related to holy places. What is happening in Jerusalem today is certainly one of those flashing points. So far, we haven't yet had a major explosion there, but this is definitely one of those places where something like this could happen. There has been gradual escalation during the past four months since the kidnapping of three Israeli kids by Hamas, Hamas in the West Bank, followed by the Gaza war, the kidnapping of Palestinian, burning him alive by Israeli right-wingers. And a series of other events that are currently moving in the direction, again, I don't see a snowball effect. I don't see this becoming... We do not have data that indicates that this is something that will indeed snowball tomorrow, but there are indications that people are losing hope in diplomacy. They are becoming more convinced that violence is the way to go. They are more convinced that Israel will never give up control over the West Bank without Palestinians imposing very serious costs on the Israelis. And they are convinced, many of them are convinced that a two-state solution is not workable. For all these reasons, I would say the future looks grim and could become violent. It's a great pleasure to be here. That's my first time in Michigan, so I'm honored to be here and honored to talk to you. And honored more to differ with my colleagues in the Crown Center and in doing that great book that we did. I hope that after six years, we feel a kind of camaraderie that makes us capable of differing with each other. And my case is the following, that if we learned anything from the study of the Arab-Israeli conflict, we learned that it is a very resilient conflict. It is capable of adapting to a lot of international and regional system from colonization to decolonization to Cold War, post-Cold War, American unilateral dominance of the universe, post-September 11th world and so on. Every configuration we get in the world or in the region, the conflict continued. And with capability to attract attention now and then with a war, if not with Palestine, it is with Lebanon or with anybody else. However, not only the adaptability is happening, but also the ability to change things. Things don't stay the same. And sometimes we get achievements from the middle of the dark of darkness that we have. I mean, I can make a case that the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty could not have happened because if we looked at the conflict as a beauty contest in which we ask people, did you hate each other? They will tell us we hate each other. If we talked with a politician, and the politician will try to always maximize the interest of his country, so usually he play his domestic politics. If we looked at it as the situation in the world or in the region is collapsing, well, it has been a lot of collapsing times. I mean, the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty happened after what, 1973 war? The rising oil prices. And then there was the middle of the invasion of Afghanistan and by the Soviet Union. I mean, it was very dark times. Yet there was a peace treaty and there was negotiations. Can we imagine what happened in the 1990s with Madrid, Oslo and Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty after one of the biggest wars in the region, the war in which more than a half a million soldiers and hundreds of planes and a lot of people died? I believe that we cannot judge from the beginning that the situation is difficult because it is always difficult. It has to be difficult. And this time probably it's more difficult than others. And I am talking about the future and also the Arab-Israeli conflict because when it becomes very difficult, probably we will have always a lot of risks that it can get worse. And sometimes getting it worse in itself is one of the bushers to make it an opportunity to look for a solution to the situation we are living in. And even in the middle of what we have, we will find some glimpses of much more reconciliation as I will represent. The Middle East and particularly Arab countries went into a furnace, you know, like all countries for about three, four years get into a furnace of revolutions. Revolutions is a very serious matter. Usually is accompanied by violence and people expectations go high. Romanticism is mixed with blood and mixed with a lot of clashes. And let me evaluate the situation in our region in four terms. All of them are difficult. Number one is the state, number two is power in terms of authority. And then the balance of power in the region and third, the agenda, what do we have? And probably I will show you that it is not pleasant at all. But inside that unpleasantness, we probably will find some lights that I think it might help us in the future if we are not only, you know, keeping saying what is, you know, we have accustomed to over the past century or more. The state is a challenge. And probably it's irony now that Palestinians want to make a state in a time that the state in the Middle East, many countries, I don't think that any country can be getting the case of a stateness like Egypt. And it has been seriously weakened in the past four years. The state has been challenged by non-state actors. Non-state actors are not trade unions, are not pressure groups. Non-state actors are those who carry arm and question the ability of the state to be the only having the monopoly of force in the country. The state is not there. You know, in many cases weakened and sometimes it's destroyed in its capacity to use force are contested by others. Also it's contested by civil society organization. Not because we have certain organizations of human rights or of people who are getting together to express their own interests. No, we are talking about now civil society that is in essence global. You know, it is in an alliance who is similar people in the West, in Europe and probably other in the region. So it is weakening the state because it is challenging the functions of the state. I will say that also the media. The media is not only to inform anymore in the region, it is a political actor that is getting also to, you know, once I asked one of our ministers during Mubarak's time, if you give me one reason why Mubarak regime collapsed and he told me the media. The media succeeded to delegitimize the regime and with it delegitimizing a state that was built over decades. So number one reality is the environment is the state is weakened or collapsed. I mean, look at Libya today, Syria today, Yemen today, you'll find the state of collapsing state. Then we talk about power. You know, power is who rules countries, who is really getting the ability to change things. And I will say that we witnessed in the past four years four patterns of behavior, you know, that affect seriously, you know, the powers of that control the state. Number one, that Arab Spring was not as peaceful and as romantic and as nice as people think outside. It was after a few days, we get violent and sometimes extremely violent and what is, you know, started with good slogans, noble ones ended with using not only cocktail molotovs but sometimes RPGs and the rest. So the idea of Selmaia being peaceful, the Arab Spring was really full, full of sandstorms. You know, those who know the Middle East know that we have a lot of hamacines over there. Second pattern we get that the revolution ended to be very backward. I mean, most revolutions got progressive goals. Imagine the American revolution, the French revolution got progressive goals in terms of how to upgrade, you know, the lives of people. We got the Muslim brothers to power. Muslim brothers by any judgment is a very conservative political group and it has, you know, particularly those who are belonging to Sa'id Qod, they got into a kind of being very violent. Some of them are moderate but a lot of them also very violent. But at the end, their agenda was to make religious constitutions. I mean, the constitution made by the Muslim brothers in Egypt in 2012 was really a religious, making a religious state out of the Egyptian state. But that was not the case. Muslim brothers were, you know, in the rise of Muslim brothers in Tunisia, they were in Libya, they were in Yemen and their behavior in general, and even they got into elections in Morocco and influences the street in Jordan. So they have been there into the politics using all kinds of political and sometimes non-political pressure and led to the upgrading in a ladder of Islamism from the Muslim brothers to the ISIL that we have it today. The third pattern was is the re-rise of the army. At the end in that kind of political turmoil that we have in the region, we will find that the armies were almost the remaining powers that remained in countries like Libya, like Egypt, and like even in Yemen, they were there. So armies came back and succeeded with help of circumstances, including uprising from the people to get back to the power. What was surprising in the whole endeavor of the four years was number one, the fourth pattern, which is that the monarchies were very resilient. They stood the times. They stood the times, the monarchies of the Gulf, Jordan, Morocco, they faced sometimes the power of revolutions like in Bahrain, in Morocco there was, in Jordan there was, in Saudi Arabia there was. However, they stood themselves sometimes through reform and sometimes through use of firm power and force. The balance of power in the region is ending after four years of revolution that there is no revolution anymore. Actually, you know, every public opinion poll that we have in the region that people are now crying for stability, for end of violence and back to normalcy. And I will say that there was also an attempt that started to work out to start to counter these revolutions by building a kind of alliance if we got historical analogies, I know that they are very imperfect and rightly so. However, I found that there is certain similarity between what happened in Europe after the French Revolution with the rise of the concert of Europe, arise in the Middle East of something I will call concert of Arabia that use oil and use money of oil and also arms to face the revolutionary endeavor of the region in the past four years. I will end by here the changes taking place by the agenda in the region, what these four years are putting as an agenda for now and for the near future. Number one, I will say that the restoration of the state is number one priority now in all the countries of the region. I mean by the restoration of the state, I remember in two ways, one through another revolution or counterrevolution or whatever you call it, or through elections. I mean basically the Neda Tunis, the party that won the elections in Tunisia is Zain al-Abidim bin Ali people or the majority of them at least with a legacy over there. So the restoration of the state is extremely on the table right now. Number two on the agenda, most of the constitutions and the debates about them, whether they are in Egypt or in Tunisia or in Morocco or in Yemen, put the idea of religion and the state. That's something, one of the big dilemmas that we are faced in the Middle East and the Arab Middle East in particular, probably in the past 80 years or so. We failed like it happened in the West and in Europe to face this issue, what is the relationship between religion and the state, religion and society, measure questions that kept hanging and I think now they are faced and we got formulas to deal with them in the constitution that already done, like in Tunisia or like in Egypt. Number three I think is a table on the agenda is military-civic relations and no place this kind of how to make the balance and strike the right balance like in a state like in Egypt. There are other issues on the agenda like political and other economic reforms. What is all this, the state, the power, the balance of power and the agenda that I mentioned affect the Arab-Israeli conflict that we have. I will say that we have two equations here. One belongs to Israel and one belongs to the Palestinians that paradoxical in many ways. It got to be resolved. Israel cannot live in the region in peace with occupation in the same time. If we learn it from the book, if we learn it from our recent history that peace and occupation does not go together. Another thing we know also for the Palestinians is violence and having a state does not go together. Particularly if the violence is happening from a variety of groups. If Hamas stopped sending rockets, Jihad will do the job. If both are silenced, probably some people in Fatih will do it. You can't have no monopoly on the use of force and they have a state in the same time. That is something that is contradictory to do. So there's something paradoxical here. And just what the Palestinians and both with Israel has got to solve the idea of a relationship that is happening in which there is a colonization happening under the condition of proximity. We are not getting the British or the French or anybody that's coming to occupy somebody else's land. It is they are living like it or not with each other. In the same area. And the proximity has a lot of consequences, strategic, military, and societal in the same time. So here for both sides we can look at the situation we have in and say that everything is disparate, everything cannot lead to a better future. I believe something that there is there. There is a number of issues that carry opportunity. The risk we know, the risk is chaos, risk is another war, risk is another violence, we know the risk that's happening. But the opportunity here that is the idea of restoration of states that will make Israel learn that it will be better off having a Palestinian state than not having a Palestinian state. Because the only thing that can minimize the violence here is to have a state, to have somebody with a monopoly on the use of force. And with a monopoly of controlling the crossing points with Gaza, with a monopoly over the idea of how to represent yourself to the outside world. So the idea here is to turn what's happening now from being a total risk into a total opportunity. That the restoration of the strengths of the state leads, I believe, into the idea of acceptance of a Palestinian state or the two-state solution. Another opportunity that is there that is what I said that the monarchies are creating, what I called it, the concert of Arabian. Here I will see some congruence between Israeli national interests, strategic interests, and many of Arab countries. Now in terms of the priorities that is taking place that like immediately we got the example when the United States of America having an alliance with the Soviet Union to defeat the fascism of Italy and the Nazis of Germany, having ISIS in the region, having these kind of fascist groups in the region, I think create a common enemy that requires that all in the agenda between the allies or between those who are want at the end to live in the region is to get there. Number three opportunity which I see coming into glimpses is that now we have both sides are talking about the Arab Peace Initiative. If you don't remember, I remind you that Saudi Arabia represented in the Arab Summit of 2002 an initiative in which it exactly goes in a simple way. Israel withdrew to the 1967 line and then the whole entire Arab country was the Arab League will normalize and accepting Israel into the Middle East. Prince Turkey Al-Faisal said with the head and ex-Israeli head of intelligence in Belgium lately and post-talked about the Arab Initiative. More than 100 Israeli generals wrote a statement in which criticizing Netanyahu for not responding positively to the Arab Peace Initiative. So I believe there is in the middle of all this that we have it imposed on the Arab side and also on the Israeli side. A kind of rapprochement that's happening around certain kinds of goals. Will that work with Netanyahu or not? I don't know. If somebody asked me in 1977 that any Egyptian initiative will work with being in or not, I don't know. At the time, by the way, public opinion polls in Israel told us that 90% of Israelis prefer not to withdraw from Sinai over the idea of having peace with Asia. Moshe Dayan said, you know, war with Sharm Sheikh is better for Israel than peace without Sharm Sheikh. Sharm Sheikh has a tiny little nice Egyptian city in Sinai. So I believe that if the darkness in the Middle East and the difficult times in the Middle East will take us to the idea that it's hopeless, I disagree. I think always opportunities come when circumstances are very difficult. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for those excellent presentations. We're grateful also for the many questions we've received from the audience. As I mentioned at the outset, Morteza and Sessi have gone through the questions and have tried to distill from the numerous questions that you've submitted some key themes and to combine questions where appropriate since we've only got time for several questions. I'll ask the panelists if you don't mind to take the questions from your table and I will then hand the microphone over now to Morteza and Sessi to again. I'm Morteza and Azari. I'm a second year graduate student at the Ford School of Public Policy. So we have had a couple of questions on the regional interactions affecting conflict and between Israel and Palestine. And the first issue is Iran and how do you think that the Israeli-Iranian relations and conflict is as some extent exacerbating this conflict going on there or affecting it from another perspectives? And how do you think the resolving of nuclear dispute or any nuclear problem will affect the situation? The other side of these questions is about how the anti-Israeli posture of Arabian countries legitimize their own public gestures and how they need it for their public support. And as they are invested in this conflict, why they should contribute to solving it? So that's it. Okay. On the first one, Iran actually in many ways in the context that we've been discussing is it belongs to what Abdul Munim talks about the opportunity because Iran poses a threat to Israel but it also poses a threat to a number of the region states primarily Saudi Arabia and some of the smaller Gulf states. So in terms of charging those common interests that Abdul Munim mentioned a few minutes ago, Iran actually plays in many ways a positive role. Now, however, as Abdul Munim said, as I mentioned earlier and as was the case, the case was made clear in by people like Prince Turkey of Faisal for this potential alliance to become an alliance, Israel has to do certain things primarily from the Saudi standpoint to accept the Arab peace initiative which the Saudis for good reason see actually as the Saudi peace initiative. So Iran I think is in that sense in the context of Israel of creating a kind of Israel that gets out of the isolation that presents an opportunity for Israel, Iran plays also, I would say also a positive role. Of course Iran has also played a negative role in the conflict in a sense that it supported and continues to support groups that don't accept Israel's existence. And that means that, and that's on the negative side because as long as Israel faces non-state actors that remain committed to essentially Israel's destruction whether it's Hamas, Islamic, Jihad, or Hezbollah, then Israel continues to see this conflict as existential. Then all these questions about giving Hamas some way out whether it has to do with opening the crossing points and so on is all seen through this prism of a conflict that still has this existential component because these movements don't accept Israel's right to exist. And the second question is running was about. It was about anti-Israeli posture of Arabian countries. Well actually what is referred to as the anti-Israeli posture of Arab countries has of course changed dramatically because again, because of all the reasons we mentioned earlier which is, and to use Abdulmanin's fourth element which is the agenda of the region. Israel is in a different place in that agenda today. And that doesn't mean that sympathy in populations have changed. It doesn't mean that Arabs are less sympathetic towards the Palestinians, but the kind of, let's say, virulent drivers that you see in previous periods of the conflict is simply not, is simply has a different weight because of these other issues on the Middle East agenda that compete with the hatred of Israel part of the agenda. And so I think that, this of course explains why, why somebody like Prince Turkey of Faisal would go publicly. I mean, can you imagine 20, 30 years ago when Israel's role in the Arab, broader Arab agenda was where it was that the formerly security services, former ambassador in Washington, the UK, for, and a member of the royal family would appear in a public forum in Brussels with the former head of the Israeli military intelligence. I can't imagine something like that happening 20 years ago, given public opinion in the Arab world then. And it'll be another forum. And in the next few days it'll be a forum at Harvard with the same Prince Turkey of Faisal with a former deputy prime minister of Israel and had an administrator in charge of the Israeli intelligence system, Dan Miridor, and other public forum. These are all signals that the Saudis are sending which are inconceivable 20 years ago. You put me say something on this, you know, if you lived in the United States as I did during different times, you would find that the Cold War was one of the things that's used by American politicians in every elections. That didn't mean, you know, that later on to have a dialogue with the Soviets over a variety of issues. And so the issues that pertain to, you know, domestic situation and domestic passions are part of the political nature of leaders. But certainly the region is changing. And part of it, if the Iranians succeeded to have an agreement with the Americans, that we mean that we will reduce the nuclear tension. And for the Arab purpose here is to turn on the Israelis while you are keeping your nuclear weapons if everybody else is now is standing down on that kind of an arms race. So I think if there is, you know, something will come of that, it will reduce a notch from the heat in the region, even a notch from the heat with Iran and our countries who are afraid of both religious, revolutionary, power owning nuclear weapons. That is a very lethal combination. And, you know, I don't think that our countries or any country in the world are immune from, you know, public hyperboning in terms of, you know, dealing with any sort of adversary. Let me just say shortly that I agree with what I just heard, but I actually add that the international community's engagement with Iran is actually playing a positive role. The Iranian policy has changed. The Iranians take the Gaza war. During the Gaza war, the group that has been most loyal to Iran, Islamic Jihad, had actually been playing the most positive role in bringing about the ceasefire and has been a lot more willing to work with the Egyptians and the international community than we have seen it acting at any time before. The Iranians seem to have an interest in reaching a deal with the international community on the nuclear issue. And if they do indeed reach one, they will have an interest in keeping that deal and keeping the international community working with them. And it has, of course, something to do with the nature of the regime in Iran. There's a little change that is taking place. But the Iranians have essentially desired that is in their international interest. The Palestinian question, therefore, is taking, is no longer being used by the Iranians. And the truth is, for those who've asked about the Arab countries, the Arab countries are now fighting groups that are using the Palestinian question to agitate against the Arab countries. So this is a dramatic shift from the era of revolutionary Arabs in the 50s and 60s, the period of the Cold War. And this is a dramatic change that, in fact, that is why we've concluded that the regional environment is permissive. It certainly is not pushing, but it's permissive to the kind of agenda, a peace agenda between Palestinians and Israelis. Then we have seen in previous times. My name is Ceci Burns. I'm a second year MPP. And I'm gonna give you a couple of questions to finish out if you could take about two minutes each to respond to whichever part you would like to. We had several questions on optimism and what you see as the most optimistic outcome in the next couple of years, specifically also long-term, and particularly whether there are any leaders that you see as an up-and-coming potential for this optimistic outcome. And then several questions also relating to the two-state solution versus a bi-national single-state solution and what you see as the, again, I guess the most optimistic route to take. Maybe I should answer the question about optimism. He's been the most optimistic. So rather than depress you more, if there is any one single positive thing out of the Arab Spring phenomenon is that people are there participating in politics again. So no one will take them to war. No one will take them to peace. No one will take them to any road without a kind of consent of the populace or they will come back to the streets. I mean, knowing where Tahiri Square is is one of the most positive elements, but people and sometimes the population, they can get manipulated. However, there is much more maturity, I will say, I will say, in evaluating politics. There is a sense of accountability as well in terms of rulers, safe none, including, and I have been working in dealing with the monarchies that saved by this storm, but I know very well that every policy that they are now contemplating will have to think it over and over because they will measure how much support it will be. Particularly with issues that are very sensitive like state and religion, as I said, civic, military and the other issues. I think that's the most optimistic, I will say, outcome in people who say that we will get back to where we were. No, we will get back to where we were in terms of having a state, having that order. However, not the old order, but I think a new order that I think probably will be much better than the one we had before. I'll just share with you why when I look hard for sources of optimism is the following. In, again, in this arena or situation where the international or global level doesn't seem to provide sources of hope that something positive will dramatically change in the next few years, and the region provides this mix of threats and opportunities, it really falls down to this question of where do these domestic scenes go and the interaction between leadership and domestic scenes, which is actually the crux of this question that we see leaders coming up. And the reason I'm a little bit more optimistic about this level of domestic is the following. My own view is that Israeli, in a way, the Israeli contribution to the lack of resolving this conflict until now has been not because Israel has a majority of people who are ideologically religiously committed to preventing peace from coming about. The problem has been that the minority, the 20, 25% who are committed for religious and ideological reasons have been tolerated by the center of the map that actually disagrees with those 25%, that have still been, at least until the last polls that Khalil ran with some of his colleagues in Israel, shown that there are still those 65 to 70-something percent who support the two-state solution. But those 50% in the middle of the map have essentially been passive, immobile, they've been at home. It's a combination of all the changes from Robinsa's assassination to the second Intifada, which caused them to essentially become indifferent or apathetic and allowed those 20% essentially to dictate the agenda, especially with respect to settlement construction. Now I think that what Abdelmoney mentioned a few minutes ago is the beginning of a wake-up call. When you have 106 former generals, 106 former generals from both the Israeli Defense Forces and the police forces, are basically telling the Israeli Prime Minister, excuse me, we have an opportunity here, okay? Listen to what the R's are saying. Listen to the R, read the R&P's initiative. They specifically referred to a very important speech that the new president of Egypt, LCC, gave a few weeks ago and said, the president of Egypt provides you an opportunity, why are you not responding? And I think that if that becomes like the first sign of essentially the center of the map waking up from a long, long period of sleep, if you wish, I think that that's very important. And it's important particularly because, again, what's been driven, driving those 50% in the middle are not ideological, religious concerns, they're security fears. And the most important thing is if you have somebody who is a 30-year veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, reached the rank of Major General, one of them interviewed, said the only real security for Israel in the long range is peace. That may begin to change the discourse in Israel and gives me at least a source of optimism. And that's where I will be looking for sources of optimism. I don't see a lot of reason to be optimistic, but there is no doubt that unlike previous periods, we had periods in which there was a cold war and there was an arable war. And the international environment was very oppressive. It did not permit one to be optimistic. It is not like that today. It does provide a permissive environment, but it's not compelling. So this is where my optimism ends, that the international community, the international environment, and in fact, the regional environment, as I said earlier, and as my colleagues have said, provides an opportunity. But it is the domestic environment that is really oppressive. The domestic environment doesn't really look good. I am also encouraged by the letter by the 106th Israeli General. This is a very courageous movement, they're part, and it certainly is a strong indicator that there are forces in Israel that are really worried about the direction that Netanyahu is taking the state of Israel. But I don't read too much into it. The reality is, Israel is actually there after they become more and more right-wing. The Israeli public is becoming more and more right-wing. And it is likely to continue to go in that direction because the Israeli geography is also moving in that same direction. And in the past, we wouldn't win the situation of similar. We were saved by leaders. So again, I just don't want to depress you more. Tell me, who is that leader? You would depress them anyway. Who is that leader? I mean, there was a Sadat at one point, and there was a Arab fan and an Arabine, and they certainly, they took very courageous decisions, even though their domestic environment was not all that compelling for them to move in that direction. And they, in fact, at times, went against the major trends in their society. At the moment, therefore, I just can't find a glimpse of how, but, but, social science is not nuclear science. No, we might all be wrong here, and be optimistic, please. That is, that is a good note on which to, on which to leave our discussion. I'd like you to please join me in thanking our panelists for a very good time. And if this stack of questions is any indication, you all are interested in continuing the discussion. So please start by attending Dr. Shikaki's talk on Friday at 11.30, and also hopefully participating in our future events here at the Ford School and elsewhere on campus. Thank you very much.