 It's a special pleasure to initiate our program this afternoon where we have the exceptional honor of welcoming Dr. Jahan Sadat and I'll be introducing a very interesting panel as we inaugurate the publication of a very interesting book of speeches from the Sadat Lectures and artwork that is created to go along with them. The Middle East peace process is, I guess, languishing as one way to put it, and one of the issues that Americans face is whether one of these great intractable conflicts, the other you might cite of this era, is the frozen conflict on the Korean Peninsula. They just never seem to go away. But as my old boss Henry Kissinger pointed out, Americans are congenitally optimistic. We have a can-do attitude and we jump in and try to solve problems where resolution may not be as realistic as the idea of managing and trying to contain conflicts. And I'll leave it to our panelists to explore that idea in the subsequent discussion about whether the current situation is one that is better managed than some bold initiatives to try to resolve, again, this great intractable conflict. But we want to honor today the work, welcome Esther. We want to honor the legacy of that great Egyptian statesman Anwar Sadat and the lectureship that we're here to recognize as part of that effort. And the book includes some very important statements by a very distinguished group of senior international statesmen on the issue of the role of leadership in trying to deal with global problems like the Middle East peace process, exploring how peace might be achieved, and the role of the United States in trying to move along efforts to achieve that peace. So I think we have an important opportunity given the unfortunate stalled status of the peace process to explore these issues. Shibli Talami and his colleagues will explore these issues, but I want to underline Shibli's special role in both leading the lecture series and producing the book, which I should say is available to you for a slight charge outside the door. And Shibli indicated he'd be delighted to sign copies as well. But this book project is a good example of the kind of collaboration that the Institute of Peace routinely pursues, but we're particularly pleased to do so with the University of Maryland given its neighboring association with us, and particularly because of Shibli Talami's long association with the Institute of Peace. He was a grantee of ours. He was a distinguished member of our board of directors and continues to work with us on Middle East peace issues. We have a study group on Arab-Israeli peacemaking, and under the leadership of Steve Hadley and Sandy Berger, we have a senior working group that's trying to, again, figure out ways of dealing with the current impasse. And along with Shibli, who will be talking about the book and the lectures within it, let me just identify Bill Quant. He and I were graduates of a great political science program at MIT. He went on to participate as a key player in the first Camp David. And Ellen Lapson and Aaron Miller, they have many very important aspects of their professional careers, but as I was just reminding them, they were members of the best policy planning staff under George Schultz that, at least in my memory, we've had, and we're longtime colleagues. I'm delighted they can be with us. There are several very distinguished members of our audience that I do want to recognize before introducing our special guest. The Egyptian ambassador here, Sami Shukri, and I want to acknowledge John Rupert, who's chair of the Department of Art at the University of Maryland, Dr. John Townshend, who's dean of the College of Behavior and Social Sciences at the University, and Suzanne Cohen, who has provided very generous support for the SADOT Art for Peace program. Now let me say a few words about our special guest, Dr. Jahan SADOT, as I think you all know. She was first lady of Egypt from 1970 to 1981. She's both a distinguished academic. She's published several books I'll mention, but also a real social activist. She has MA and PhD degrees from Cairo University, and in terms of her social activities, she first created the Tala Society, which was designed to bring empowerment to village women from her country. She founded Egypt's Wafa Waal Amal, the first rehabilitation center in the Middle East. She founded the Arab African Women's League, efforts to reform Egypt's civil rights laws, and many other activities that I won't spell out other than to say that her two books have been extremely well received at bestselling autobiography, A Woman of Egypt, and a book published just this past year, My Hope for Peace. Dr. SADOT currently is a fellow at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland, up the road in College Park, and an honorary president of the Women's International Center. So it's, again, a great pleasure for us to welcome Dr. Jahan SADOT. Thank you, Ambassador Salam, for this introduction. Thank you very much, Ambassador Salam. Ladies and gentlemen, it is an honor for me to speak at the United States Institute of Peace, an institution that has been in the forefront of research and public policy in the pursuit of international peace. I take pleasure in knowing how closely the institute has worked with the SADOT chair at the University of Maryland, and with its holder, Professor Shibli Talhami, who has served on the board of this great institution. I would also like to acknowledge Ambassador Sameh Shukri of Egypt, Dean John Toynson of the School of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland, Professor John Rupert, the chair of the art department at Maryland, which has graciously cosponsored the SADOT Art for Peace program, and Mrs. Susan Cohen, who has kindly sponsored this program. It is also a pleasure for me to open this discussion on the role of leadership in advancing Middle East peace on the occasion of the release of the SADOT Lectures book, which includes speeches by prominent world leaders commemorating the legacy of my late husband, President Anwar SADOT. These diverse lectures by leaders ranging from President Nelson Mandela to Dr. Mohamed El-Baradei, from President Jimmy Carter to Dr. Henry Kissinger, among other distinguished leaders have not only addressed the role of bold leadership in advancing peace and real change in history, but also reflected on the tumultuous decade in world politics, especially in the relations between the United States and the Middle East. The accompanying art work for the SADOT Art for Peace program is truly stunning. I know that in a few minutes we will have a panel that directly addresses the role of leadership in successful diplomacy, but allow me here to make a few observations both about President SADOT's legacy, about this stalemate we now face in the battle for peace in the Middle East. When President SADOT surprised the world by announcing his willingness to visit Israel and address its kineset, the mood that prevailed in the Middle East was one of pessimism and resignation. Israel had just elected its most right-wing government to date, led by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and the negotiating process underway in Geneva was getting nowhere, suddenly the prospects changed among overnight. Our distinguished panelists will undoubtedly touch on that period, but a few comments are in order here. President SADOT used to say that more than 90 percent of the cards are in the hand of the United States when it comes to Arab-Israeli peace. SADOT truly believed that proposition, but never used it as an excuse not to act or take risks on his own, as he did in launching the 1973 war to regain control of occupied Egyptian land and as he did in his courageous decision to visit Jerusalem. I don't know that anyone would disagree that without his bold leadership, Egypt and Israel would not have been able to make peace. But SADOT's belief that clinching peace cannot be done without a central American role was also true. Even after SADOT's initiative, there were moments when negotiations seemed on the verge of collapse, even at the Camp David, Maryland, where a deal was ultimately concluded. There can be little doubt that the difference between success and failure had to do more with the active role of the American president at that time, Jimmy Carter, than anything else. Today, regional parties, both Israeli and Arab, have to do their part. But after years of formal and informal negotiations, it has become clearer what the parameters of the agreement have to be, and leadership is once again needed to clinch a deal. I'm particularly heartened by the announced intent of President Barack Obama to elevate Arab-Israeli peacemaking in his priorities, because without such a central role by the American president, Arabs and Israeli will face nothing but continued conflict and bloodshed. Egypt paid a heavy price for peace with Israel. As the Arab League severed relations with Cairo over the deal, President SADOT paid with his own life for saving the lives of untold numbers of Egyptians and Israelis from certain war. For these reasons, many believed that Egypt's peace with Israel would end after President SADOT, but it became clear almost immediately that this would not be the case. SADOT's successor, President Hosni Mubarak, who was tested almost immediately when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, continued the same commitment to peace. Thirty years later, the peace agreement remains fully enforced. But for Anwar SADOT, the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was only a part of the vision that he sought to advance when he spoke at the Israeli Knesset and broke psychological barriers. He expressed his view this way. I have not come here for a separate agreement between Egypt and Israel. This is not part of the policy of Egypt. The problem is not that of Egypt and Israel. Any separate peace between Egypt and Israel will not bring permanent peace based on justice in the entire region. Rather, even if peace between all the confrontation states and Israel were achieved in the absence of a just solution to the Palestinian problem, never will there be that durable and just peace upon which the entire world insists today. Those words were uttered more than 30 years ago. And Israeli-Palestinian peace, the anchor of comprehensive peace in the Middle East, is still not at hand. President SADOT's formula remains valid today, especially with regard to the status of Jerusalem, which has been so much in the recent news. He put it this way. There are facts that should be faced with all courage and clarity. There are Arab territories which Israel has occupied by armed force. We insist on complete withdrawal from these territories, including Arab Jerusalem. I have come to Jerusalem as the city of peace, which will always remain as a living embodiment of coexistence among believers of the three religions. It is inadmissible that anyone should conceive the special status of the city of Jerusalem within the framework of annexation or expansionism. But it should be a free and open city for all believers. SADOT also knew what the Arabs had to do in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories. All Arabs would have to make genuine peace with Israel that would end the state of war and usher a new era. Ladies and gentlemen, three decades after President SADOT expressed his vision, comprehensive peace in the Middle East remains unfulfilled. The region has grown weary, and many are increasingly doubtful about the prospects of peace altogether. The moment of truth is upon us. This is no occasion for buying time, for postponing hard decisions, for avoiding responsibility. If the prospects of a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel collapse, the next generation of Israeli and Arabs will be sentenced to years of conflict and bloodshed. This is a time for leadership to do what's right, to fulfill a vision that one man articulated on behalf of millions of others and paid for it with his life. As a widow of this great man who lived by his principles and died for peace, I stand before you in this institute for peace and say that peace in the Middle East is possible. Thank you very much, and peace be upon all of us. Good afternoon. It's a true pleasure for me to have this event and also to moderate the panel with three good friends of mine who have had years of experience in dealing with this issue, and all of whom, as Ambassador Solomon mentioned, have had long years of cooperation with the United States Institute of Peace, and it is an honor for me to collaborate with the United States Institute of Peace, an institution that I've worked with very closely, was one of my first grants that I received as a young scholar was from this institution, led to a publication of a book that I did on international organizations and ethnic conflict. And since then I've served on the board of this institution, and I'm very happy to be here and to have the book published by the USIP Press. Let me just tell you a little bit about this project before I open up the discussion with the panel. I'm going to moderate the panel from here, and the speakers will speak from the table. When we had this project of the Siddharth Lectures, beginning with the inauguration of the Siddharth Chair back in 1997, we envisioned a series of lectures by prominent leaders, mostly Nobel laureates, and as you can see from the collection, we have some extraordinary people. The first one was Aisir Wiseman followed by Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, George Mitchell, Nielsen Mandela, Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, James Baker, Muhammad al-Baradeh. And in reviewing the products of these lectures over a decade, what was interesting was how much change there has been and how much continuity there has been. When you look at some of the issues that were debated from day one, the settlement issue that has been with us, the Jerusalem issue that has been with us, when the Siddharth Lecture was inaugurated in 1997, when the first project, the Prime Minister of Israel was Benjamin Netanyahu. You can see that in this collection, there is a lecture by Senator George Mitchell, who then was a special envoy really writing the Mitchell report in 2002, and in this lecture he was comparing the mediation in the Middle East with mediation in Northern Ireland, which is very insightful to read. And I want to say also one more thing about this collection, particularly because it has this art dimension to it, the so-called Anwar Siddharth Art for Peace program that we've hosted at the University in Conjunction with the Art Department, magnificent works, both paintings and sculpture. The sculptor was presented to the lecture every year, and the paintings are on display, they're also in this book mixed with the lectures. What I thought we would do with the discussion today is to connect the themes that come up in this book, particularly the theme of leadership, and carry it through to the current situation today. And what it takes, Mrs. Siddharth has been calling, as we have heard, for leadership to finally break the deadlock and move forward. So that notion, that concept of leadership, is there. It's not a surprise that it's the main theme in this book, because obviously the whole series is to commemorate the legacy of Anwar Siddharth, so the theme of leadership is one of the key themes in this series. So what I'd like to do is turn to my colleagues, I'll introduce them briefly, they're known to you, but I will go through a quick introduction. To my immediate left is Professor William Quant, who is the Edward R. Statenius Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, who is one of the most prominent experts on American policy in the Middle East, whose work is not only highly regarded, but highly read and assigned to schools, he, among other things, he's written the most credible account of the Camp David negotiations between Israel and Egypt with American mediation. And has been at the University of Virginia for a number of years, but before that he was at the Brookings Institution as well, and I'm also happy to count him as a very good friend and a mentor, really, from very early years. To his left is Ellen Leipzig, who's another close friend, goes back many years, who is the President and CEO of the Henry L. Stimson Center. She's spent a career in government and in the Library of Congress, and she is one of the most distinguished analysts on American foreign policy today. And to her left is Aaron David Miller, who is currently a public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, but who spent much of his career in the U.S. government as a diplomat, as a mediator, who has been involved in Arab-Israeli mediation for really a couple of decades, and has been also a very effective writer. Those of you who've seen some of his recent work, particularly his most recent book, before he went into the government, he also published, including a little book that most people probably don't remember, but I actually assigned it very early on on the Iran-Iraq War. So Aaron has been a scholar and an analyst and a diplomat, and it's an honor to have you all on this panel. Let me start with Bill Kwant. And I'd like to start basically where Mrs. Siddharth left off. Mrs. Siddharth said in her remarks that it's true that without President Anwar Siddharth probably a breakthrough would not have happened, and no question that his leadership was essential. I think there's a little doubt about that in the conversation. The question, of course, is whether it could have happened without Jimmy Carter. If you look back at that period, two men were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the Camp David Agreement, the President of Egypt and the Prime Minister of Israel. But the President of the United States was not awarded that award. And it is in retrospect, it is interesting to think about whether peace could have happened, would have happened, without the role of Jimmy Carter. What does it take? Would Siddharth have done it with Begin alone, without the intervention of the United States? How can we think about the role of the U.S. even when you have initiative from the regional parties? And I'd like to reflect on that a little, because clearly today a lot of people are calling on the U.S. to intervene. And there are many over the years who've said, there was a theory which says, no, wait for the parties to take initiative on their own, wait for ripeness, or until somebody on the ground takes initiative. How do you sort this out? You were there at Camp David with Jimmy Carter, you were part of the process, perhaps watched it even before in the lead-up to Siddharth announcing that he wants to visit Jerusalem. How can we sort out the role of the U.S. in this regard? Well, first thank you for including me in this interesting discussion, and thank you, Mrs. Siddharth, for setting the stage by calling attention to the very important role that your husband played in making peace possible. I think Anwar Siddharth would have been one of the first to say that he couldn't have done it alone, whatever he was able to do helped create an environment at which peace became possible. But very shortly after his going to Jerusalem, he was a very frustrated man because he wanted it to all come together very quickly, and he didn't actually find it easy to deal with Menachem Begin. And by January of the next year, we were pretty concerned that the initiative that he had launched by going to Jerusalem was unraveling. And at that point, President Siddharth came for his first visit to Camp David, the Camp David that nobody hears about in February of 1978, to meet with President Carter to talk about what to do. And it was quite an interesting moment because he was pretty depressed. It was February in Washington, and it was cold and miserable, and I think your husband did not like being in cold, miserable Washington. And his initiative looked like it had run out of steam. And he met alone with President Carter for some time. I don't know exactly what happened there, but they came back into the room, and President Carter undertook to tell the rest of us what was on President Siddharth's mind. And he said that I've been talking with him, and he's very concerned that this effort is going to fail, and he's asked what we can do, and I've explored some possibilities with him and so forth. And then he turned to President Siddharth, and he said, do you want to add something? And President Siddharth was also a great actor, I must say. He had a way of seizing the moment, and he had his pipe in his mouth, and he looked at us, and he looked like the saddest man in the world. And he said, I just have one question of you, Mr. President. And Carter, at this point, would have, I think, done anything to make him happy. And he said, yes, what is it? And he said, will there be an American proposal? He said, without it, we can't go any further. We've done what we can do. We now need you, Mr. President, to push it forward. And Carter said, yes, there will be, but we have to set the stage for that ourselves, and then we had to talk about that. And that was really the beginning of thinking we need to create a setting in which the decisions can be made, and that I think Carter had already started thinking of a summit meeting. He hadn't made the decision for it. But that was the moment when we started acting as if the next step has to be from our side. We have to somehow get out of the doldrums and to a point where the decisions can be made. So yes, I think the United States had a role to play. It was a crucial role at that particular moment. And I'm biased. I was in the process. But I can't see it having worked unless the president had made a major commitment at that point to bring the parties together and, as Sadat had said, to put forward an American proposal. The problem with the other way of doing negotiations, waiting for the parties to trade proposals, is that it assumes a kind of parity, which isn't always there. And for an Israeli proposal to be given to the Egyptians is to guarantee that, in large measure, it will be rejected because it's an Israeli proposal. And vice versa. Anything the Egyptians would put forward would be rejected. One of my best lessons, and I will stop with this, is at one point Moshe Dayan, who was a major contributor to the success of the Camp David negotiations, even though your husband did not like him as much as he liked Aisir Weitzman. But Dayan was a real hero in this. He came up to me, and he said, you know, the Egyptians have an idea. It is a good idea. But if they present it to us, Manoham Begin will say no to it because he's never going to accept. He said, what I think needs to happen is you take this idea, make it into an American proposal, and you present it to Begin. And then it will have a much better chance of succeeding. And we did that. And we kept on doing it at Camp David, taking ideas that were good from whichever side and feeding them back as American proposals. It made it much easier for Begin to say yes, and it made it much easier for Sadat to say yes. And without that capacity for us to be the buffer, I don't think they could have reached an agreement. Well, let me just ask you another question on that, which is how much assurance did Sadat ask for before he went to Jerusalem? Was there something in particular that he needed prior to going to Jerusalem? Sadat had met with us in August of 77 to talk about next steps. And we were at that point beginning to look at the draft of a possible peace treaty. And he gave us a text that he was ready to consider. And in his inimitable way, there was a formal text that had been done by the foreign ministry. He took Cyrus Vance aside, and he said, this isn't our final position. I'll tell you what more we're prepared to give, but hold that in reserve for the negotiations. Not many people negotiate this way, but it gave us something to put in the pocket. So we were beginning to think that there was some material to work with here. But President Sadat got very frustrated with the slow pace of organizing things toward the eventual reconvening of the Geneva conference. It's a long story there, which I'm not going to tell you. But at a certain point, he reached the conclusion that President Carter had been politically weakened by this process and couldn't do much more for him. And at that point, he sent us a letter proposing a summit meeting in Jerusalem. And it was a remarkable proposal. He said, we should have all the permanent members of the Security Council with their representatives there, that Mao Tse-Tung should be there, and Corbett or Brezhnev or whoever they were at the time, the French and British Americans. Yasser Arafat should be there, Hafiz al-Assad should be there. Should all come to Jerusalem and have this big event. And it was an amazing idea. It simply, the problem was, Menachem Begin was in control of Jerusalem. And the idea of him inviting Yasser Arafat and Hafiz al-Assad at that moment wasn't very realistic. But the idea of going to Jerusalem had been broached. And we, lacking imagination and a sense for theater, Cecil B. DeMille style drama, were sending him back a message saying, it's too early for such a big move. And I think he was disappointed that we didn't see the possibilities. So we didn't hear anything more about Jerusalem until he gave the speech at the Knesset. He went and gave that speech not knowing for sure how we would respond. We, of course, were surprised and realized that it would put us on a different course. And we very quickly had to figure out where we wanted to position ourselves. And we ended up helping to arrange it. But it was an active leadership that put us onto a course that we had not imagined was possible. Before I bring it up to the current situation, I want to bring the issues to what the US faces today, including the Obama administration. But I want to ask a couple of more questions just to get up there. I'm going to start with Ellen, a question really about leadership. I know we're all talking about it. Great leader, Sadat is a great leader. Certainly, Jimmy Carter, actually, in his lecture, called Sadat the greatest leader he's ever met. Kissinger pretty much echoed that. Sadat clearly was loved by many. But he wasn't universally accepted as a great leader. Many in the Arab world criticized him, obviously paid with his life with some, even Egyptians. And so what makes a great leader? I mean, we talk about it. Do you know it when you see it? Do you know it because of the consequences? What makes a difference between a great leader and a reckless one? I mean, we've had President Bush take our country to war. Without him, I don't think we would have been at war with Iraq. Is that a great act of leadership? Was that reckless statesmanship? And I say that because in this book, it's interesting, there was a lecture by President Mandela. It came right after 9-11. He had visited the US right after 9-11, went to meet with President Bush. When he gave the lecture, he gave support for the Afghan war and for President Bush for his leadership in response to 9-11. Within two weeks, he started changing his mind. And you can see, based on the consequences on the ground, and then later when Iraq war became an issue, he changed his mind completely. So what is leadership? I mean, do we know it when we see it, or is it dependent on the consequences? Is it dependent on who's doing the judging? Is it really that there isn't just one constituency that can pass that judgment? And what are people asking of our president, for example, say, we want leadership from you? What is it that people are looking for? Shibley, I think it's a question that has many different dimensions to what we can draw on science, but also philosophy, religion, and art, I think, to try to answer it. And it occurs to me from Bill's very compelling stories and from Mrs. Siddharth's wonderful recollections that that today feels like a very heroic era, the era of Siddharth and Beggin. And Jimmy Carter, who did not present as a larger-than-life heroic figure, in a way, had kind of a drive and a sense of ambition and of his own strategic goals that, in a way, was heroic in its own fashion. And so I guess I reflect that how much the world has changed in terms of how we treat our leaders and who is it that aspires to be leaders these days. I think in one generation maybe it has changed. It occurs to me that what is so curious and rich about the late 70s and the Egyptian-Israeli experience is that each of these leaders who came together and somehow learned to trust each other came from such remarkably different political cultures that each of their immediate national environments, the domestic politics in which they each operated were very different in terms of how they communicated with their publics, what the expectations were of transparency, of honesty, how much tolerance there might have been for changing one's position mid-course. So it really does tell us something about their sort of intestinal fortitude that they hung in there even though they were not necessarily working with similar raw ingredients. And we do look at Egypt to some extent Egypt's leaders in terms of the popular culture of Egypt that their leaders have been given a lot of latitude. They are seen as pharaonic, a very proud Egyptian tradition and history of leaders being expected to be very powerful and forceful. Whereas Israel, it's gotten worse in Israel, but even in those days a very feisty, contestational political culture in which a leader didn't know how long a decision that he made might endure, that you might find that you've lost sufficient support in a parliamentary system and have to face elections again. And let's remember that Jimmy Carter was dealing with more than one problem at a time while I think he found the Arab-Israeli issues very deeply meaningful personally in terms of his own values and things that he cared about. Let's think of that period of 78, 79, what else was going on? You had the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, you had Iran beginning to get very wobbly and eventually the regime of the Shah of Iran fell. So he also had to think strategically not only what could he accomplish in the Arab-Israeli arena, but what might be the consequences of that for some other very big strategic challenges he faced. So two last points. One is it's always easier to evaluate leaders after they've accomplished something and then you can look at their personal qualities and then you can also say they got lucky. Sometimes it's fortuna. Sometimes it really is that things fell into place in ways that might not have been expected. There's plenty of people who had the same potential to be great leaders that weren't so lucky and they were not able to produce the results that they wanted to. But a last thought just in terms of the world that we live in today, in terms of the 21st century is how much we now live in a culture, globalization, whatever we wanna call it, in which the diffusion of power is the norm. We don't want power accumulating in one individual as much. This has always been part of the American tradition, but I think it's really a global story that leaders at the national level are less powerful in some ways than they used to be and certainly at the international level. So just, you know, my last thought is that the centrality is the U.S. role 90% now or maybe is it 65%? You know, are we less dominant in terms of the total amount of power that needs to be expended to achieve a goal in the Arab-Israeli arena than was the case 30 years ago? Well, I wanna carry with that theme actually with Aaron, who by the way, Aaron wrote a concluding chapter for this book and on the theme of leadership, reflecting on the lectures. And in that book, he says that by 1999, the Arab strong leadership in the Arab-Israeli arena was already drawing to a close. That's the thought, the theme that comes out there. Another great president, question mark, which is a study of presidential greatness. It's rare because in our system it requires nation encumbering crisis in order to move our system. But across the board, and I think there are some universal characteristics, leadership means having one foot in the present that is to say being a transactional leader, being able to deal with problems to be masters of your house, not prisoners of your politics, but also having a foot in the future. You must to be a great leader in my view be a transactional leader and a transformational leader. You must leave a legacy that fundamentally alters or changes ways that are irrevocable. And if you lead with honorable ambition and your husband led with honorable ambition, you can accomplish a great deal. I tell people that five men defined a good part of the history of the mid 20th century. Five men wreaked more havoc, devastation, destruction, but also offered prospects of peace and security. Five men. And you wonder in a culture where we're all taught and conditioned to believe that in personal forces shape our lives, we should never forget how powerful individuals are. They truly can bend history. Problem today should lead is that you have leaders who are prisoners of their politics, not masters of them. This confronts not only these negotiations, but any prospect of transformational change with a huge challenge. I mean, Bill knows, Bill is gonna forget more about Camp David one than we're ever going to know. But at Camp David two, I watched Arafat and Barak meet in the same physical space where Sadat and Beggin had met briefly and not very too often during that summit. The president was wise enough to understand what would happen if you allowed them to remain in the same room for too long. But I wonder what both Barak and Arafat were thinking. Only one Arab leader had ever gone to Camp David and he paid for his peace initiatives with his life. I heard Arafat say, Camp David, at least three times you will not walk behind my coffin. You will not walk behind my coffin. So politics in the Middle East is existential. And the problem that we confront today you've identified is the absence of that kind of boldness and vision which will be required no matter how artful, tough and reassuring a U.S. president can be to move us in significant ways. You know, just one more thought on this. I mean, you did remark about how Manachem Beggin and Anwar Sadat really didn't get along well at all at Camp David as the story. Those of you who followed this know that they were separated for pretty much after the first day and were not really negotiating directly with each other, just couldn't get along basically. And when you look back at Camp David II in 2000 when Arafat and Barak were there, they didn't go along very well either. And that was used in part as an excuse for not having an agreement. I wonder whether that really is, what's the difference? Is that much of an issue when you're mediating, do you need leaders to get along? I would just conclude with one final point that with the exception of the Israeli Jordanian peace treaty signed in October of 1994 which is done by the Jordanians through a series of clandestine and discreet context, every other agreement that actually was brokered and endured came about as a consequence not just of direct negotiations but as a consequence of U.S. mediation. The poster child for directness, Oslo, lies bloodied, broken and battered. Probably the consequence of too much bilateralism. Well, on this issue of mediation, we've mentioned mediation a number of times and actually it's one of the themes that in fact is an Aaron's chapter in this book as well. But I want to ask you, Bill, on going back to the Camp David negotiations, there was already a dispute about what kind of role the United States will play, just what we have now. What is a mediator? Sadat didn't want the U.S. to be a mediator. Sadat wanted the U.S. to be a partner. And that was the term that was used. And the idea here being is that the U.S. is not an uninterested party. The U.S. has interests of its own. It's not just doing goodwill to bring parties together, but the U.S. has interests and therefore has to, it had a particular interest in certain outcomes. It just didn't accept any outcomes. It didn't suit its interests. So the American, the term mediation often means somewhat disinterested. And there was that debate dating back to the days of Camp David and there is a question that is before us today because when you ask the question, what's the difference between the Bush administration policy and the Obama administration policy will come to that. But in the first Bush administration, certainly the administration did not define Middle East peace as an American interest. It later did, as did this administration. Does that make a difference for how an administration manages or mediates a conflict? Bill. Yes, I think it does. And it calls attention to several different ways in which the United States can engage. And at the most modest level, there is this notion that we hold back and wait until the parties are ready. You referred to it as the ripeness theory, which had a certain popularity sometime back. And that if everything's moving appropriately, the United States just occasionally nudges things along and gives reassurances and so forth. I've never been a great proponent of that approach because I think given both the fact that we do have our own interests in seeing a more peaceful Middle East, we have every right to play a more assertive role if it can help produce the result. What I think is odd about the American position is at least I never felt that it mattered all that much exactly what the terms of an agreement were between Egypt and Israel or Jordan or Israel or Palestine or Israel. What mattered to the United States is to get the conflict under control or resolved because we had bigger fish to fry in the Middle East that would be our interests would be benefited by a more peaceful, stable Middle East. But if the Egyptians and the Israelis wanted to agree on a certain adjustment of the border, it didn't make the slightest bit of difference to the United States. That wasn't our interest. At some point, we had to intervene and express a judgment on whether any alternative to the international border was realistic. So we ended up taking positions on matters of substance but largely as judgments about what would work as part of a compromise package. Not that we ideologically cared that it had to be this line or this demilitarization regime. On the Palestinian-Israeli issue today, if somehow miraculously the Palestinians and the Israelis were to come to us and say, you guys are talking about this two-state solution and we're going to go for a three-state solution. If it solved any problem, I don't think the United States should care one iota. It doesn't happen to be our current policy. But our interest is in solve the damn thing. But you also reach a point as the mediator in seeing that they can't do it on their own. They could if they would have a long time ago. So you see them kind of coming close on Jerusalem, on borders, on this, on that. And the role of the mediator then becomes to help bridge the gap by saying, we think this is the most realistic package of compromises. We know it's hard for each of you, but it is precisely that's why we're putting it forward. We're going to make it a little bit hard for both of you. We're also going to do what we can to reassure you. That's the role I see as a mediator. When you only do that, if you think your larger interest is going to be served by getting the agreement. If your basic view is this is your conflict, you guys solve it, tell us when you're ready, and we will convene the signing ceremony, you're going to never see the United States out front. And in my view, you will not see our reserved peace in the lifetime of most of us in this room. Helen, you want to? Yeah, I wanted to jump in on this. I think the parties sometimes have a somewhat inconsistent view of whether the US should have interest or not. On the one hand, they want us to be neutral on the particulars of a matter, but they do want us to care enough that we will be there even after the deal is signed. They care a lot that the United States be sufficiently engaged that we see stakes not only in the achieving the deal, but in the execution and the implementation of it. So I feel this now, and if you think about Iraq and Afghanistan right now, they're desperate. The parties want to believe that we will be there even after we've achieved our short-term goals. So this question of long-term versus short-term is also part of the answer. Well, is it also that the role the US needs to play is partly a function of the structure of power locally? When you look back at the relationship between Egypt and Israel, Egypt was the most powerful Arab state. It had just fought an effective war in 1973. It had its own way to bring to bear in the relationship with Israel. Israel certainly was a powerful and significant state. You have a current Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in some ways that are unusual, even an historical perspective, where you have a Palestinian authority which is not even a state, negotiating from territories that remain under Israeli control, not only occupation theoretically, but in practice able to affect what actually happens on the ground. So Aaron, does that matter? Look, I mean, I've watched this movie now for a very long time, and I sadly played a role in a fair portion of it. Arguably, whether it was a positive or a negative role. But I have convinced myself, and I may be too much a prisoner in the past, I'm a student of history, I think it still means something. That serious negotiations require several things. And we'll get this a little closer to you. Several things. Leadership, and there's no question that the breakthroughs were brought to us courtesy of, in this case, strong men who were masters of their political houses, whether it was Sadat Beggin, Hussain, Rabin, Arafat, and his first incarnation. It requires urgency, because politics in this region is existential because men and women pay with their lives. For risking it, you have to be in a hurry. If you're not in a hurry, there's no possibility that you'll be prepared to take the kinds of risks. And it requires what I call the doable deal. A, an agreement that doesn't exceed the carrying capacity of both sides. Now, if these three things are present, and in the Sadat period, they all were present, then the fourth factor becomes absolutely instrumental. And that is effective American mediation, reassuring, but very tough. The question today is whether or not this president can compensate for the absence of leadership and the absence of severe and acute urgency with leadership of his own and a strategy of his own. That, to me, is the single most defining question that needs to be faced up to honestly, clearly, no more process in an effort to try to determine whether or not that is right or not. And that's the challenge of this president. You have a transformational president in a transactional environment. That's his real dilemma. That's his real dilemma, both at home and abroad. Well, I wanna come back a little bit later to that, the choices that are before us now, because that obviously is a central question on how we see it, particularly in terms of the transformation and the conflict itself over the past couple of decades. But I wanna go back to Ellen on Israeli politics. And I look back again to the era when Anwar Sadat actually declared that he was gonna go to Jerusalem. We all remember this was not, there was pessimism. There wasn't a breakthrough imminent, negotiation of getting nowhere, and then Manachem Begin get selected in Israel. That was the first right-wing government in Israel's history. And people thought it was impossible to move forward. And Sadat said, as long as I have a strong leader, I can make a deal. Now he believed that, and it turned out that it was up to a point, true up to a point meaning that Begin certainly was prepared to make a deal with Egypt. He wasn't as prepared to make a profoundly important deal on the West Bank, arguably. But we have a government of the right now in Israel with Prime Minister Netanyahu elected for a second time. Is this just another Begin moment? Or is this really profoundly different coalition in Israel and a different configuration that does not, can President Obama make a deal with Netanyahu? Can, is this current Israeli government capable of a deal like Manachem Begin was? Well, I see it quite differently. I mean, I don't personally believe that there is enough sense of, whether it's sense of urgency or even a sense of what's the strategic goal at the horizon given the current alignment of Israeli politics. This is partly both the temperament and the interest of the current Prime Minister. But I would say even more importantly, it's how complex kind of coalition building in Israel is. So that some of the political alignments in Israel are not all about the Arab-Israeli dispute. They're about domestic trade-offs. That severely constrain an Israeli leader. So even when Israeli public is polling, over 50% willing to make territorial compromises, there's still some degree of consent, not an overwhelming consensus, but at least minimally sufficient consensus in Israeli society to try to resolve this enduring dispute, the domestic political alignments always have these second, what from the perspective of the Arab-Israeli problem are secondary issues. But those secondary issues might be the reason the coalition is holding. And so a leader may not have as much room to maneuver, sometimes on issues that from the outsider's perspective should not be the determinants, but they are. So we all have seen such structural change in the Israeli political alignments, the collapse of the labor party, the emergence of Kadima, but Kadima not being robust enough to form sustainable coalitions. There's just a lot of softness and uncertainty in the domestic politics, in my view. Well, let me just turn to the one question that has been with us, certainly recently, but has been with us throughout since Sadat's initiative. And that is the issue of settlements, Israeli settlements in West Bank and Gaza, and at that time also in the Sinai. And I wanna ask that to Bill, because if you look back at that issue, it was a hot issue at Camp David, at least for the Sinai, where Sadat absolutely insisted there would be no settlement, and there was a precedent of total Israeli withdrawal of all settlements from the Sinai. And we know also the dispute about what happened in terms of Manachem Begin's commitment to freeze settlements in the West Bank and Gaza that you've recounted in your own book. And we actually have Mr. Herb Hansel here with us, I see in the audience, who was the State Department's legal advisor who wrote a finding during that period, the State Department finding that settlements were illegal, a finding that was never actually changed, but the American position had not really used it for any administration after the Carter administration. It was no reference to a legality after the Carter administration. But it's now with us again in a big way. What has changed? What has changed in the debate? Is there something profoundly changed other than the increased number of the settlements, which is not a small thing, obviously, but when you watch the debate over the years and its relationship to whether or not we can have an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, how do you see it? Well, as Erin said, I've seen this movie too many times, and it's really a bad movie. And you could tell in its first version that it wasn't gonna get any better, it would be getting worse and worse and worse in it, and it has. We used to be told when the Israelis established settlements that the settlements would not determine the borders. They were for security reasons. Now, we don't believe that anymore. We believe that the borders will be significantly influenced by where these communities have developed. So the numbers and the permanency, settlements, if you go back in time, in the very early phase, they were described as serving a security function. That's why they were there, not in Jerusalem, but in the West Bank. So it's actually the wrong term. If you've traveled around the West Bank and seen Maale Adumim and any of these others, these are towns. These are just Israeli towns in the West Bank. And I think some Americans think it's settlements means sort of tents and impermanence and easy to move and so forth. So the passage of time has changed the numbers involved. It's changed people's expectation about what can be done. And it is very sobering to try to imagine how do you construct a two-state outcome given the large numbers of settlers who either would have to be absorbed in the new borders of Israel, which makes hash out of a Palestinian state, or would have to be removed, or who would have to be left in place under a Palestinian authority. And every one of those options has real difficulties associated with it. Now, these were humanly contrived settlements. People made concrete decisions that made this happen and you can undo some of it by political decisions as Sharon did in Gaza. He simply said they're gonna leave and they did. I'm not sure that for the large settlements in the West Bank, that's a very realistic option, but somebody on the Israeli side and somebody's on the Palestinian side need to think long and hard about what the various realistic options are with respect to these large settlement blocks because they're not impermanent, they're not easy to move, and they do pose a major obstacle. I hate to say it, but this was one on which successive American presidents were right. Whether it was legal or illegal, that wasn't nearly as important as the fact that they said this will be an obstacle to peace. And we would be told no, no, no, it's for security and when the borders are finally settled, if they're on the wrong side of the borders, they'll come back. Well, good luck. It's not gonna be so easy, even if a prime minister of Israel wanted to have the suffer's return. And of course that was done by design by Ariel Sharon in the 1980s. He wanted to make it impossible for his successors. Am I right, Sam, more or less? He wanted to make it impossible for a peacenik to come along and say, okay, we gotta go back behind the 67 borders, you folks leave. And I think he came pretty close and we're right at the point where if there is going to be any serious breakthrough between Israelis and Palestinians, this issue has to be looked at very, very seriously. I noted that the Baker institution, I guess it's okay to mention that institution in this place, it's a respectable place, has put out a report looking at the various possible maps that could be constructed and what would be required with what kinds of territorial adjustments. And I think it focuses your attention on a fairly minimalist territorial adjustment which leaves a lot of Israelis beyond the future borders, a fairly maximalist one, which makes the future Palestinian state look very hard to imagine. And then a few things in between with maybe you could begin to construct something. But that struck me as a serious exercise because it took the facts on the ground seriously. Talking about percentages without looking at a map is a worthless exercise. I hate to say it, but in the Clinton proposals of 2000, he had an interesting notion. We're gonna talk about percentages of territory and he does it in a way that you could have imagined a map which 6% of the West Bank was given to Israel and 3% of adjustments and it would have been perfectly doable and you could have imagined those same percentages creating a nightmare and until you translate these percentage concepts into a map on the ground, you don't know if you've got the makings of a deal or not. So go look at the Baker Report, it's a good one. Well, by the way, on Baker, not only is it okay to mention it, of course this is a bipartisan issue, a nonpartisan institution, whatever the actual description is. But of course, James Baker co-chaired the Iraq study group that Bill and I were part of and I think Ellen as well, which was sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace. So I know that wasn't the implied comment here. I wanna open it up. I just want one round, a final round of question because I wanna get some questions from the floor and I want it to be really about the current situation. I mean, I'm gonna start with Ellen and then go to Aaron and end with Bill but I want to start with a question actually that Aaron started addressing. I'm saying a question is whether Obama is gonna be that transformational leader who's gonna overcome the absence of regional leadership and that there's no time for process anymore. So there is a sense, at least projected sense of urgency, how urgent is the pursuit of Arab-Israeli peace right now and what is it gonna take, whether it's gonna happen or not, let's assume it's, you know, maybe they're too complicated, it's not gonna happen, you can predict maybe that it's not gonna happen but what will it take? What will it take to push forward, to have, to clinch a deal between Israel and the policies? What will it take from the United States? Given that, regardless of what the parties have said, the United States has already declared Arab-Israeli peace as an important American interest to be pursued and so whether or not you have obstacles, you still need it and particularly if it's increasingly becoming less likely, so what will it take? What would you like to see, Ellen? Well, I wanna fuss a little bit about Aaron's formula that I think people are projecting onto President Obama this requirement that he be transformational in sort of all aspects of his job when he's just as capable of being a transactional guy as anybody else and sometimes to get things done you have to get to that phase where you're doing the horse trading and you're just rolling up your sleeves and playing the politicians role. I also dispute the notion that we can ever get away from process, I do think that over the years we let process be preoccupying and we spend too much time thinking about process but we, for better or worse, we're in a society where the rule of law is a very precious value and we're never gonna be able to leapfrog over all of the mechanics of legal precedents and past practices, et cetera. So regrettably I think that Obama is stuck in a very suboptimal environment. I am not persuaded that he really does wanna put Arab-Israeli that high on his list. I think it might be on a list of 10 things he'd like to do but it's not necessarily the top two or three and I think there is a heavy sense that he doesn't, you know, the Israelis are fond of saying we don't have a partner. I'm not sure President Obama has a partner either. And of course we haven't talked, you know, we've talked a little bit about Israeli politics. We haven't talked about how divided Palestinian politics is which is another layer of the problem. Aaron. You know, it's late in the game to be, let me start this way. I'll be very personal here. I just turned 61 so clarity and honesty very important to me these days. Look, I have an abandoned hope but as I told Steve Hadley before the session began, I think it's incumbent on us to take a very close look at our illusions. Hope cannot never be abandoned. I have a 30-year-old and a 26-year-old son and daughter. I mean, I can't tell them that never, no, there's no chance of Arab-Israeli peace. The reality is, if you're gonna pursue it, let's pursue it with our eyes open and let's face some basic realities. Number one, you have four core issues, Jerusalem border security and refugees. If they're not resolved to the mutual satisfaction of Israelis and Palestinians, there will be no political agreement, let alone peace. Number two, neither side right now, in my judgment, it's arguable, we could argue about it all day long, is willing to pay the price for what I call, and I'll choose my words very carefully here, a conflict-ending agreement. An agreement in which an Israeli prime minister and a Palestinian president will stand before their respective publics and say the following. It may take three generations to reconcile our respective narratives, but for now and forever, the conflict between us is over. All claims have been adjudicated, all irredenta have been abandoned. In my judgment, the prospects of that kind of an agreement, anytime soon, is almost unimaginable, almost unimaginable. Now it's unpopular, I get beaten up and hammered every time I use this point, but I'm sorry. Too many illusions over the course of the last 30 years brought American policy to where it is now, including, and Bill knows this, a willingness to acquiesce in each side's behavior on the ground on the assumption that at the end of the day, we'd be able to skip over all of that bad behavior, violence, incitement, tear, settlement activity, road, bypass roads, land confiscation, collective punishment, curfews, and then we'd get to the core issues, but it's a fallacy. You can't get to the end game while the trust and the confidence levels fundamentally eroded, which is why one of the dumbest ideas that we ever came up with, and I will assume my fair share of the responsibility here, was to agree to Eud Barak's determination to have a conflict ending summit in July of 2000 without his willingness, let alone our thoughts, to pay the price for one, 10 years we have descended from the summit, and Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are still not right, the trust, the confidence, the sense of partnership, the capacity to solve problems, it's all been shattered, so hope yes, no more illusions. No more illusions. But on that happy note, I'm gonna turn it to Bill Kwan, but I wanna say, I mean, I'm a political scientist, and I think a pretty good one, but I can't say that my field has been able to predict anything right. We didn't predict the end of the Cold War, we didn't predict the beginning of the Cold War. Things looked unimaginable on the Egyptian-Israeli peace front in 1973 and 1974 and 1975. Anybody who would've told you Israel's gonna have an embassy in Cairo in 1973 would've been laughed at all the way, so let's be a little bit modest about our own kind of ability to predict and be deterministic in our analysis, because I think we need to have some liberation a little bit in thinking ahead about what the possibilities are, and so I set it up for Bill Kwan to give us a little bit more hope in describing where we are. I might shock you as I agree with Aaron. And that would end the drama here. I actually agreed with quite a bit of what he said earlier. I was thinking, gosh, Aaron and I are on the same wavelength more than I expected. We're friends, it's dent-ly, so we disagree on things, but not in a hostile way, I think. But I don't think you know whether leaders are ready for a conflict ending agreement by looking at their current positions. They're worrying about their next election, they're worrying about Hamas's bothering them and so forth. And part of the art of diplomacy is to shift the perspective from the weeds, which is the problem with the process stuff. We're gonna have proximity talks. Well, which hotel are we gonna be in and who's gonna sit where? This is a real waste of time. You can spend endless hours doing it, but at some point, you wanna get leaders, even weak leaders, to see what the choices are. That if they do X, they'll get Y in return. The reason it always sounds so hopeless is the negotiations in their early phases always sound like this is what you're gonna have to give up. And that's all you hear. You're gonna have to give up settlements, you're gonna have to give up territory, you're gonna have to give up East Jerusalem, and you're gonna have to give up right of return, and you're gonna have to give up any number of other things on the Palestinian side. And of course, even strong leaders are reluctant to enter into a negotiation only knowing what is going to be taken from them. So part of the art is to create these occasional rare moments when you have to look seriously at the choice. If I do this, this is what I get in return. And that's what I think a strong American president could help to do. And how do you do it? I wish I knew, but I'd like to see a little house cleaning done. I think we need some new voices around the president. We've gotten distracted by a kind of incrementalism that doesn't seem to be working. It may in other conflicts, but it doesn't in this one. And I think the president who can't make this his only preoccupation and maybe not even among his top 10 needs to have a willingness in the near future to try to crystallize a picture of what a consensus outcome of an Arab-Israeli conflict would look like that would enjoy broad American support, international support, and put it out in public so that Israelis and Palestinians can start arguing over it. And maybe as they start arguing over it, their leaders will realize actually there's a constituency for this. When you see the whole picture, not just what you have to give up, but what you could potentially get in return. And maybe we shouldn't be so cavalier in always saying no. There's a risk it will fail and that it will once again show the Americans are not world dominators who can impose their will on everybody. That happens to be true. But we'll survive it. Even the president will survive it. He will have a little scar tissue because people won't like what he says. He'll have to say things that are controversial. He'll be unpopular among some Arabs for the hard truths that he has to express about what Palestinians will not be able to get. And he'll get clobbered by the pro-Israel lobby, and yes, it does exist, for saying that East Jerusalem will in fact in significant part have to be the capital of the Palestinian state. And if he's not prepared to do that, fine, don't do it, but then don't be surprised if we pay a price in terms of our interests in the Middle East. You know we will. You've said it. You can walk away from this issue. Most Americans don't care that much about it. You aren't gonna be having people demonstrating in the street saying, we want a Middle East initiative. We won't have tea partyers out there calling for it. You can be sure it's easy to walk away from this. Well, we heard something about what leadership takes, and it takes getting outside of what's easy, what's convenient, what's popular, and doing sometimes what is right and what just might work. The odds in diplomacy are not to tackle problems that are 40% easy, but to take problems that are almost impossible, make them 15% possible. And once you get to 15%, you can move it up to 20 or 25%, and it's worth giving it a try. Now at the end of the day, I think Aaron thinks it's probably not gonna work and that we can't afford another failure as the United States. We've had pretty rough past decade, or two, or three, or four. We've got a lot of rocky moments. We had some pretty good moments too. End of the Cold War worked pretty well. But it's true, you don't wanna take something on if you know you're destined to fail. I don't think this is destined to fail. I think it's just really, really hard. And unless a president feels that it matters to American national interests, and he says he does, there's no point in doing it. If he does believe it's important to American national interests, he should explain, among other things, to the American public why it's important, and then he ought to do it. That was what I hoped for. If we could take a couple of calls from the floor. We have microphones right and left, and please, if you'd like to ask a question, if you don't mind lining up, please go ahead. Yes, is it on? It's on. I'm on Nicholas Berry from Foreign Policy Forum. Yeah, please, he did, he just did, yeah, yeah. What I don't understand is what Israel's up to. Israel, when Secretary Clinton said you're either going to lose your democracy or lose being a Jewish state, I don't think any Israeli leader believes any of that. It's about land, and they're taking land. Would you agree that the issue is either a binational state or a civil war? Well, the binational state is out. A civil war is going to be a piece of cake. And as with Peace and Galilee II in 1982, it's about taking the land and moving the Palestinians off. They have the power. Don't you think this might be the Israeli intent? Now let's take one more question before I get back to the panel. Okay, I was just very interested in when you mentioned the subject of transformation. And one of the things I haven't heard you or most people talk about is that both the Palestinians and Israelis are both religious peoples. And why perhaps the transformation could come through the spiritual as opposed to the intellectual? I don't know how to get there, but if we were to make somehow enliven that so that the spiritual part, and it's a double-edged sword because who seemed like the most spiritual are the most difficult to deal with. So I just wonder what you think about what the role of acknowledging the religious principles of both peoples, many of which are very much alike, and how do we move with that and use it as a tool in working towards peace? Could you identify yourself because you didn't know? My name is Suzanne Waller, just citizen. Thank you. Anybody who wants to, go ahead. You know, Susan, Suzanne, Suzanne, you're right, and I think one of the mistakes we made in the run-up to Camp David II was our unwillingness and our inability to think outside our own immediate circle about how precisely Jerusalem might be contested. We consulted with very few, forget clerics, we consulted with very few people. I can only suggest that the Abrahamic tradition, in which theoretically I happen to describe, really falls short when it comes to asserting claims over this particular city. The reality is that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity and the way they have comported themselves toward Jerusalem is hardly on the side of the angel. When Jerusalem is a city bathed in blood, and history teaches us, even though I disagree, that Jerusalem can be shared, history teaches us quite the opposite. History teaches us Jerusalem isn't to be cut up like a piece of salami. It's to be possessed in the name of God and the name of the religion and the name of the tribe. Day eight of the Camp David Summit, when the summit had already failed, it would go on for another five agonizingly additional days, but it already failed, we turned to the issue of Jerusalem with the Israelis and Palestinians because that's not the way triumphal and exclusive pieces of these religions choose to relate to Jerusalem. So I don't, not when I don't know, I really don't know. I do not have a good answer, just to try. There was another question if anybody wants to address that. I actually think that that sort of demographic existential dilemma of can we be Jewish and can we be democratic is real. I think that Israeli leaders believe it and I think some part of Israeli society does. I think land is an issue, but I wouldn't pose it in quite the way that you did. I think that the worry about differential birth rates and out migration of Israelis, which is rarely talked about, the sort of shifting demographics are very powerful anxiety that Israeli society feels and I think it makes them very inflexible on a lot of issues. I'll take a couple more questions. What are the Israelis up to? You're not dealing with it. Can I have one tiny comment? Israelis don't have a strategy and if you look at Israeli peacemaking over the course of the last 30 years, it's a story of transformed walks. It's not a story of men and women who even though they espoused and want to end their conflict with the Arabs, had a strategy with respect to how to do it. These were men begging, robbing, the breaker of bones in the first Palestinian and to fight a sharon who built the settlements, destroyed them and his own party in the process. These were transformed hawks imposed and imposed on those hawks were the exigencies of the moment. So you want a strategy with the exception of Sadat and King Hussein and greatness is rare. Who else has a strategy? Who else has a strategy in an existential conflict? Very few people. No, we have to, you can do it because we have people waiting on these. Go ahead. My name's Lee Diamond. Over many years I've passed through my Jewish socialization and kind of came out on the other side. I guess the psychology inside the Jewish community as most of you know is almost in another reality in terms of the policy perspective and the Israeli government is building up a rand so they don't have to deal with the Palestinian conflict. It seems to me. And we have hatred analogous to the tea baggers and we have an air of unreality. And I can just offer many examples of my own encounters but I was wearing a J Street button and somebody who's a democratic activist eyes lit up and then she immediately went into the Palestinians. And so it seems to me that there's an extremely negative view of the Palestinians in American society which can't be accurate. I mean I assume you all would agree because I mean there are Palestinians suffering in much larger numbers than Israelis. And I'm just trying to struggle myself with how we can change this picture. I mean J Street's trying to change the picture but it seems to me it's an urgent situation and my own thought I wanna start a Jewish fire squad. So I don't know if that prompts any stimulation. Well we're gonna take a few more minutes so we'll go with Aziz and then we'll come to you. Aziz Fahmi from Saudi TV. I participated three days ago, four days ago with a conference called organized by Foreign Affairs. Ehud Yari was on the other line and he just wrote a long piece saying basically that if we try to reach a final status agreement we will be stuck in the mud and that we have to think of a kind of a temporary solution both on the Palestinian-Israeli track and the Syrian track. He also was asked about the current crisis between Bibi Netanyahu and President Barack Obama and he said that Barack and Bibi Netanyahu were shocked by the treatment that they got from the White House and that the sense that the left Washington was that Barack Obama wants the Israeli coalition to collapse and there is a lot of talk in the Israeli media now about that basically they're trying to tell Bibi Netanyahu that he must be realistic and that he must undo his coalition and bring Kadima in along with labor and be able to have a kind of a peace plan. Is that realistic? What's your assessment if anybody wants to offer about what can actually happen in the Israeli coalition? So why don't we take those two questions and then I'm gonna end with the last three together. I would just respond with respect to domestic politics particularly with the Jewish community. My point of departure is do not pay any attention to this because the reality is it's what I would call Jewish inside baseball. The reality is when an American president creates a national interest narrative comes up with a strategy that offers some prospect of success. Americans, regardless of who they are and to what ethnic or religious group they belong will come along sometimes grudgingly, sometimes noisily. It's happened throughout the last 30 years when strong willed presidents Nixon Carter and George H. W. Bush in defense of American national interest trumps consistently domestic politics. So I mean, I don't think frankly it's the right point of departure. I really don't. You need an American national interest narrative and a president that is reassuring and tough who can actually make it succeed. That's what you need. Anybody on the other question? I see this question about Israeli politics, no? Okay. I don't think it, I don't sense that it's the Obama administration's purpose to reconfigure internal Israeli politics. If it happens I don't think they'll cry bitter tears. Let's take the last three questions and we'll have one round of answer. Please go ahead. Okay, thank you. My name is Petra Al-Sufi. I'm a political science and history student. I'm an expert at SADAT and the panels and I agree with Dr. Miller a lot. My question is since there is a lack of leadership and we all agree on that right now and a lack of willingness to sacrifice from both sides. Is the ball right now in the field of the private citizen to take this matter into their hand and try to find a solution between them since they're both suffering. Maybe not equally but they're both suffering and the future is for them. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Mike Aghian. I'm a student at University of Maryland. My question is with respect to I guess U.S. economic and military aid to Israel if we are seen as a middleman and a broker of peace and if there isn't a certain one-sidedness that's seen to I guess air populations or airship leaders in the SADAT effects like sort of the peace process or the negotiations of the America's seen as a middleman and a true broker of unbiased broker of peace. Dick, the last question. Hi, my name is Kathleen Callagame. I'm a former grad student at Queens University of Belfast and I think conflict. My question is about third-party mediation and obviously in this conflict it's very important that the U.S. have a role and you touched on that in your comments. I'm just curious in terms of the lessons that we might be able to draw from this process for other similarly intractable conflicts how important is it simply that there be a third-party mediator versus how important is it that that mediator be the United States? Thanks very much. Why don't we take one final round of answers. I would wrap these two questions into one answer and say the following that American policy, we are not an honest broker. We are not an honest broker. And I would argue in some respects we never have been in large part because of our special relations with the Israelis. The question is can we be an effective broker? Now there's a notion in mediation called the paradox of the partial mediator. I'm compelled by it. If you want something back and your neighbor won't give it to you, then you have a couple choices. You could try to take it by force. If you can't do that, you could try to negotiate directly for it. If you won't do that, then you go to a friend of your neighbor and you say, help me. The reason our phone rings, let's be very clear, still rings despite the absence of credibility in our policy, despite our fundamental bias toward the Israelis is because we are perceived to have a relationship with Israel. And when we use it correctly, we do not allow the special relationship to deteriorate into what it has become, which is the exclusive relationship. And we haven't seen that, I might add, since 91, which was the last time we had an effective foreign policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. So it is because of our relationship with Israel that our phone rings, not despite it. And that really depends on using the relationship effectively. When we do, Sam Lewis knows this, well, so does Bill, we can actually succeed. The question for this president is, can he find the right balance between the special, which presumably he wants to protect, and the exclusive, which he is determined to undermine? That's the real question. Helen? I'll take the question on, should citizens take things into their own hands? I think that citizens have every right to be informed, they have every right to meet and share their concerns, but I don't see civil society as a sufficient substitute for the role of the state. So that in the absence of progress, I think that USIP and many other organizations are doing a lot of it, very important kind of peace-building blocks of making sure that there are channels of communication, that there are peaceful outlets for concerned citizens to express their views, et cetera. Some of that can make it up to the threshold of trying to influence and shape the politics of the country, but even in the absence of politicians who are listening, civil society can do a piece of this work by themselves, but it will never be sufficient unless the legal authority to make decisions and to implement them and to use coercive force, et cetera, is also a key actor. So I think it's a useful input, but it's not an alternative to the role of the state. I'll end by agreeing with both of my co-panelists. I think the United States is not and will not be an unbiased or uninterested mediator, but we have influence and that's why people want us to be involved. The Arab side is always worried that our special relationship will be only an exclusive relationship, but Aaron's right that they know we have the potential to influence Israel in a way that no other country in the world can. The question is always will we use that influence on behalf of a peaceful outcome? And if the answer is yes, you'll have lots of Arabs lining up willing and eager to negotiate with the United States as the mediator. When they think we're a hopeless case, they may as well find somebody who's genuinely neutral and probably serves them better food and doesn't leak as many of their secrets as we do because there are other people who can mediate this, but they can't make things happen. They can simply provide safe space. That's what the Norwegians did at Oslo, but they couldn't make Oslo work. Well, we couldn't either, but it wasn't our project. So the reason we get involved in this is we are an interested party, we have influence, and we have a reason to hang in there because we have broader regional interests. And I agree with Ellen that civil society can help this process, but state actors are the ones who have to make the tough decisions. And then if peace really takes root, there's a lot that can be done with non-government actors. Thank you. Well, you already thanked the panelists, but I want to ask you to thank them again for a great panel, and I would like to thank Ambassador Solomon for hosting this, Mrs. Sadat for joining us, and thank you all for being here. I appreciate that, and please give a round of applause to the panelists. Thank you.