Essentialities of Peace in the Middle East

0:00:01.0 Speaker 1: Good afternoon everyone. I think we'll go ahead and get started. It's nice to see you all here, and I'm looking forward to a really great conversation today. But first I'm going to read our protest planning speech. Sorry, I'll just get this out of the way. So I'd like to remind you of the University of Michigan's Freedom of Speech and Artistic Expression policies, which state that allowing protracted interruption of a speech or performance is inconsistent with full respect for the rights of free expression and communication of those present. The University believes in the freedom of expression, which includes the speaker and also you.

0:00:48.0 Speaker 1: Okay. Now, I am going to introduce our four retired ambassadors who have all had incredibly distinguished careers in the State Department. And I am going to begin with Ambassador Jacob Wallace. He is second to my left. Ambassador Wallace retired from the Foreign Service in 2017 after 35 years, during which he served twice, as Chief of Mission as US Ambassador to Tunisia from 2012 to 2015, and as Council General in Jerusalem from 2005 to 2009. Throughout his State Department career, Ambassador Wallace held senior roles, including Senior Advisor on Foreign Fighters in the Bureau of Counter-Terrorism, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, overseeing US policy for countries like Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Israel. His career has been marked by significant contributions to US Middle East policy, including more than two decades focused on peace efforts in the region, dating back to the 1991 Madrid Conference. Since his retirement, Ambassador Wallace has served as a non-resident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he worked on international policy issues. So, thank you.

0:02:13.4 S1: Next we have Ambassador Susan Ziadeh. Ambassador Ziadeh served 23 years with the US Department of State, including roles as US Ambassador to Qatar from 2011 to 2014, Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Arabian Peninsula Affairs. Her career included leadership positions across the Middle East with postings in Riyadh, Baghdad, Bahrain, Kuwait, Amman, and Jerusalem, shaping US policy in the region. Now based in Washington DC, Ambassador Ziadeh is a strategic advisor on Middle Eastern Affairs, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institutes. Now, while all of the ambassadors posses degrees from very fine academic institutions, there are only two of us up here who have degrees from the University of Michigan, and Ambassador Ziadeh is one of them who she earned her PhD here back in the day.

0:03:25.1 Susan Ziadeh: Back in the day.

0:03:27.3 S1: Next we have Ambassador David Satterfield. He is currently the director of Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. He has been in that role since 2022. With nearly 40 years of experience in the Middle East, Satterfield has held senior positions, including Director General of the Multinational Force and Observers in Sinai, Acting Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, US Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa, where he was addressing the intertwined political security and humanitarian crises, and as US Ambassador to Turkey, among many other roles within the State Department. His work spans multiple high stakes assignments across the region, including Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.

0:04:18.9 S1: And finally, we have the President of the American Academy of Diplomacy, with whom we put on this conference every year. This distinguished speaker series, Ambassador Ronald D. Neumann, and he is a former deputy Assistant Secretary of State, and he has served three times as ambassador in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, as well as ambassadorships to Bahrain and Algeria. He has also held various positions across the Middle East, including Deputy Chief of Mission in the UAE and Yemen, and he has authored many books and articles on his experience and insights and wonderful wars in Afghanistan. Without further ado, I am going to turn it over to Ambassador Neumann to introduce the subject, which obviously is on the Middle East, and we'll get started. After the speakers have made their statements, we will turn it over to questions, and we have our moderators from the Ford School, Amina and Nayab who will moderate the comments and questions. Thank you very much. Ambassador Neumann.

0:05:33.5 Ronald D. Neumann: Thanks, Susan. Thank you very much. It's nice to be back with you. Nice to be here again. Actually, I think this is the warmest it's ever been when I've been here. I think our first one was December, which was a cooler introduction to Michigan. So, obviously the Middle East is bubbling, wars are going on, some wars may get bigger. Seemed like a good subject to talk about for a conference. When we were designing it, it reminded me that years ago, my father, who also spoke often on the Middle East, told me that when he had to give a subject in advance, long in advance for talk, he would always call it Crisis in the Middle East, because he was sure that when he came to speak there would be one. But the amount of blood and the danger of larger crises are larger today than they have been for quite some time.

0:06:28.4 RN: Now, this is a really complicated issue, and we're clearly not gonna cover all, can't possibly cover all facets of it in the time that we have. It's also one which has grown. I mean, a lot of my service was in the Persian Gulf. And I would say that much of my time in the Persian Gulf in the '70s and the '80s, Palestinian issues were not really important. If you asked somebody, you would get the required answer, but you could go for months or even years and not have the subject come up. That exploded with the first intifada and the projection of what was going on onto Arab television with an impact, very much like the Vietnam War being televised in America had on the American public.

0:07:27.9 RN: But even so, we have a new dimension now of this direct conflict exchanges between Israel and Iran, of the potential for America being drawn into that war as well, of the potential consequences for that war on the entire oil production in the Persian Gulf, which has enormous consequences of the American economy. You all saw only a couple of years ago, the consequences of having a ship stuck for one week in the Suez Canal. You multiply that by a couple of hundred or something and you can imagine the consequences of a major conflagration in the Middle East, which is one reason why the US can't stay out. We periodically try, American administrations over the years, periodically try to turn their back on the Middle East, and that always exposes another portion of the posterior. It doesn't work.

0:08:27.8 RN: So, we have this expansion. It has now become a tremendously emotional issue in the United States, as I suspect most of you know. I just wanted to comment and say, when you have a lot of people suffering and a lot of violence, there is a human desire to make a judgment about right and wrong, which is a good thing. You should judge right and wrong. But we also, I think, as humans have a desire to simplify so that we can make judgments. In fact, if you don't simplify life, we'd be so confusing. You couldn't do much of anything. But there's this strong desire therefore to assign the good side and the bad side. And when people can't or don't have clarity, then they tend to turn away entirely. So you have huge tragedies in the Sudan to which almost nobody is paying any attention because both sides are lousy, frankly.

0:09:36.8 RN: That was a bit the problem in Yemen, or it's still the problem in Yemen to some extent. It's very hard to assign good and bad, but the desire to do so is very strong. As soon as you do so, you tend to take sides, reasonable. But whatever side you take, when you start denying the humanity of the other side, then you're losing a bit of your own humanity. And the problem of talking these days in an emotional climate is to simply offer kind of a basic understanding of facts and of where each side is. So, first of all, reiterating my and my colleagues are all retired diplomats. We are not speaking for the US government, and frankly, we can't do much about US government policy. Our endeavor is to talk from a kind of professional long-term perspective about some of these issues, and to answer questions.

0:10:43.0 RN: In order to keep this subject manageable, because we could talk for a year or two, we decided to pull out three elements to look at to start with, and then go to questions. And so I've asked each of my colleagues to keep their comments fairly short, which means that they are condemned to be slightly superficial because otherwise they'll talk too long. So the three elements we've picked out, I'm gonna ask Ambassador Wallace to start, talking about the broader Israeli-Palestinian problem. I'm asking Ambassador Ziadeh to follow up talking about Iran and the Gulf and how Iran is now drawn to this. And then Ambassador Satterfield, in addition to all his distinguished other accomplishments, was pulled back into the administration to be the coordinator for humanitarian relief in Gaza, to talk particularly about the humanitarian issues. I don't expect that any of them will stay within the criteria I've allocated, but that's our starting point. And then we'll go from there to questions and we hope we'll have a lot of them and we hope we'll have these answers. So Jake, over to you. You can you speak from...

0:12:01.6 S1: Give him a round of applause as welcome.

0:12:05.0 RN: You can either... I'm gonna sit back. Dan, you can stand up or...

0:12:09.1 Jacob Wallace: I'll speak from here if that's a good, 'cause the speaker... Is the microphone working okay? Okay. Well thank you. Thank you, Ron, for the introduction. Good afternoon everybody, and thank you all for coming today. It's a pleasure to be in Ann Arbor. This is the first time I've been in Ann Arbor. I'm not a graduate of the university like some of our colleagues up here, but it's a great town. I've enjoyed my time here so far. The war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas has dominated the global headlines for over a year now, so I think this is an opportune time to look back, not just over the last year of war, but further back to understand the fundamental roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So I'm gonna talk a lot about the history of the conflict. I'm not gonna talk a lot about the past year. I think David Satterfield is gonna talk about that. But I want to go back through the history, just help us understand where this conflict comes from, and a little bit about where I might be going. To start off, I'm gonna make two fundamental points that I'm gonna come back to later, but I wanna make these points up front 'cause my time is limited, as you said.

0:13:10.3 RN: It's my fault. Yeah.

0:13:12.4 JW: First point is that this is a conflict about the land and who controls it. This is not about religion, it's not about natural resources or anything else. It's about the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And the second point I wanna make is that the only way to resolve a conflict like this about land can be through the division of the land for these two peoples in the two states. I will come back and talk about that more later on as well. So this area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which Israelis referred to as the Land of Israel, Palestinians refer to it as Palestine. I'm gonna refer to it in a generic sense as Historic Palestine, which is what Palestine was prior to 1948. This area has been contested for millennia, but the history of the current conflict between Israelis and Palestinians begins in the late 19th century with the rise of nationalism as a driving force in global politics.

0:14:11.5 JW: This period was marked by two important trends in Europe and the Middle East. Number one, the decline of existing multinational empires, especially the Ottoman Empire, which then controlled Historic Palestine and much of the rest of the Middle East. And two, the resulting rise of new nation states based on ethnolinguistic groups in Europe, but also in the Middle East. In Europe, in the 19th century, nationalism took over, took another form with the birth of Zionism, a movement created by European Jews responding to longtime oppression and discrimination in Europe. The Zionists sought to establish a national homeland for the Jewish people. In the early days, they considered several options for the location of a national homeland, and eventually, the movement settled on Palestine as the logical place based upon the ancient Jewish connection to the land. Slowly at first, but with greater urgency as time went on, the Zionist movement began to promote immigration to Palestine and Jewish settlement there.

0:15:12.6 JW: At approximately the same time, Palestinian Arabs who were subjects of the Ottoman Empire began to chafe under their Turkish rulers and saw their own route to self-determination. This development in Palestine was part of a larger Arab nationalism movement that spread then across the Arabic speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire. These two historical movements, Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, each with claims to this piece of land and each seeking their own self-determination and a national homeland in the exact same place, inevitably clashed with each other, creating the fundamental dispute of the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that continues to this day. As I said, this was a conflict then and still is about the land, who controls it, not religion or other differences between the two groups.

0:16:00.2 JW: Picking up in the history, I think we have to go back as well to the Ist World War when the Ottoman Empire, the end of which the Ottoman Empire began to break up, and the British found themselves in charge of Historic Palestine on a League of Nations mandate, ruling these two distinct national groups with very different ideas about what should happen next. And in the beginning, the British administration in Palestine favored the Jews and allowed immigration to bolster the Jewish population. This prompted a strong negative reaction from the Arabs. And by the 1920s, there were violent clashes between the two communities and with the British. That caused the British to restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine just as the Nazis were coming to power in Germany.

0:16:45.7 JW: I'm not gonna review the whole history of this period, but I wanna point out one detail from the 1930s. The British administration at the time, faced with a seemingly intractable problem, decided to do what governments often do, which is to establish a commission to make recommendations. And they did this in this case, and they established a group which was known as the Peel Commission, which recommended in 1937 that Palestine be divided into two political entities, one Jewish and one Arab. This is significant because it was the first proposal for what later came to be called the Two State Solution, a compromise that has been returned to again and again over nearly a century.

0:17:24.8 JW: Returning to the history, I think that the other parts of this are probably familiar to you. After World War II, the British decided to wash their hands of this problem. The Jews and the Arabs fought a war in 1948, resulting in the establishment of the state of Israel on 72% of what is what was Historic Palestine. The remaining territories, known as the West Bank and Gaza, came first under the control of Jordan and Egypt, and then following the war in 1967, under Israeli occupation. Peace talks, which were known as the Oslo Process, led to the establishment of a Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. But these talks later stalled and left unresolved conflict that has grown more intractable and violent over the intervening years. Alongside the establishment of the PA came the rise of Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood dedicated to the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Islamic state.

0:18:22.0 JW: Let me talk a little bit about Hamas and where they came from, and its origins. As I said, Hamas is an outgrowth of Muslim Brotherhood, a broad regional movement that developed in the early 20th century promoting political Islam as an alternative to the national political leadership in the Arab world. In the Palestinian case, Hamas was founded in the late 1980s as an alternative to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO, under Fatah. Hamas's ideology is a mixture of political Islam and resistance to Israel. It seeks the control of the entire area of Historic Palestine and the establishment there of an Islamic Palestinian state. It has engaged in armed struggle against Israel as a means to accomplish this, and it does not support a two-state solution.

0:19:06.0 JW: Hamas first came to have a significant impact on events in the mid-1990s when it initiated a series of terrorist bombings and suicide attacks inside Israel to derail the Oslo process. These bombings were perhaps the single biggest factor that crippled Oslo. The second significant development came in 2006 when Hamas competed for the first time in elections, winning a majority of the seats in the PA Council with 44% of the vote. Hamas formed the PA government after this election, but that government was boycotted by Israel, the United States, and much of the international community because of Hamas's support of terrorism. In 2007, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the Hamas government. Hamas later responded by taking over Gaza by force, establishing its own government there, and expanding its military capabilities.

0:20:01.0 JW: Hamas's operations against Israel led to major clashes with Israel in 2009, 2014, 2021, and then, of course, to the October 7 attacks over a year ago. As I said, I'm not gonna talk a lot about October 7 and what that was. I think a lot of you are familiar with it, and David will talk about it in a little more detail. Since October 7, there has been an effort to arrange a ceasefire in Gaza, but it seems quite remote at this point. But at some point, the fighting will stop and there will be a day after. And looking ahead, I think these fundamental points that emerge from the history of the conflict will be relevant to what happens next. First, that this conflict is rooted in competing visions of nationalism in Historic Palestine and who controls the land. And second, that the only feasible way to resolve such a conflict over territory is to divide the land in some way in what is now called a two-state solution.

0:21:00.6 JW: For a lasting resolution to this conflict, there will need to be a resumption of some form of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. This will not be easy, and it cannot happen under current circumstances. But one important lesson from the history of the conflict is that when international problems are left to fester, they become worse, and bad actors will exploit the situation. So we must try. The alternative is an endless conflict locking Israelis and Palestinians into what could literally be a forever war. In my view, as I said, two states for two peoples is the only way in which the underlying conflict can be resolved. Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, there are now roughly 15 million people. Roughly half of them are Jews, and roughly half of them are Arabs. None of them are going anywhere. Both of these groups have a national identity and won't be satisfied until their national aspirations are secured, which means two states.

0:21:57.3 JW: However the Gaza war ends, a key action item for the United US Administration going forward, whichever candidate emerges as the victor in the election coming up in two weeks, whoever wins the US Administration going forward will have to renew an effort to address the underlying Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a negotiating process. While this goal seems far-fetched now, and is only conceivable in the long term, starting a credible pathway towards this outcome now is essential to unlocking support of others in the region for a broader transformation of the Middle East.

0:22:33.7 JW: The obstacles, however, are considerable, and one key impediment is a lack of support in Israel after October 7 for a two-state solution. The government in Israel, together with public opinion, will have to change in order for progress to be achieved. And the impediments to progress are not only on the Israeli side. Hamas is a very large obstacle to peace, and the PA needs serious reform and new leadership as well for progress to be possible. These changes are necessary, will need to be accompanied as well, as I said, by this different approach going forward by Israel. Addressing these challenges will be a tall order for the next administration, but to protect US interests in the region, I believe the next administration will have to be more proactive on the Israeli-Palestinian front than it was before October the 7th. The Middle East has a way of coming back to bite you when it is ignored. The next president and his team will be well-advised not to ignore the Middle East. I'm gonna stop there, turn it over to my colleagues, and look forward to your questions.

[applause]

0:23:40.7 SZ: So I've been asked to deal with the topic of Iran and Iran and the Gulf states, and then bring in the whole issue with Israel in less than 10 minutes. So of course I'm gonna go slightly over time and this will be shorthand. So for those of you who say, but you didn't talk about this or you left out that or this isn't balanced this way or that way, believe me, I'm trying. But it's just really very difficult and I just want to more or less spark the discussion with what I'm laying out. And I say this particularly to my professor who knows Iran better than just about anybody.

0:24:13.0 SZ: Okay. So if we look at the history of the Gulf region, just historically, going back generations, I had a professor at the Foreign Service Institute. He had a map of the region, and the map would show the different empires and the different timetables and the country's kind of moving depending upon who was in charge and who was on top of things. And the Byzantines and the Sassanids and the Ottomans, and, I mean you could go on and on and on, right? So those tensions particularly in the Persian Gulf where you have historically the ancient Persian Empire, and you have other empires across the waterway. That is something that has historically been control of waterways, trade routes to the Orient, across to the Middle East, projections of power in the region. This is not a new phenomenon.

0:25:07.8 SZ: If we look at the issue of Iran and its relations with the United States, and by connection, its relations with the other countries in the Gulf and Israel who are partners and/or allies to the United States, you see that a lot of this distrust of America really goes back to 1953, and when the Prime Minister of Iran, Mossadegh, who nationalized the British oil in Iran and challenged the Shah, was overthrown with the help of British and US intelligence. And then the Shah was reinstated, the Shah being the larger power in the Persian Gulf and the close ally to the United States. And then you see it when Khomeini came into power and our embassy was taken over by the students at that particular period, and the cries of Mossadegh were very clearly heard at that particular period.

0:26:04.7 SZ: So there's always been this tension between the US and Iran in terms of influence in the region, in terms of dominance and deterrence and how you view that. Now, the current conflict in part currently harkens back to the Iranian revolution, the rise of Khomeini. And I think in many ways what has colored a lot of the thinking in Iran was the eight year Iran-Iraq war, which somehow in America we don't really look at. But for me as a student of that region, it's very clear when President Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded Iran, and most of the countries in the Persian Gulf, not all, but many of them sided, at least tacitly and then with other more clear support for Saddam, and even us as Americans. This sent a signal to Iran that the geography of the region and the modus vivendi that they had thought they had cultivated with countries in the region was no longer gonna hold. And they had to think about, as Iran, all right, how do we deal with this situation?

0:27:16.0 SZ: Now, over the last 20 years, of course, well, I mean, if you look at even the region, look at all the countries surrounding Iran. None of them are exactly what I would call friendly to Iran. There are no allies, and in many cases, they're either enemies or partial friends, but not very much so. And then the war in Afghanistan and Iraq over a 20-year period. We had thousands and thousands of US military stationed basically in those two countries bordering Iran from the east and from the west. We look at the fact that even today, we have more than 40,000 US military in the region, stationed predominantly in areas that are contiguous to Iran or in the Persian Gulf area.

0:28:10.3 SZ: So, from where the Iranians sit, and this is not a defense of Iran, but in order to understand politics and understand negotiations and understand whoever this is that you're dealing with, you have to understand where they sit and what drives them and what shapes their thinking. How does Iran protect itself and its leadership and its revolution? This is always first and foremost on their minds. And how to increase Iranian influence while reducing Western influence in the region. This is what drives their realpolitik. And for those neighboring monarchies in the Gulf, how do they protect themselves? Because there's always this tension in the region between the powers. And then what roles does Israel and the United States play?

0:29:00.7 SZ: Now, the Gulf countries and Israel and the US look at Iran as sort of the master manipulator of crisis. This is how we've termed Iran. And so how has Iran kind of managed it from where they sit? So they exploit chaos and ungoverned spaces. This has always been, they don't have the strong army. They certainly don't have a strong air force, the air force being key. So they look at how they can look towards countries where there's civil strife and how they fill the void. And their ability to basically create actors with sort of the same components of support, whether that's ideology, whether that's lethal training, whether that's cybersecurity, whether that's weapons. And that is all to the end to have influence, to project power, and to pressure Iran's enemies without suffering the severe consequences of war on their doorstep.

0:29:56.7 SZ: Now, the tools and the techniques are similar. The audiences are different. And the Iranians in this way really are kind of ecumenical. Everybody says, oh, they only deal with Shia. Well, no, that's not true. They don't look at things as a Sunni-Shia divide. They look at opportunities. So if you look at Hezbollah, for example, Hezbollah is more closely aligned with Tehran. They can act independently. They do have agency. They don't do things simply at the calling of Iran. But at times, you see them more as acting in accordance with Iran, in which is, for example, their role in Syria during the strife, the civil war in Syria fighting to defend Bashar al-Assad. That was very much more pushed from an Iranian perspective. But in other ways, they can have their own independent thought.

0:30:50.0 SZ: Now, Hamas's relationship with Iran is not as organic, and it's really more a marriage of convenience. First of all, they are Sunni. They're Muslim brotherhood politically. And the relationship really has had an ebb and flow. For example, in Syria during the civil war, they had been headquarters in Syria up until 2012. And then during the Arab Spring, because they didn't want to take a position supporting Bashar al-Assad and they didn't want to take a position against the Syrian opposition, particularly the Islamist elements, but the Syrian opposition writ large. And so they left and they went to Qatar at that point. They didn't go to Tehran, by the way, which is very interesting. They could have, and Iran wanted them, but they went to Qatar instead.

0:31:40.2 SZ: Now, when Yahya Sinwar came more into power in terms of Hamas, he reestablished those relations with Iran. But it was unclear now how the relationship will be maintained and at what level. The Houthis in Yemen, these are the three H's, right? What the Western press very liberally calls the proxies, but they're very different in the way they engage with Iran, in the way they engage with the elements. They're all nationalists. They're organic. They have their own grievances in their own country. Iran works with them and utilizes them, exploits them, pick your word of choice, for its own machinations. The Houthis in Yemen had historically dominated in North Yemen, had difficulties with the Saudis along the border. Sometimes they were bought off with money and things were quiet. If the money wasn't flowing, then the battle started to make sure the bags of gold were coming across the border. With the Houthi ascendancy in 2014, when they took over the capital and deposed the legitimate government there, Iran saw an opening.

0:32:49.8 SZ: Now, everybody says, oh well we knew that Iran was very tight with the Houthis since time immemorial. Not really, but they saw the opportunity, and now, of course, through training, through weapons, through money, etc., they have established a foothold with the Houthis there. And the Houthis, yes they're Shia, but a different brand of Shia. They're Fivers, which means really they're kind of not true Shias in the eyes of the religious leadership in Iran. But what does that matter? What matters is they're useful. And so they have played that role. And you find that they could legitimize it when the Saudis were bombing in Yemen, across the whole region, and the Houthis were lobbing rockets over into Saudi Arabia and to the UAE and the whole issue explodes. And once again, Iran understood how to take advantage of that ungoverned space.

0:33:47.7 SZ: Now, if we look at relations with the Gulf countries, and I'm gonna do this in three sentences, which is a real disservice to the whole relationship, but forgive me. By and large, there have been tensions between the Gulf countries and Iran. Now that's not true for Oman, which has better relations. The Kuwaitis have a little bit better, the Qataris a little bit better more recently. The Omanis are the ones with the real relationship. But the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, terrible relations with Iran. And it's always been a tough call. But the Saudis and the Emiratis got a real wake-up call around 2019 when there were the attacks by the Houthis, but to be said Iran was behind it, it was said, on the eastern province of Saudi Arabia where the oil-producing areas are, Abqaiq. And then Houthi rockets hitting airports and Dhafra Air Base in the UAE.

0:34:43.7 SZ: And what did we do? Nothing. We didn't respond. We didn't come to the defense of our partners there. And I have to say that at that point, there was the whole issue of, well, what are we going to do? The people who we thought were going to help us didn't help us. So that's where about two years ago they started the march of detente. I'm not gonna call it rapprochement. I think that's overstating it, but detente with Iran. There was an exchange of ambassadors. You had leaders received in capital for the first time in years. And I think basically the GCC countries were very worried. The US, oh, those US people, they have short attention spans, they've got a fickle Congress. And I have to say, our withdrawal from Afghanistan really shocked them in conversations I've had there. And so they made a calculated decision. This is our neighborhood. We've got to get along. Let's have a cooling of what's going on in the region.

0:35:45.1 SZ: Now, these countries understood, they lack sufficient deterrence, either against Israel or Iran in terms of the back and forth, the tit for tat going on, and they were worried that they were gonna get caught in the crossfire that would compromise their national security, which was a huge issue. Now, when we started seeing all of these assassinations taking place, particularly the Israeli assassination of the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran in July. This was like in the heart of Tehran where he was a guest for the inauguration of the new president of Iran, Pezeshkian. This was really a signal. And then the second signal with the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. And there were other killings in between, but these two were very important.

0:36:41.8 SZ: And so we see the tit-for-tat that had started after October 7th, actually on October 8th, when Hezbollah started lobbing rockets into Israel in support of Hamas. You start seeing now a whole new regional equation that has changed dramatically, basically. That the foundation of Iran's national security and their military strategy has now started to shift from a reliance on non-state military allies in the region to a new form of deterrence. So that means that their whole gray zone strategy, which means you prioritize indirect conflict using non-state actors, is now being a complementary approach rather than the main approach deterrence. This is a difference.

0:37:33.6 SZ: Two, that Iran has abandoned its strategic patience. They realize that the failure to retaliate would mark a strategic inflection point that was problematic for them. And they came to a realization, at least among some, that the risk of inaction now far outweighed the risk of a strike. And what does that mean for Iran going forward in the region? Three, that there was a publicly discernible policy on deterrence. They've decided to take strikes, and this was showcased with the damaging attacks on Israel. Now, the first attacks in April, which were with different missiles, they were announced 48 hours in advance. They were slow. I mean, they were meant to send a signal but not really do damage. Like, we're here, but we don't want to escalate.

0:38:23.8 SZ: And then you see in October one where all of a sudden you have Iranian missiles that are hitting airfields in Israel. And this was the use of ballistic missiles. This, again, raised a bar in terms of the capacity of Iran to strike, using missiles they hadn't used before, and issues that probably will be non-negotiable in talks with the West, because that is something they're not going to give up. Another component, Iran's new red line towards Israel has been redefined. They struck Israel for the first time from its own soil, from Iranian soil. Now, Israel has been lobbying into Iran, but they have never actually from Iranian soil struck Israel. And this is the first time they target a nuclear state. Israel is not a declared nuclear state, but it is a nuclear state nonetheless.

0:39:20.6 SZ: And the last thing, and I'll close, Ron. If you look at Israel's retaliatory operation against Iran, this could really transform, I think, Tehran's nuclear policy, because the deterrence that was afforded by these different groups that were in proximity in the Middle East and that were doing some of the bidding of Iran, or at least as independent actors, were carrying out actions that were helpful to Iran, all right? Those now are being reconsidered in terms of, do we have to really reopen or continue on our nuclear program, but go to a next level? So I think the idea that we could see a nuclear Iran is not as far-fetched today as it might have been a few months ago, and I'll leave it at that.

0:40:22.9 RN: Good. Now, David, to continue the initial process of raising confusion to a higher level of detail, over to you.

0:40:32.9 David Satterfield: Sure. Gaza presents, and in a different sense than the current situation in Lebanon, which I'll touch on at the end of my remarks, a genuine problem from hell in Samantha Power's famous description. But I'll walk the clock back briefly to 2007. Hamas unilaterally assumes control from the PA from Fatah of Gaza, imposes its rule by force. It is a very harsh acquisition of power. It was directed not only at the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza, but also at those representatives of the international humanitarian community attempting to work in Gaza. What to do? The Israeli reaction, in terms of a meta-sense, was we don't want to send the IDF on the ground into Gaza. We know what happens when that takes place. We lose soldiers. They're captured. Ultimately, we have to withdraw. The damage that we do to Hamas is limited compared with the damage reputationally and in terms of actual tactical yields that we get there.

0:41:39.9 DS: Bibi Netanyahu is many things, but has not been a military adventurer. He has avoided the temptation to engage in Lebanon, in Syria, and in Gaza as well. Gaza was a problem that could be addressed from outside by mowing the lawn, the expression, artillery fire, aerial strikes. It would be a tit-for-tat. Hamas would attempt and sometimes succeeded through attack tunnels and other means of breaching the fence through or below, seizing Israelis, taking them back in, holding them for ransom, sometimes getting what they wanted, sometimes not, but this was a manageable problem. Then, over the course of the decade that preceded October 7th of last year, a different approach was tried. And it was an approach in which most of the region, the Middle East, the United States, most Western governments, and the government of Israel, the Netanyahu-led government of Israel, all participated. It was a different kind of view.

0:42:44.0 DS: Hamas is a terrorist organization. Yes. Hamas will try, if it can, to kidnap Israelis, hold them for ransom, get prisoners in exchange. Absolutely. There'll be ultralight aircraft. There'll be Zodiac boats on the shore. There'll be attack tunnel dug, all of that. But we don't wanna send the army in. We got to deal with this problem in another way, and whether it was through wishful thinking, magical thinking, some combination of the above, a different approach emerged in which it was assumed, despite the full knowledge of what Hamas was, what Hamas wanted to be, that Hamas did not view Gaza and Gazan governance as its end state. Gaza and the people of Gaza, the 2.3 million Palestinians, was purely an instrument for Hamas, an instrument to achieve the next proximate goal, which was Ramallah, the PLO, the PAO, the PA, to displace Fatah. But even that, even the West Bank, was an instrument to the real goal, which was the Arab street, broadly. And if that point is not understood in advance, that the ambitions of Hamas were regional, not confined, certainly to Gaza, or to Gaza and the West Bank, then October 7th and its motivations are largely lost.

0:44:05.8 DS: So the approach that was adopted over much of the past decade was to assume Hamas was bad, but it wanted to be viewed as successful in Gaza, which meant you could send money in, you could offer employment and social services in Gaza, work permits would be granted by Israel for Gazans to come out and earn income, that Hamas was ultimately a rational organization that was focused on its 'success' in governance of Gaza. And so, all of us, eyes wide open, engaged in the active support of the tens of millions and ultimately hundreds of millions of dollars that were transferred from Qatar directly into Gaza in suitcases in the back of taxi cabs. With US diplomacy engaging the Qadri government at the highest levels to want to know where's the next payment? The payment isn't there. You've got to get a payment into Gaza for the sake of stability.

0:45:09.0 DS: Again, holy witty, but based upon a concept, or as it is called in Israel, a conceptzia, that you could avoid a military confrontation or anything other than random, partially, or largely unsuccessful acts of violence through this combination of buying off Hamas and by mowing the grass periodically from outside. That conceptzia in which we were all a part, this massive failure of imagination, collapsed spectacularly on October 7th. 1200 Jews killed, the largest number of Jews murdered on a single day since the camps were finally liberated in spring of '45. National trauma, national shock to Israel of a character, a depth, endures today that's never been seen in the history of the state. This was a fundamental shock, a shock to the system. It was a failure. It was a failure by the state. It was a failure by the security services of enormous dimensions, real and psychological. And hostages were taken, over 200. 101 of those hostages remain today, alive and dead combined, in Gaza. What to do?

0:46:31.6 DS: Now we'll come up to what happened after October 7th. In those days immediately after, senior members of the Israeli government declared famously, not one ounce of fuel, not one drop of water, not one ounce of food will enter Gaza until the hostages are released. Tony Blinken goes to Israel on the weekend that follows, that would be the 15th of October, has very difficult conversations until the early morning hours over a minimal level of trucks. Humanitarian assistance entering Gaza. Very, very tough presentation. Shock, confrontation is everywhere. Anger and frustration and humiliation that this could have happened. President Biden travels on the 18th of October. I was with him on that trip. The president has three messages. Those messages on October 18th, that's a year ago, are important 'cause they resonate today. President said, first and foremost, the private message was identical to the public message he made. We've got your back. It is essential, not just as a right, but a requirement. Any state would, any state.

0:47:42.1 DS: You have got to do what you can to destroy the military capacity of Hamas so they cannot do what it did on October 7th again, and we, the United States, will support you. Second message, at the same time, that fight, that kinetic struggle is gonna take time. It is gonna be hugely complex. We had no idea on October 18th. Israel did. The United States did not. Just how complex it would be, 300 miles of tunnels, bunkers below the depth of penetrating ordnance in Israeli or, in most cases, in US inventories. The thorough wiring of Hamas's military structure, 30,000 fighters, heavily armed, highly structured, above ground, below ground. This was a campaign, the magnitude of which we didn't understand. Israel didn't understand at the time. But the president's message was, it's gonna be hard. It's gonna be complicated. It's gonna take time and political space for you to do this. And for you to have that time and space, I'm telling you, you need to have a humanitarian campaign which is as robust, as effective, and as committed to as your military campaign, 'cause without it, that space and that time is gonna collapse in on you and on all of us, including the United States and your friends in the region and around.

0:49:09.1 DS: The president had a third message, which is ultimately, take it from us. We have been in these conflicts, these forever wars, for decades. You cannot, through military means only, counter an ideology. You need a political counter message, a counter vision, a counter context to provide. And hard as it is to absorb, that political vision, that horizon, has got to be a credible pathway to a negotiated permanent status two-state resolution. Difficult to palate, to absorb those words at a moment of shock. But that's what's got to come. Those were the messages then and they remain profoundly the messages now.

0:49:55.8 DS: So where has a year taken us? First, on the military side, the Hamas military force has not been eliminated, but it has been dramatically reduced, taken off the battlefield, disrupted at command levels and in fighter levels, without question. We don't assess. More importantly, the Israeli senior security officials do not assess that Hamas possesses a credible military force to threaten Israel as it did on the 7th of October. So a success in that regard. But Hamas does remain, and its military force remains, in the thousands. For all of the decimation of command and control elements of Qadri, this was a huge force. They remain embedded. The tunnel network has been only partially explored. This is difficult. You're unraveling now from above, whether you're on the ground or in the air, a system built over the course of 17 years with enormous commitment of resources and very, very sophisticated. But it has been dramatically diminished. It does not pose Hamas a military threat to Israel.

0:51:08.8 DS: The humanitarian side. Well, that declaration, when Tony got there that first weekend after October 8th, that we can't do anything. The Israeli public will not accept any entry of humanitarian assistance. We have a cabinet decision that we will not allow direct humanitarian assistance into Gaza ever from Israel again. That changed. And it changed as a result of persistent highest level pressure, starting with the President and going on down. Every day, every night, telling Israel, this won't wash. You cannot sustain the military campaign unless you have a commitment validated on the ground to the delivery into Gaza and distribution within Gaza of humanitarian assistance. It started slow. October 21, 20 trucks moved, but it wasn't zero. Then more trucks started. Then fuel, first in a very small amount. Then hundreds of thousands of liters of fuel for functions within Gaza. This was a process which had ups and downs, but the curve was broadly upward. And it was the result of constant engagement with the government of Israel, by the President, by the National Security Advisor, by the Secretary of State, in the closest coordination possible with the international humanitarian community.

0:52:35.3 DS: By the spring of this year, over 400 trucks a day, sometimes 500, commercial goods now coming in from Egypt again were entering Gaza. The north, where we were really worried of the risk of starvation and famine, the north was being supplied with assistance. The President used disasters, the tragic killing by mistake by the IDF of World Central Kitchen staff, an organization the government of Israel wanted to have succeed, and they couldn't even manage to preserve WCK from harm. We used that as an opportunity to try to effect a pivot. Enough is enough. You got to open crossings directly into the north. Ashdod Port has to be open for all humanitarian assistance. You've got to be able to increase capacity for inspection and movement of goods, not just from Israel, not just from Egypt, but from Jordan as well. The Jordanian army moving its trucks into Gaza in an exceptional operation which continues today. And you've got to do it now, because otherwise the situation is gonna get desperate.

0:53:41.0 DS: Look, at the best of moments, end of April, beginning of May, what we were able to do was avoid famine and starvation. That is a very, very low bar. It's important. But we were not preventing malnutrition. We were not preventing chronic wasting. We were not preventing the growing problem of lack of sanitation. And Gaza is not Sudan. The situation in Sudan is terrible. But Sudanese can move out of combat areas. They can move across national borders. In Mosul, when we fought the campaign there against ISIS, we controlled the terrain. We could move civilians out of the city, appropriately care for them before they came back. None of these options exist in Gaza. Gaza is an urban environment, one of the most densely populated areas in the world. 2.3 million people in this very small area. And then compacted still further by repeated IDF evacuations, displacements, re-displacements, re-evacuations.

0:54:50.8 DS: On the last visit we made to Kerem Shalom on May 5th of this year, the message was very clear from the US government, which is the volume of assistance has now got to move up dramatically and we've got to move it in a way that doesn't have us counting trucks every day and every night. We've got to go to specialized feeding, specialized medical care, and you Israel should not move into Rafah. We know you need to move. You've got five and a half, six and a half Hamas battalions there. You've got to deal with them. But before you move, you've got to provide a place for a million people to be displaced to, on top of the 800,000 already displaced, with appropriate care and appropriate shelter, and you've got to have alternate routes out of Rafah. Because they're going to have a long campaign there, you've got to have a way to distribute aid.

0:55:42.2 DS: The campaign began the next day, May 6th, May 7th. None of those steps have been taken. And the profound character of the humanitarian disaster that is Gaza magnified dramatically in the days after the initiation, May 7th, of the Rafah campaign. Assistance gets in at tiny trickles right now. The risk of famine and starvation is profound, well beyond anything of the past year. And winter's coming, which means the risk of disease because of lack of sanitation, lack of appropriate shelter, medical care, all of this poses an enormous challenge. Law and order broke down. Armed criminal gangs loot 50% of the assistance, the limited assistance that does move in.

0:56:36.0 DS: How do you deal with this? How do you address it? The answer is, first and foremost, without a ceasefire, it can't be addressed at all. Without restoration of basic security on the ground, it can't come back. Right now, Israel is a responsible party for security, like it or not, and they don't like that. They're responsible, but they are not providing security for distribution of humanitarian assistance. It is an obligation they have to understand and they have to assume. So ceasefire, why no ceasefire? Hamas has been silent since the latter part of August in responding or non-response to a proposal for a ceasefire with return of hostages. There'll be no unilateral ceasefire, and that's not an Israeli view, that's the United States view. There must be hostages that come back. We have US hostages, some living, which need to come out. Israel has many more.

0:57:30.7 DS: Hamas has not responded. Why? My assessment is Sinwar was waiting, waiting to see what happened in the north with respect to the campaign in Lebanon, what happened with respect to Iran. Did the outcome of all of that increase his isolation? Did he lose Iran and Hezbollah as a notional, instrumentalized partner, transactional partner, or did he gain something more? Why answer? Be silent. Wait for a better moment to respond. Sinwar is gone. Still no response. I don't know what the calculations of the successor leadership, and trust me, there will be a successor leadership of Hamas, will be. Do they make the same, let's wait and see judgment? Wait till the shoe falls on an Israeli response in Iran and then the Iranian response back or not? But without a Hamas response to the ceasefire hostage release proposal, fundamental truth here, this goes nowhere except further kinetic activity in Gaza, which in the view of the Israeli military, serves a very limited, if any, tactical or strategic purpose at this point. It's a campaign on automatic pilot. It needs to stop, but the vehicle to stop it is that ceasefire and hostage release. Very, very quickly, Lebanon is different.

0:58:54.9 RN: We may have to do Lebanon on the Q&A 'cause we're going 20...

0:58:58.5 DS: Alright.

0:59:00.4 RN: 60 seconds.

0:59:00.6 DS: Ask a question. 60 seconds.

0:59:01.6 RN: 60 seconds, you could do...

0:59:03.8 DS: There's a deal on Lebanon that would end all of this tonight. And it's not the elimination of Hezbollah, it's not the elimination of their arsenal. It is Hezbollah accepting what it has rejected for 18 years. Resolution 1701, which they formally accepted in August of 2006, and then proceeded to never implement. It means they have to move their forces north of the Litani River and they have to stop the linkage of their rocketing 180, 200 rockets every single day into Israel. Can they do it? Of course, they can do it. Will they do it? That remains to be seen. But if they don't, I assure you, that campaign will continue and civilians in Lebanon will continue to suffer. And that country, trust me, has suffered far, far more than is justified. They don't need this additional confrontation and conflict. But there's a resolution in Lebanon. The resolution in Gaza between absence of a political horizon, the decision of this Israeli government, inadequate attention to humanitarian affairs, the responsibility of the Israeli government, and a military campaign that succeeded but not enough by military means alone to eliminate the threat of Hamas. That takes a political resolution. It takes a change on the ground. All of this leaves us in Gaza with a terribly difficult challenge for whatever administration takes office next.

1:00:37.9 RN: Now that should now that should have completely clarified this for you. We can now take questions. I would ask, since we have only about, 20, 22 minutes, maybe we can go a few minutes over. Go ahead.

1:00:56.6 Amina: Hi, ambassadors. Thank you so much for taking the time out to come and speak at the University of Michigan. My name's Amina. I'm one of the Weiser Diplomacy fellows here, and I'll be one of the moderators for the Q&A section. Our students have submitted a couple questions for all of you, and I can go ahead and read the first one. Given the turmoil in Israel and Palestine, there's been a lot of discussion from the Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, but one of our students wants to ask, who speaks for the Bedouin communities and how are native nomadic and indigenous communities represented in and through diplomatic efforts during tumultuous times?

1:01:33.4 DS: Regrettably, the Bedouin Israeli community has not had any significant voice whatsoever in all of this. Yet they have suffered from rocket strikes, from damage as a consequence of this campaign. Economically, Bedouin communities have suffered, as has all of the Negev from the consequences of what Hamas did. They are a marginalized community. So are others.

1:01:58.0 RN: Do the Egyptian Bedouin have any more representation?

1:02:02.3 DS: Pardon?

1:02:03.3 RN: Do the Egyptian Bedouin have any more...

1:02:06.8 DS: No.

1:02:06.9 RN: Representation? No.

1:02:07.0 DS: No, but...

1:02:07.4 JW: There are also a Palestinian Bedouin as well, who also are not represented. So I think the answer to your question is...

1:02:12.4 RN: We have a collective negative answer to any useful representation for the Bedouin.

1:02:18.0 DS: No, unfortunately not. No.

1:02:18.0 Amina: Is is there, maybe as a follow on, is there a way that, or in US other government negotiations, do they ever bring them them up?

1:02:31.5 DS: No. No, and they won't. I'm just being blunt here. The issues here are between states, state actors, or between a state and a non-state entity like Hamas or Hezbollah. The role of marginalized communities in Israel, like marginalized communities in the Arab world, with the exception of Jordan, where the Bedouin, the tribes have an extraordinary outsized political role, well beyond their proportions, no, they're not a reasonable factor. They're not a meaningful factor.

1:03:01.2 RN: It doesn't mean they shouldn't be. Just the answer is no.

1:03:03.6 DS: But they're not.

1:03:06.8 RN: Next question.

1:03:07.8 Niab Aliah: Thank you, ambassador. I'm Niab Aliah. I manage the Weiser Diplomacy Center. Our next question for you is if Israel and Iran end up engaging in a direct conflict, the student believes that the war could escalate significantly. Do you think the United States could intervene or take action in the region if this happens?

1:03:28.5 DS: It's a great question, and I'll repeat the message that we have had collectively as an analytical judgment, but also US government position, since October 8. There's no inevitability, wasn't then, isn't now to that very dark vision of a genuine regional war into which the United States becomes further drawn in. It depends on decisions taken by Iran, and they in turn depend on what Susan presented as Iran's risk tiering. Is the risk of not responding to Israel not being seen visibly as the leader of the axis of Jihad in resistance, a greater risk. Then the risk and it's real of what their responses precipitate. Iran's a rational actor, there's no question about that, but it's how they assign risk in priority here, and we don't know that. What they did in the last attack was extraordinarily risky. These ballistic missiles hit targets. They could have killed many, many civilians.

1:04:39.1 RN: Had they been aimed collectively at a metropolitan area.

1:04:44.4 DS: Well, they did hit in metropolitan areas.

1:04:47.4 RN: Yeah, but not...

1:04:48.4 DS: They hit on the route I used to commute on squarely, but...

1:04:52.6 RN: Not downtown Tel Aviv.

1:04:53.0 DS: They could have left Israeli dead, which would've assured a very different character with potential of escalation of response. But where does Iran go next? To answer that question, you'd have to ask, where does Israel go now? And the answer is, we have counseled Israel strongly against attacks on either the hydrocarbon sector or the nuclear program. Different reasons in those two different cases.

1:05:19.3 RN: You have a high potential for stupidity, to be really blunt about this.

1:05:26.1 DS: But there's no inevitability to a regional war, nothing.

1:05:27.6 RN: There's nothing inevitable. But to go back to your question, if through miscalculation, and I think it, I believe it would be miscalculation. Neither side wants, neither Iran nor Israel wants this to expand into a full scale continuing war. And each one is trying to play this game of how much they can show they're tough without quite getting over the line. But there's lots of room for miscalculation. If they miscalculate, an answer to your question, the US is going to have very little ability to stop it. But we could really suffer because if it starts impeding the oil flow, you will see inflation go through the roof here and all kinds of economic consequences, and it's really, really difficult to stop this stuff. That's why the Gulf states are petrified because their oil facilities and their desalination facilities on which they depend for water, are mostly on the coast. The Saudi Arabia's a little different 'cause it's much bigger. So they're also within very close range of Iranian missiles, far closer than Israel is.

1:06:44.9 DS: They're pursuing de-risking strategies.

1:06:47.8 RN: Yeah, they're all pursuing de-risking. But the bottom line to your question is if Iran or Israel screw this up by getting themselves into a full scale war, we are not going to have a stop switch that we can flip easily. Next question.

1:07:05.4 Amina: Thank you ambassadors. Next we have a question for Ambassador Susan. You pointed out that around 2019, the Gulf States worries about US disengagement from the region prompted them to seek detente with Iran. Do you see that as part of a broader trend where US engagement in the region has been a destabilizing force in that it gives US allies a backstop that discourages them from seeking peace?

1:07:33.3 SZ: No, I see, the American presence in the region as a deterrent force and a protective force for these gulf nations. That's certainly how they see it and what they want. And you see it even in current discussions that the Saudis have made very clear that they are seeking some kind of security arrangement with the United States. If they thought it was a liability, they wouldn't want to be seeking it. But by the same token, when they were hit and we did not take any action, it, I think, woke them up a bit. It shook them up and they realized that while they hadn't really managed the relationship with Iran very well, they had kind of let it just simmer but not engage. And they had pulled their ambassadors out in 2014 and 2016 due to tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran. They decided that no, we had better at least tamp things down a bit, and have at least on voice in country to be able to deliver messages, a sense of a bit more normalcy. But it's a very tenuous situation. People could be pulled back at any moment, but they were worried. And so it's their neighborhood and geography matters.

1:08:53.4 NA: Thank you, ambassador. Our next question is for Ambassador Wallace. As a diplomat, how do you or how did you navigate conversations that require balancing the national interests of the nation you represent with the interest, goals, priorities of the nations you engage with?

1:09:13.4 JW: Well, as a diplomat, I think we can all sort of speak to that. What guides us is American interest first. And our job as an ambassador or as a foreign service officer serving overseas is to represent the United States to the foreign government. So we convey the policies of the United States. We urge countries to fall in line on that basis, but there's not a question of balancing our interest, it's their interest.

1:09:40.8 RN: The question of balance really comes up only in the fact that you have to understand their interests enough to know what kinds of solutions are possible. You can't work in a vacuum. We've had administrations that do that where the policy was sort of one meeting diplomacy, we've told you what we want now we don't need to talk to you. It doesn't work very well.

1:10:07.6 Amina: Thank you so much. So, another question from a student. How would you respond to the accusation that a two-state solution is simply a mantra of US diplomats that ignores the practical realities on the ground where Israeli settlements have steadily made such a solution nearly impossible.

1:10:25.2 DS: Look, the pursuit of an enduring negotiated settlement two-state resolution permanent status resolution has been with every US administration, a really serious sense since Ronald Reagan in 1982, at least in modern times. Those initiatives have come closer or further away from the goal at different moments. But here is an inconvenient truth if you're an American diplomat. We've never been the driving force behind all of this. We have provided the setting, the facilitation for peacemaking. We've given financial inducements and supports. We have offered theoretical security guarantees to help make hard decisions, and that's an appropriate role for us. But at every step of the way, where genuine progress has been made, even if that progress faltered or failed, it was the parties themselves driven out of their own sense of self-interest, no better choices, reluctantly, usually reluctantly they've done it. Our job was to help sustain and encourage and support it and move it forward.

1:11:34.3 DS: It is important to reiterate that there must be a political horizon which constitutes a credible pathway to a two-state negotiation. Not to paraphrase John F. Kennedy of Rice University in '62, because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because it is the only way out of this miserable suffering that now proliferates generation after generation and touches not just on Israeli lives, Palestinian lives, but the entire region and basic US interests at home as well as US interests at broad. Do we mean it? Yes, we mean it. Do we have the ability by determinative force to make it happen? No, we do not, and we never did. But if we stop saying it, we undercut the concept fundamentally, and that would be very wrong to do.

1:12:29.9 RN: Jake, you worked on this for years. Do you want to add a little more?

1:12:33.6 JW: I would add to that. I actually agree with a part of the rest of the question, which is that settlement activities have made it harder on the ground in a practical sense to achieve a two-state solution. There are other actions that the Israeli government have taken that have been unhelpful, just as there have been many actions on the Palestinian side that have been unhelpful and take us further from a two-state solution. The difficulty is that it is very difficult, I think, to achieve a two-state solution, but nobody's come up with an alternative that's any better that addresses the fundamental problems of this conflict. As I said, there are about seven and a half million Jews and seven and a half million Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. None of them are going anywhere. And the only way you can find a solution is possibly acceptable to both sides is a two-state solution and division of the land in some way.

1:13:26.4 RN: Next.

1:13:27.9 NA: Thank you ambassadors. Our next question is, ProPublica recently reported that USAID and the State Department's Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration had determined that Israel was deliberately blocking US-backed humanitarian aid from entering Gaza in May. The consequence of which, under federal law, is an end to weapons shipments. However, secretary Blinken reported to Congress that Israel was not blocking humanitarian aid. In September, the number of food trucks entering Gaza reached a seven month low. Now reports are emerging that Israel is preventing any food aid at all to enter the Northern Gaza Strip. What can be done to encourage the State Department to release accurate reports about the state of food entering Gaza and take appropriate action under federal law to ensure that US-backed humanitarian aid is entering Gaza?

1:14:21.2 DS: Well, I'll take issue with the premise of the question. It is not individual bureaus or offices of the Department of State who make that determination. It's a determination for the Secretary of State to make. The determination was based upon the best information available to the secretary provided by the field, provided by those actually engaged on the ground on this issue. It was a decision based upon two factors. First, that a determination could not be made that as a deliberate act of state policy, assistance was being denied. Although the report, the letter in May highlighted the many areas where Israeli conduct, where Israeli policies were frustrating delivery of assistance, it was not viewed as an issue of state policy.

1:15:12.1 DS: The second question though, or the second part of the question, does correctly refer to the extraordinarily deteriorated state of assistance that I noted since May. It's disastrous, and I would draw your attention to the letter I revealed in the press, sent by Secretaries Austin and Blinken in the last Sunday, Sunday, a week ago, enumerating, because of the profound nature of this disaster, the steps that now need to be taken and taken within a 30 day period, because we're gonna have to make another report on this issue. And that report is going to have to speak not to an improving curve as the May letter came against, but not just a deteriorating curve, but a drop off the cliff.

1:16:02.0 Amina: Thank you, Ambassador. Another question. I'm sorry. Can you speak to Israeli political feeling? Does Netanyahu represent the Israeli population's view of the war? And is there any question of new elections taking place in the future?

1:16:20.5 RN: Well, we've got two experts on that, and I don't know if either one of them wants to talk.

1:16:26.1 JW: I'll start out...

1:16:26.2 RN: Yeah, go ahead.

1:16:26.9 JW: And I'll pass the baton over. Israeli politics are very complicated. The governmental system is based on coalition governments. Right now, the coalition government in Israel is a very hard-line, essentially pro-war government that wants to continue to eliminate Hamas, eliminate Hezbollah. Frankly, the polls in Israel suggest that that government has gotten stronger rather than weaker over the past year, and Netanyahu's position has gotten stronger rather than weaker. As long as he maintains the coalition that he has through these hard-line approaches to the situation in Gaza, and Lebanon, and Iran, he can stay in power until the next election, which is scheduled for over a year now?

1:17:13.8 DS: Over a year.

1:17:13.9 JW: Over a year. So I guess the short answer is, things are looking... If people are looking for a change in government in Israel, it's not going to happen anytime soon.

1:17:25.8 DS: Not at least over the issue of Gaza.

1:17:29.4 JW: Right. It could happen over religious issues.

1:17:31.1 DS: Over draft. Over the Haredi draft.

1:17:32.9 JW: That's a good point.

1:17:34.0 NA: Great. Thank you. We have a lot of questions which are submitted here, some from the audience right there. So I just wanna ask if you would like to ask the question yourself, and I can bring the mic over. Anyone?

1:17:48.7 RN: There's one over here in the corner. I don't know how... We are running out of time, unfortunately.

1:17:55.3 S1: Can we go five times?

1:18:00.8 RN: Fine by me.

1:18:02.4 Speaker 8: Thank you so much for your comments. Something that I've also noticed that's been difficult to discuss is, prior to October 7th, there's been knowledge of the hostilities of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians both within the West Bank, within Gaza, and then within the state of Israel. And per a lot of the discussions on this topic, a lot of people are attributing that the hostilities that have led to the October 7th attacks have been due to a failure of Israel not being cognizant of the extent of their discrimination, for example, with the settlements, discriminating against the Palestinians within the territories of Israel and the West Bank. But from my perspective, also wondering to what extent do you think this is a failure of US diplomacy of not putting more pressure on Israel to tame this before it led to the extreme hostilities that we have seen now since October 7th and henceforth?

1:18:56.7 RN: I tell you what, I'm gonna give a short answer to this, because I haven't been involved in it at all. So I'm free of responsibility. There is a cycle in US policymaking. Dealing with the Middle East is incredibly hard. It has virtually no political benefit for any administration. And the natural tendency of presidents over and over has been to avoid the subject. When you avoid the subject of Palestinian-Israeli peace, you eventually have a catastrophe. This has never persuaded any administration not to avoid the subject, again, because there's no prospect of short-term gain or even gain often within the time frame of an administration. So could the US do more? Theoretically, yes. Would it have the political support in the United States, in the Congress, and in the people to sustain the kind of pressures which would be required on either Palestinians or Israelis in order to really get someplace in the absence of a crisis? You can argue, but my answer would be no. That you could be...

1:20:16.5 RN: One of the hardest things to convince presidents to do is to launch a process which you cannot have the political support to sustain. That's a really hard case to make to a president. Mr. President, I want you to go take a really hard policy, and I want you to sustain it for years. And it may cost you the next election, but it's the right thing to do. So really, not necessarily wrong, but it's a really hard case to make to a president. And so yes, you have a certain responsibility. But yes, you have to understand the political context within which it takes place. And to go back to the point that Ambassador Satterfield made, at the end of the day, you can't do this without the parties. And the parties, especially in the last several years, there has been no constituency to make this peace happen. My colleagues could all take another five minutes easily on this, 'cause they even know more about it than I do. But I'm going to let it rest there. We can do what, one more, two more?

1:21:14.0 S1: I think we could do one more. Let's do two more.

1:21:22.9 Speaker 9: Thank you very much for your talks. My question is, how strong do you think that internal politics of Iran is? And how do you think internally the government is in power? And what happens if there is a change in the government?

1:22:00.2 SZ: I don't know if I'm most qualified to deal with that. But I can tell you from what I have studied and read and talking to scholars on this issue, we in the US have a tendency to look at things in black and white. Oh, the sanctions are taking hold. Oh, the economy is on the ground. Oh, the army cannot perform, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think it's that. Is it a strong economy at this point? No, the sanctions are biting. I mean, it was very clear that at the UN recently when the president of Iran came with his foreign minister and deputy foreign ministers, all who were previous negotiators on the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the nuclear deal, the P5+1, that there was at least initially some thought of is there an opening? Is there something we can talk about on this issue? Because sanctions are biting.

1:23:13.9 SZ: But it's not a failed state. It's not an economy that's on the ground like in Lebanon or even Egypt for that matter. It is a large country. They do have a lot of natural resources. They have a resourceful population. They don't have an air force to speak of, but their army actually is quite well trained. So they do have, and they have a strong national identity. I think in part, it kind of depends also where you look. In the urban areas, especially among a certain educated elite, I think you get one response, which is more, shall we say, much more critical of the religious constrictions, of the economic bonds that are kind of tying people in a way that their hands are tied and they don't think they can work. But I talk to people who tell me in the countryside, there's a lot more support for this government, which actually surprised me.

1:24:16.2 SZ: But because they have more support for the religious pronouncements of the government and a stronger sense of, yes, we want things to improve, but they are not as impacted in the same way as people in the urban areas. So you find different responses to this. I think it is a country like other countries that go through revolutions. You go through the first generation and the second generation who will come after Khomeini. I'm sure there will be somebody teed up, if it's his son Mojtaba or if it's anybody else. I think you have to look at the third generation before you start to see how much of the patina of the revolution is gone and, are the underpinnings still there or will there be a change. And I just don't think it's happening anytime soon.

1:25:10.2 S1: Okay. Maybe last question.

1:25:11.1 RN: Got a last one in here or we can take the next.

1:25:13.8 S1: We certainly have more here.

1:25:15.0 Amina: We have a lot more there.

1:25:16.3 SZ: Oh my God.

1:25:18.0 S1: Okay. Let's ask one more from...

1:25:18.1 SZ: One more from the...

1:25:26.6 Amina: Another question about the ProPublica report that USAID found last spring that Israel is using US weaponry in Gaza in ways inconsistent with international humanitarian law. Do you think current US posture for Netanyahu undermines the edifice of international humanitarian law established after World War II?

1:25:49.0 DS: That's an editorial judgment by a private publication. It was not the net assessment we made. I mean, the comment I can make on that is we have deep concern over how US weaponry has been used. But when we assembled the pieces...

1:26:03.6 RN: We, the US government.

1:26:05.3 DS: We, the US government.

1:26:07.2 RN: For which we do not speak.

1:26:09.6 SZ: Yeah, for which we do.

1:26:09.6 DS: They don't. The US government has those concerns and enumerated them in the May report. But the judgment, the net judgment, was one that did not find a deliberate overall state policy of denying assistance.

1:26:27.5 S1: Maybe we could get some other comments from those who don't speak for the government.

1:26:33.0 RN: Well, look, the government made it... There is always a struggle in the United States to impose by legal fiat law over policy and law over politics. And it is always a difficult, it doesn't always fail, but it is always a difficult struggle. And this judgment was one where people differed within the bureaucracy. They weren't all on one side, from what we know from the outside. I'm only speaking from the outside. There were differences. The president, secretary, made a decision, in the end, which they are entitled to do. They found a grounds, a legal grounds, on which to make it. That was not illegitimate. Somebody else might decide differently. But now you're in a question, the kind of question you put to a jury in a trial. Do you believe something, or do you not believe it and make a finding? That's not a question of utter, clear-cut law. It's a mixture of fact and judgment, and one can certainly argue with the judgment they made.

1:27:52.8 RN: The question is not gonna be over. As Ambassador Satterfield said, it's about to reemerge. So it keeps coming back. And as does the goal to impose law on a chaotic world that has no law outside of nations. That's something we're gonna continue to live with. We're going to continue, I'm sure, to try and continue to find situations that don't fit very well. This desire to have law and make it clear, and then you've got a friend that does something, or for instance, you could have imposed, you could have decided that the military overthrow in Egypt was a coup. Then you could have had basically totally ruined your relations with Egypt, which, by the way, has the Suez Canal, which is half of the guarantor of the peace with Israel.

1:28:45.6 DS: That was in fact, the policy of the Obama administration and Susan Rice to destroy the relationship.

1:28:52.4 RN: Yeah, and then you pay enormous consequences. What can I tell you? In foreign policy, there's no free lunch. And when...

1:29:02.2 DS: Unsquared circles.

1:29:04.3 RN: Yeah. And most of the most interesting questions are not, and certainly the questions that go to the President and the secretary of state, are not questions with easy answers. If they had easy answers, they'd get solved.

1:29:16.3 DS: Ron, if I could add.

1:29:16.4 SZ: Yeah, please.

1:29:17.1 DS: This problem from hell, it's bigger than Gaza. And Ron touched on it in his remarks. International humanitarian law, law of armed conflict, those were written for state-on-state conflicts in a different world, partially, 'cause we still have them, but a different world that didn't envision the emergence of powerful, highly-structured, non-state entities like Hamas, like Hezbollah, who deliberately embed their military forces in, under, around humanitarian infrastructure, civilian buildings, and then proceed to attack from there. What is the response of the state party that's been attacked to that? Now, Hamas's calculation was clear. Either Israel wouldn't strike at them because it would inflict civilian casualties, that'd be unacceptable, or they would strike and over time would attrit international support. This is a true problem, and it is way bigger than Gaza. What does a state do under these circumstances? Wring their hands and give up? Strike and produce horrible levels of civilian casualties? What do you do? I don't have an answer for this, but it is a problem that is not a black and white one, it is not a shades of gray either. It's a new world, and it needs very hard decisions taken. Do I think they will be? No, I don't.

1:30:49.4 RN: And now that we've clarified all those things, and left a few questions on the internet, I think we've actually run out of time. Thank you all for a great set of questions and being great audience.

1:31:00.6 S1: Thank you everyone.

[applause]