Ibish and Miller: Perspectives on the Middle East crisis

0:00:01.1 Celeste Watkins-Hayes: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our community audience here and to the many that I know are watching online. I am Celeste Watkins-Hayes, the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. As we know, it's been a difficult year since last October 7. Members of our community have experienced pain, anger, hope, and also a sense of isolation. Many are anguished about the suffering and loss of life and for some, that anguish is deeply personal.

0:00:34.6 CW: We've seen month by month how violence in the region has been expanding and seen that every day brings new harrowing images and realities, new hope for ceasefires, and new international developments that affect the prospects for peace. Our Ford School commitment has been first to care for members of our community. We've also worked to fulfill our mission to teach, offering opportunities to learn about the complexities of the conflicts in the Middle East and to explore how each of us, despite our differences, can continue to communicate in ways that live up to our ideals and our values.

0:01:14.6 CW: Those teaching goals are where these two highly regarded scholars come in. They visited the Ford School in April for what was a terrific conversation and we're so pleased to welcome them back to give us fresh perspective on the current state of affairs and the range of possible outcomes of the crisis. Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

0:01:39.9 CW: He's a weekly columnist for the national newspaper in the United Arab Emirates and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Daily Beast, and many other US and Middle Eastern publications. Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, focusing on US foreign policy. His most important credential is that he received his PhD in Middle East and US diplomatic history from the University of Michigan in 1977.

0:02:12.6 CW: We are so sorry that he can't be here with us in person, but we're so grateful that he can be with us virtually. Between 1978 and 2003, Miller served at the State Department as a historian, negotiator, and advisor to Republican and Democratic secretaries of state, where he helped to formulate US policy in the Middle East and the Arab-Israel peace process. So we welcome you both.

0:02:39.8 CW: A note just about the structure of the discussion. Each of our guests is going to give some opening remarks and then the Ford School's director of the Weiser Diplomacy Center, Ambassador Susan Page, will lead a conversation. We will then take questions from the audience. Senior Public Affairs Manager, Daniel Rifkin, will be working with two of our MPP students, who we are so happy to have here with us today. Abdulla Tarabishi and Shania Baweja, I hope I'm pronouncing the name properly and please forgive me if I said it incorrectly. For those of you in the auditorium, you can ask further questions using the QR code on cards around the room.

0:03:22.4 CW: If you are watching online, the question link can be accessed on the event page or in the event description on YouTube, LinkedIn, or Facebook. So welcome to both of you and now we will turn it over to Ambassador Page.

0:03:37.7 Susan Page: Thank you very much, Dean Watkins-Hayes. It's my pleasure to welcome you both. I'm sorry that I was not here for the last event that you did, but I'm excited to hear what you have to say, especially as things have really gone a lot further than I think many people expected in the Middle East with now Lebanon involved and attacks even inside Iran. So I will turn it over to the two of you and we're expecting five to seven minutes of opening remarks. And why don't I start with you since you are right here next to me.

0:04:16.8 Hussein Ibish: Thank you.

0:04:17.7 SP: Thank you.

0:04:18.2 HI: Ambassador, thank you very much, and thank you Mr. Rifkin as well for setting this up. And hi, Aaron, great to see you over there.

0:04:26.5 Aaron David Miller: You too. Nice to meet You.

0:04:27.0 HI: And great to be back here at University of Michigan Ann Arbor. This is wonderful. All right, so what's changed since April? I'm gonna make six points. The first one is that the Israel-Hamas war has morphed completely into a different conflict, right? It began with Israel attacking Gaza from the north and moving steadily through the strip to the south, destroying everything of possible value to Hamas and even to Gaza society and eliminating people and destroying buildings and infrastructure and what have you above ground.

0:05:06.2 HI: Once the Rafah campaign was completed, the Israeli forces had reached the Egyptian border and the last Hamas battalions, organized battalions were smashed. At that point, you started to notice that Hamas began popping up all of a sudden in places that had been declared pacified. They started attacking the Israelis in Gaza City, in Jabalia, making attacks across the Kerem Shalom crossing point, attacking soldiers all over the place. And these are not organized Hamas battalions. These are little mobile groups of small units that are operating in a very simple way. So what's happened is that the war has shifted from a semi-conventional war into an insurgency versus counter-insurgency.

0:06:02.2 HI: And I think what also has happened is that the war has shifted from Israel's war, which was the first part, into Hamas's war, which is what we have now. I wrote an article for the Atlantic on October 12th of 2003, five days after the October 7th attack, called Israel is walking into a trap. And the trap I described was an indefinite insurgency in which Hamas would inflict on Israel a death of 1,000 cuts, nothing dramatic, but just wear them down in a war of attrition, a kind of guerrilla war, what Mao would have called a people's war, even though I don't think Hamas represents the people of Gaza, but that sort of conflict, a guerrilla insurgency against an occupying force.

0:06:51.5 HI: And that is what Hamas wanted from the beginning. Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and the other dead Hamas leaders knew they were signing their death warrants when they ordered the October 7th attack. They also knew they were throwing away the infrastructure and institutions that they had built in Gaza since taking over violently from Fatah in 2007. They chose to exchange all of that, their lives and their institutions, and the little statelet that they had built in Gaza in exchange for an open-ended war with Israel. Now they have that, thanks to Netanyahu. He has played his role perfectly. He also wants indefinite war for his own purposes. And that's what we really have now. Israel is stuck in a quagmire. It could have declared victory and left after the Rafah campaign. It could have declared victory and left after killing Yahya Sinwar. But it's going to be hard to find politically viable inflection points in the coming months and years to pull out.

0:07:57.1 HI: A counterinsurgency is very hard to get away from for reasons we could talk about if anybody wants to describe why it's so hard to end a counterinsurgency, I will. But I'm not gonna go through it now. The point is Israel really is stuck in a quagmire and it's going to be very difficult for anyone whether Netanyahu or anybody else to get out of it. They're trapped. And Hamas has got the war that they wanted. What they want to do is wave the bloody shirt every week, every day, over the next 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. They're playing a very long game. And the target is control of the Palestinian National Movement. Israel is not the end here. Israel is the means to the end. The end is control of the Palestinian National Movement. That's what Hamas was set up to take over.

0:08:49.5 HI: And they have not taken it over and this is the path to take it over. In other words, this is the next step in their prime directive to marginalize Fatah, take over control of the movement, and take over control of the PLO. The second thing that's happened is that the war has spread to Lebanon, meaning that Israel has managed to reverse the main regional strategic impact of the post-October 7 environment in the Middle East. In other words, until Israel's attack in Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinians and Hamas had paid the price for the conflict that had largely benefited Iran and its regional network at very low cost, virtually no cost to Iran.

0:09:34.6 HI: Now, Hezbollah is in tatters and disarray. Iran has been hit and the strategic equation is reversed. Now, Israel can claim with credibility that they in fact are the bigger strategic beneficiaries of the post-October 7 environment and this is the point of smashing Hezbollah and taking the war into Lebanon. And Iran's national security strategy based on a forward defense through proxy Arab militia groups led by Hezbollah, which sort of included Hamas but not really, but it's certainly Hezbollah, the Hashd al-Shaabi groups in Iraq, the allied militias in Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, those are much closer to the Iranians to some extent or another.

0:10:28.5 HI: The Houthis are a bit distant, but the rest are vertically integrated into the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force and they're run as adjuncts of Iran's national security infrastructure. So Israel called Hezbollah's bluff. Hezbollah tried to have it both ways, have a confrontation with Israel, but a limited one, a confrontation in order to maintain its credibility as a resistance group, but not an all-out war which had, for which there was no reason. There was nothing in it for Iran or Hezbollah to go to war with Israel over a place, Gaza, that has no strategic or cultural or historic or religious significance to them, and an organization, Hamas, that they consider correctly to be an unreliable ally.

0:11:17.9 HI: Fundamentally, it's in a marriage of convenience. It is a Muslim, Sunni Muslim, Muslim Brotherhood organization that does not fit well into a fundamentally Shiite alliance, and indeed they broke over the Syrian war for most of the decade between 2011 and 2019, 2018. So they're an unreliable ally. So they really didn't wanna go to war with Israel, but they tried to have it both ways. Israel called their bluff, and now it's advantage Israel. However, by going into Lebanon on the ground, Israel is potentially delivering to Hezbollah, again, the same thing they're delivering to Hamas, which is having fought their own, their war, Israel's war, which was the air war, the war of sabotage, the war of, I would call it terrorism, with these thousands of little bombs blowing up wherever it may be, the war of assassinations, the war of airstrikes. That was Israel's war.

0:12:18.7 HI: Now that Israel has gone in on the ground, they may well find themselves fighting, especially over time, Hezbollah's war. Hezbollah could really use a guerrilla campaign in the South to get back to basics and rebuild as a lean, mean fighting machine. When they were tasked to be the ground forces in Syria after the Russian-Iranian Hezbollah-led intervention in Syria in the fall of 2015, they had to expand their ranks very quickly, and they took on all kinds of people they never would have touched before, and they opened themselves up to deep penetration, and you can see the results of that. Israel's thoroughly penetrated Hezbollah. They knew where everybody was. They knew where everything was. They knew who was moving everywhere. That's not signals intel. That's human intel.

0:13:02.8 HI: They've got all kinds of people all over Hezbollah. There's no doubt about it. And it's clearly the Syrian war that made, and I say this as a man who was always being fat and flabby, it made Hezbollah fat and flabby, and they wanna go back to being a lean, mean fighting machine, and the best way to do it would be a guerrilla war in Lebanon for over a decade or two, as between the 18 years between 1982 when they were founded in a very similar limited precise Israeli incursion that turned into an 18-year occupation. If they could get that again, they could rebuild themselves.

0:13:36.8 HI: Four, Iran's situation is particularly tenuous, right? They haven't responded to the latest Israeli attacks because they were very carefully calibrated not to force them to do that, which is a really good idea, but they have to rethink their entire national security strategy, right? Do they double down on the forward defenses and try to rebuild Hezbollah, or do they think past that to something more based on a new understanding with their neighbors and with the United States? They've been making concerted overtures to the US since before the UNGA meeting this fall, and at UNGA in particular, they made it very clear they want new talks.

0:14:18.2 HI: And even Ayatollah Khamenei has made it very clear this last week that he wants new talks with the United States. They need sanctions relief, and they may be looking for a new version of the JCPOA that locks in most of the progress they've made towards weaponization without forcing them to decide whether to turn the screw. I think they still would like to be on a threshold nuclear state. That's been their policy for a long time, and I think that still suits their purpose. If Israel had attacked their nuclear facilities, they surely would have sprinted towards a bomb. That's why the United States pressured Israel and gave the quid pro quo with the THAAD missile defense system.

0:15:05.6 HI: It was not to attack the nuclear facilities, precisely to prevent the Iranians from sprinting towards weaponization. So they're going to have to look very carefully about whether they can get anything out of Trump or Harris, and we can talk about which one might be more open to it in terms of a deal, but there's every indication that they know they've suffered these incredible setbacks, and it's better for them to try to pocket the progress they've made and exchange the future weaponization for now, for sanctions relief and for a little breathing space.

0:15:40.1 HI: A lot of it depends on the outcome of the election. The final question is how Iran will respond to the setbacks, and the question really becomes now, do the Iranians try to accommodate their foes, right? And that would involve Hezbollah taking a deal that's on the table in Lebanon, that's being put before them by the acting Prime Minister Mikati, by the Speaker of the Parliament Berri, by Walid Jumblatt and others, that involves them eventually, you know, sort of becoming part of the Lebanese army and becoming a political party. They could get something in between, but they certainly would have to back off. At the moment, the Israelis are not really willing to pull back on the basis of 1701, the UN Security Council Agreement. They would like Hezbollah to obey it, but they say they should have free reign over Lebanese airspace, and they should have hot pursuit at any time.

0:16:41.8 HI: That's not likely to be acceptable to Hezbollah, but it is still possible that Iran might compel Hezbollah for its own purposes to stand down. It's also possible that Iran might want Hezbollah to raise the stakes with the Israelis. They're still capable of doing it. They retain missile capabilities they have not used to date, and even though Israel's missile defenses have been greatly augmented by the United States now, it's still possible that Hezbollah might be able to overwhelm them by swarming on, say, the Dimona nuclear reactor or Haifa or something like that. So the ball's in Iran's court completely now, and Hezbollah is a tool in their, it's an arrow in their quiver.

0:17:34.7 SP: Thank you very much. Six points that we will continue to discuss once we get to the questions and answers. So I will now turn it over to you, Aaron David Miller, for your comments and opening.

0:17:51.2 AM: Great, thanks, Ambassador Paignton, and Dean Watkins-Hayes, thanks so much, and Daniel Rifkin for hosting this again, and to Hussein, and I always love listening to Hussein. I learn a ton. He's capable of incredibly rare and brilliant insights on some of this stuff. I'm gonna make seven points. I'm gonna do it very quickly because I think the conversation would be better.

0:18:18.5 SP: Okay, I see how this is going.

0:18:20.7 AM: All right, so first of all, can everybody hear me?

0:18:24.5 S?: Yes.

0:18:26.4 AM: Yes, okay.

0:18:27.6 S?: Yeah.

0:18:28.4 AM: All right, great. Number one, the last year has demonstrated with a frightening clarity one elemental fact, which all of us should have recognized from the beginning. And that is when combatants to any conflict, they're engaged in something they perceive to be vital, even existential. The influence of outside parties is highly restricted. And at the top of the list is the United States. We can talk about this later. But the Middle East is literally littered with the remains of great powers who wrongly believe consistently and wrongly believe they can impose their will on small.

0:19:07.8 AM: The locals who live in the neighborhood care more, will do or will risk more than we ever could imagine, maybe wisely, maybe unwisely, to survive, and to maintain their legitimacy and credibility before their constituents. Number two, there's also number two, there's also a severe limitations on the leaders, the four leaders who are responsible and capable of making decisions over the course of the last four years. They would not be my choice to be leaders of vision, to say the least. Yahya Sinwar, who is no longer with us, Hassan Nasrallah, the same, Iran's Ali Khamenei, and the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

0:20:00.4 AM: I would argue to you that these four leaders, particularly Sinwar and Netanyahu, shape the trajectory of this conflict without vision, without much of a sense of urgency of ending the conflict, and constrained by their ideology, their politics, and in the case of the two non-state actors, by the organizational imperative, which is survival.

0:20:27.4 AM: Three, any effort at negotiation, and I'll refer specifically to the Biden administration's efforts to negotiate or broker an agreement between Israel and Hamas, never succeeded. And they didn't succeed because the one missing ingredient that is critically important to all negotiations, particularly on issues that are perceived to be vital by both sides, is the absence of urgency. I worked in and around the Arab-Israeli negotiations for the better part of 30 years, and I can say with some authority, whether you like the outcome or not when there were agreements, it was always because the parties recognized that the incentives of reaching the accord outweighed the disincentives of not. They were in a hurry. Woody Allen famously once said that 80% of life is just showing up. I'd amend that by saying 80% of success in life is showing up at the right time.

0:21:36.3 AM: Number four, the limitations of military power have been in a terrifying way demonstrated over the course of the last year. Israel maintains escalation dominance in each of the three wars. I don't describe them as wars of attrition. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. Israel-Hamas, Israel-Hezbollah, Israel-Iran. Israel maintains escalation dominance, but it does not get clear to me whether or not that power, that formidable military power can be converted into sustainable political arrangements that will guarantee an enduring sense of security and stability.

0:22:21.4 AM: Five, the Israeli-Iranian conflict, the one that carries the greatest implication and consequence for strategic change. I think the Israeli-Iranian rivalry, it's a strategic problem by the way without a solution, has entered a new phase. The fact that both Israel and Iran, I find this incredibly fascinating, could attack one another's territory twice within the last six months without triggering a major escalation and a major war leads me to the conclusion that their risk tolerance has broadened. I'm not suggesting this is the new normal, but I don't think it augurs well for the future.

0:23:14.9 AM: Six, the Palestinian issue has risen to the top of the regional agenda, the top of the international agenda, but tragically and sadly, it has nowhere to go. I would argue that the space it will occupy in the days, months, and years ahead, those of us who are interested in a conflict-ending solution to this problem, I think will be caught between a two-state solution that is still too important to abandon on one hand, but impossible right now to implement on the other. That is the space we will inhabit.

0:23:58.0 AM: Seven, I can only say this, I'm not an Israeli, I'm not a Palestinian, and I'm not Lebanese, I don't play one on television, but I would say to you the humanitarian consequences of this conflict in Gaza and to a lesser extent, but still incredibly fraught in Lebanon are horrific to say the least. The international community, the vaunted international community has once again revealed that it is too divided, it is too self-interested, it is too preoccupied, and it is too feckless to do much about it.

0:24:37.3 AM: As for the combatants themselves, the state of Israel headed by the most extreme right-wing government in Israel's history, and Hamas now, and Hussein I'm sure can enlighten us on potential leadership changes, and Hamas now effectively without a preeminent decision maker, have demonstrated little urgency, no capacity, and unbelievable disregard for human suffering on a scale that Israelis and Palestinians have not witnessed. On the Palestinian side, it goes beyond the Nakba, 15,000 Palestinians dead between 1947 and '49, 750,000 displaced. It goes beyond the Naksa, the setback, the '67 displacement, and for Israelis and for the hostages and their families, the trauma of those initial 24 hours, the raping, the sexual degradation, the mutilation, the killing of innocents. Willful will continue I think to haunt any potential pathway out of this.

0:25:57.8 AM: I will close on a hopeful note, despite the grim nature of my analysis. I occupy a tiny space on this planet for a very short period of time, and because of that, and because of the fact that I can't see what is in front of me, both for good or ill, I would just urge and caution all of you not to say never, not to abandon hopelessness and despair in the face of what we've witnessed, because the truth is you never really know, and the arc of history bends in ways that none of us can fully understand.

0:26:34.2 AM: I would only say to you, and much of my formative education occurred at the University of Michigan, in conversations that sometimes were awkward and unpleasant, but conversations that were conducted in a way of mutual respect and tolerance, you need to engage with those who do not see the world the same way that you do, and instead of trying to figure out your talking points to rebut their arguments in the conversation, just think about whether or not anything that they've actually said could help you build some kind of bridge and knock down the walls that are getting higher and higher on a university campus. My only piece of unsolicited advice to you, but thank you again. I turn it back to Ambassador Page.

0:27:32.0 SP: Thank you very much. It's nice to end on a somewhat hopeful note, but the two of you have a number of points of convergence, but I'm weary about how foreign policy analysts, we often go down the line of analysis of what's wrong, the problems, who is where, but we struggle with, well, what do we do with that? So let me start on the humanitarian side first. I wanna talk about how the humanitarian crisis, I mean, whether or not we start with the destruction just on the ground, under the ground, the buildings, of course, people's lives are upside down. Where no one seems to be talking about is, well, there were two different points. So one, the Israeli Knesset's recent decision to no longer support assistance going through UNRWA. And secondly, the US had built a port, which many people saw as, I'm trying to use the right terms, a PR campaign stunt, but despite it sort of floating away and then being repaired, brought back, they've just sort of quietly disassembled it and moved on. So one is what can be done on the humanitarian side that is obviously beyond a stunt. However, it might have helped to a certain degree, and I mean, I don't think anything is just a stunt, but what can be done? Yes, exactly.

0:29:40.5 HI: It wasn't just a stunt. It wasn't, I would say a noble effort that didn't work. I mean, I think, look, the US has played a Janus-faced role in Gaza over the past year. On the one hand, it's, especially in the first five or six months, protected Israel from international criticism. It supported the war. It provided resupplied munitions. And it played a very negative role from a Palestinian point of view and people are very angry about that. On the other hand, I do think the US has been a crucial part of the sort of constellation of forces that have prevented full-blown mass starvation, full-blown famine, uncontrolled, or epidemics like the polio epidemic that was contained very quickly from taking hold in Gaza.

0:30:34.0 HI: Things would have been a lot worse without four actors that have worked more or less in concert with each other. First of all, the United States, with efforts like the bridge and the airdrops, pressure on Israel to allow aid in and money. The UN, especially UNRWA on the ground. I think Israel's refusal to work with UNRWA is totally unacceptable, and it ought to be communicated by the United States that this will seriously damage bilateral relations between the two countries. UNRWA is the only agency capable of providing aid to the Palestinian people. Israel's had a campaign against UNRWA for decades because UNRWA read as part of its mission to serve Palestinian refugees, registers the refugees, and keeps a record of their existence.

0:31:23.1 HI: And this sticks in the craw of Israelis because it makes it impossible for them to say, because the people displaced physically, personally in '47 and '48, or in '67, are dead or dying, therefore there's no refugee problem. They wanna, they've tried to redefine the refugee problem out of existence. UNRWA prevents that, right, because it keeps a record of who the refugees are and where they are as part of its mandate. And so I think, you know, there's no doubt that Israel is just seeking to crush UNRWA for political purposes, for negotiating purposes, or just to eliminate the question of the refugees altogether. And this is a very sinister motive. And it's also, I think, hard to see it as not part of a campaign of vengeance against the Palestinians of Gaza that Netanyahu expressed on October 7. He promised a mighty vengeance. We have seen a mighty vengeance. And the vengeance has not only taken the form of physical violence but it's also taken the form of the use of starvation and humanitarian aid as a weapon of war.

0:32:34.5 HI: This is what Mr. Khan, the prosecutor at the ICC, wants Netanyahu and Golan indicted for. I think they're absolutely worthy of indictment for that. I think it would be a good thing for the ICC to indict them actually. I see no reason not to indict them. And the United States ought to act, especially if Kamala Harris is elected, it ought to act on what President Biden said in his State of Union address, where he specifically mentioned the use of starvation as a weapon of war. And it was clearly, although slightly elliptically, a warning to Israel.

0:33:11.6 HI: And so I think, first of all, a lot more pressure can be applied by the US, but the US has been crucial. The third factor, along with the US and the UN and agencies like UNRWA and associated NGOs, have been two Gulf countries, the UAE, which has given the most money, and Qatar, which has also given a lot of money. And between the four of these entities, they have managed to keep the ball in the air in Gaza so that you have not had the kind of mass starvation or mass death from communicable diseases that you otherwise probably would have, and that left to their own devices, I think the Israelis would have allowed to happen.

0:33:54.4 HI: So, yeah. So, what more can be done is to empower all of them to really make it, to give the Israelis no option but to increase the amount of aid that is allowed in, or suffer severe consequences to bilateral relations. That is essential, I think. I don't think anything else will work.

0:34:18.9 SP: Well, and the US has not been very good at sticking to any of its commitments in that regard.

0:34:26.5 HI: Correct.

0:34:26.6 SP: But let me turn to Aaron David Miller.

0:34:29.3 AM: No, I'd agree with Hussein on at least one point, and that is there would not be a scintilla of assistance, not that it's anywhere near what it needs to be. I mean, Gaza needed 500 trucks pre-October 7, even with all the constraints that the Egyptians and the Israelis posed about what could go in and what could come out.

0:34:51.9 AM: Right now, after some US pressure, it's backed up, I was briefed on this yesterday, to 250, but it is woefully insignificant given what is necessary. But not a scintilla would be getting in without US pressure, in large part because the Israeli logic was very clear. As long as hostages are being held and abused by Hamas, we are not going to, but we will do the minimum required to facilitate international assistance into Gaza. Hamas also has a role to play in this. And right now, no way to know if this is accurate or not, Hamas is diverting what little aid gets in, jacking up prices, selling it on the exorbitant prices on the black market.

0:35:39.2 AM: I don't see, and in part, the Israeli government has a huge responsibility for not willing to engage seriously in day after planning for what happens in Gaza. And the sad cruel reality is, it's now, it's November 1st on Friday. And the three basic conditions that are necessary to bring any measure of stability to Gaza are nowhere near being met. Number one, Hamas, as Hussein has correctly and rightly pointed out, will morph into an insurgency. It will have a huge influence in what happens in post-conflict Gaza. The Israelis will not stop their military activity nor withdraw until they are adequately assured that there are security structures in place that will prevent Hamas from re-emerging, let alone pulling off another October 7.

0:36:34.4 AM: And finally, is the whole issue of Palestinian governance. Is it Hamas on one hand or Abbas, Mahmoud Abbas on the other? An 89-year-old man who's in the 19th year of a four-year term, corrupt, nepotistic, controls 40% of the West Bank and is undermined every single day by Israeli policies. We just have drained what credibility he once had. So humanitarian assistance and Palestinians, 2.3 million of them, are caught up in this maze with no sense of real urgency by the actors who could in fact alleviate their suffering.

0:37:21.0 SP: Let me continue on the humanitarian side for a moment. The US as several other countries halted their funding of UNRWA after it was discovered that some 11 or 12 or 13 Palestinians allegedly had participated in the October 7th attacks. They were disciplined or they were killed, but they are no longer working for UNRWA. Investigations, I believe are ongoing, but they have found...

0:37:58.8 HI: The Israelis haven't given any evidence to UNRWA and the UN and that's a problem. So it's hard to investigate. I mean, UNRWA is not a government.

0:38:05.1 SP: Right? So. So. But even so, allegations have been out there for years. Some of that is political, some of that is some evidence, but at the same time, UNRWA is one of the few organizations that Palestinians can actually work for. So it doesn't help that that's one of the only lifelines. But the US has not resumed its funding for UNRWA.

0:38:34.8 HI: Right, shameful.

0:38:36.1 SP: And other countries have, not all, but most other countries have.

0:38:40.3 HI: Most have. Most have.

0:38:41.2 SP: And so at the same time that they have now stated publicly that the Knesset's vote is basically prohibiting, it does have a leeway. I think it's three months before that law takes effect.

0:39:00.3 HI: That's correct.

0:39:00.8 SP: Which is also strategic.

0:39:02.7 HI: That's right.

0:39:03.0 SP: We'll know who has won the elections in the United States.

0:39:06.2 HI: And they can gauge the reaction, yes.

0:39:07.8 SP: Exactly. But isn't it a little bit speaking out of both sides of our mouth to say this is disastrous.

0:39:16.1 HI: Yes.

0:39:16.6 SP: On the one hand, and yet we have not ourselves recommitted to funding the only organization with, we all know the UN has tons of flaws, but it is the only organization on the ground that has the mandate or the ability to provide the kind of assistance that's needed.

0:39:36.4 HI: And let's be clear about this.

0:39:37.4 AM: Yeah can I speak...

0:39:38.3 HI: Well hold on.

0:39:40.1 AM: Can I speak to this just for a second? First of all, the we in this case is the reality and the imperfections of life in a democratic poly. Congress, the US Congress, in a bipartisan fashion has restricted US, has literally forbidden US assistance to UNRWA until March of 2025, okay? This is, now, if you wanna test that decision with a US veto, whether or not the administration would have the votes on this one to override it, I highly doubt it. That's point number one. Number two, UNRWA has been low-hanging fruit for the Israelis for decades. It is inevitable in a situation where 13,000 of its employees are Palestinian, no matter how motivated and detached from Hamas they may be since 2007, since Hamas became a member. Now it's, what, 17 years Hamas has ruled Gaza, and since the '80s, it has developed extraordinary roots, economic, social, and it can rule by admiration, by co-optation, and by intimidation. It is almost impossible to imagine how there won't be in the future, assuming Hamas continues to play a role, this connection between Hamas and UNRWA. How can you expect Palestinians who are under this threat to essentially, I mean, the fact that so many seem to have functioned for so long without being politically tainted to me is extraordinary. One last comment on the legislation.

0:41:26.1 AM: The Knesset introduced two bills. One prevents UNRWA to function in any area that is sovereign Israel. Right now, that does not include the West Bank and Gaza, and that's not in the legislation. It is East Jerusalem only, and UNRWA controls, is active in Shu'fat refugee camp with education and some health. The second piece forbids Israeli any contact with UNRWA. That, to me, is the death knell, and it's 90 days, three months before any of this is going to take effect. I don't know where we're gonna be in 90 days, and I agree with Hussein, this is clearly a political act, but the problem of how to deliver assistance on a regular, predictable basis into Gaza is a problem we have not solved. One last point on pressure. We can talk all day long about why the Biden administration in a year has been reluctant to impose a single cost or consequence on policies of the Netanyahu government that it did not like, that normal humans like the three of us and those in the audience would regard as sustained and serious pressure. We can have a conversation about why the Biden administration, but those reasons still persist. Five days from one of the most consequential elections in modern American history, there's not gonna be any pressure on Israel.

0:43:01.1 SP: And they sent a letter, remember that they have given them a month.

0:43:07.6 HI: A strongly worded letter.

0:43:10.3 AM: There is a letter. There is a letter sent from the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, not by the President or the Vice President, I might add, to the Israeli Minister of Defense and the Minister of Strategic Affairs, Ron Dermer, and it says, it lists a whole bunch of things, metrics the Israelis need to do, and it says, failure to do these things, I think the phrasing is might implicate the delivery or US military assistance. Right now, that is not going to happen. And depending on who wins...

0:43:44.7 SP: Doesn't take effect for a month after it was dated, which again is...

0:43:48.4 AM: Well, it's 30 days, it takes effect on November 13th.

0:43:52.0 SP: Right, so again, after the elections.

0:43:54.8 AM: Let's hope, Ambassador Page, that we know the outcome of the election by November 13th.

0:44:00.6 HI: Correct.

0:44:00.7 S?: True.

0:44:00.8 S?: If that's true.

0:44:02.4 HI: Let me just amplify something that Aaron was saying about UNRWA. Not only is it unimaginable that if there are so many thousands of Palestinians, I mean, that seems more than Aaron said, actually more than 13,000, but in Gaza working for UNRWA, it's not only inevitable that, there will be some people connected to Hamas working for them. As a matter of fact, if there were only 13 Hamas members out of that group, that's an excellent record. If you were to judge it by, let's say the record of the agencies the US worked with in Iraq, right. And their connection to groups like Daesh to the bad Hash'd al-Shaabi groups, the bad popular mobilization groups, and others who attack us, they were much more penetrated if we're to judge by this number. Now let's just...

0:45:00.5 SP: You could even say to our own military that has been involved in...

0:45:04.7 HI: You could say that.

0:45:06.0 SP: Bad behavior and...

0:45:07.6 HI: Sure.

0:45:08.3 SP: That's domestic, even if we are operating overseas Senator.

0:45:11.4 HI: But I wanna describe... Okay. But, but I just wanna say one other thing about UNRWA. UNRWA is not a state. UNRWA does not have an intelligence service or an investigative body in it, UNRWA is a UN humanitarian agency. So what UNRWA does, is it, I believe bi-annually or quad-annually delivers lists of current and new employees to the state of Israel for their review. And it is the state of Israel that does the vetting. Not UNRWA... UNRWA cannot vet. UNRWA does not... Is not set up to vet people. Vetting can be done by state or by police force, or you have to have some kind of investigative infrastructure to vet people.

0:45:56.5 SP: So how come that is not made public?

0:45:58.5 HI: How is an UNRWA administrator gonna do it?

0:46:01.3 SP: Why atleast in terms of when Israel does go after UNRWA.

0:46:07.1 HI: Yeah.

0:46:07.7 SP: For these and other reasons. Some of which...

0:46:09.1 AM: Why people defend it more?

0:46:10.8 HI: Correct. Well, I mean, I think it's hard to defend UNRWA when the charge is made that it's infiltrated by terrorists. And I just... I mean, I think people like I do do that, but a lot of people prefer to turn the other way, not to stick their necks out for UNRWA. UNRWA has had, the Israelis have been turning the screws on UNRWA for every bit, a little bit every year for decades. And UNRWA now has a really bad reputation in the United States, which it thoroughly does not deserve because of this drumbeat of pressure from the Israelis saying that it is responsible for the refugee crisis itself. I mean, not that they're saving the refugees, but they are the main ones perpetuating the refugee crisis. That it's a hot bed of terrorism, that it's a hot bed of antisemitism, that it's, you know, all this stuff has beaten people down in Washington. They don't know what UNRWA is. And when people say, why hasn't UNRWA vetted? You know, it sounds good, unless you know what UNRWA is, and you realize that's a non-sequitur that's asking why the elephant didn't build a house. The elephant can't build a house.

0:47:21.8 SP: Okay, so let me continue for just one minute on, the humanitarian angle.

0:47:28.4 HI: Yeah.

0:47:29.3 SP: So in Israel, it is widely known that both Israel and Egypt to a lesser extent, but both and for different reasons.

0:47:38.6 HI: Yeah.

0:47:40.4 SP: Have supplied Hamas with finances for years.

0:47:44.9 HI: Facilitated. Yeah. I would say.

0:47:47.2 SP: Okay.

0:47:47.6 HI: Yeah.

0:47:48.5 SP: Maybe facilitated is the better word.

0:47:49.8 HI: I mean, I don't think it's been Egyptian money and Israeli money. I think it's been Qatari money, Turkish money, Iranian money, and private money that Egypt and above... Especially Israel, have allowed in for decades.

0:48:02.7 SP: Correct. And it's at least, it's widely known within Israel, but very less widely known I think in the United States and maybe elsewhere as well.

0:48:13.2 HI: Yeah that's right.

0:48:13.3 SP: But whether it's whoever's money it is, it has been going to Hamas.

0:48:19.5 HI: Yep.

0:48:19.7 SP: In order to keep Fatah at bay.

0:48:21.6 HI: Yes.

0:48:22.1 SP: And the PLO from regaining legitimacy or a rise in power.

0:48:27.8 HI: Yes.

0:48:27.9 SP: So what do we do about that? Because...

0:48:32.3 HI: I mean...

0:48:33.1 SP: You know, that has facilitated also to a certain extent where they are.

0:48:38.9 HI: It create... Look, Netanyahu in particular was a... An architect and a champion of a divide-and-rule strategy to keep Hamas in power in Gaza, but surrounded and contained physically by Israel continuing to control the coastline, the airspace, the electromagnetic spectrum, and all sources of ingress and egress, except for the little one controlled by Egypt, which was cooperative with Israel. So that Gaza was kind of entirely surrounded and contained. And then to keep Fatah in power in the West Bank in the little area, a cantons, but humiliated and with no success in negotiations and looking ridiculous and looking like quiz links. And in that way quash the potential for Palestinian statehood.

0:49:29.5 HI: And Netanyahu helped to explain this to thickheaded Israeli Knesset members who might not have gotten it at a meeting in 2019 of Likud Knesset members. He said those of us who don't want a Palestinian state need to support the facilitation of money into Gaza. He didn't mean Israeli tax shekels, he meant Qatari money and Turkish Iranian money, etcetera, in order to divide the Palestinians to keep them from getting a state. And more than that, even more explicit. But the logic taken to its next conclusion, which I think does reflect Netanyahu's thinking, but it's, this is the quiet part. Smotrich, the finance minister said the quiet part out loud. He said, Hamas is an asset for Israel, and the PLO is the enemy of Israel. And he means that Hamas because of its policies and its conduct and its ideology does help thwart Palestinian ambitions for independence.

0:50:27.3 HI: It makes enough Palestinians radioactive and it divides the movement and it just screws everything up, whereas the PLO and the Fatah-led groups might actually one day create a Palestinian state, or at least on their own, given their policies of having recognized Israel since 1993, of seeking to negotiate a two-state solution with Israel. This is very threatening to the agenda of a greater Israel. And the one point I disagreed with Aaron on about a two-state solution is it's not just that we are kind of waiting for the conditions for a two-state solution to come about.

0:51:07.4 HI: I think we're on a fast train and headed for a station called annexation/expulsion in the West Bank. I think Israelis have moved so far towards the annexationist agenda that it will only require an explosion of massive violence in the West Bank, which is a matter of time. It's not an if, it's a when. Unless there's a horizon for freedom through some other means, there will be an explosion of violence in the West Bank. And Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, the sort of the governors of the West Bank, have been doing their best to create one by picking fights through the settlers and through the IDF with these armed youth groups in Jabalia sorry in Jenin and Tulkarm and these other places. And I think the idea is that when the West Bank erupts in violence, Israel can move and say, right, obviously we cannot live together. This is intolerable. We need to separate. We are the adults. We will bite the bullet. We will draw the line. And here's a new line, new border.

0:52:14.8 HI: Us over here, you over there. Oops, a lot of you ended up on the other side. Well, that's terrible. And what a pity. We would never have wanted to do this, but it's absolutely necessary. They forced us, and we cried, and we went to therapy. But that's the way it's going to be. And it's in everyone's interest. We did it for them. We're killing the Palestinian cause and expelling and taking their land. That's in their interest as well so that we can live peacefully, they there and we here. I see it coming.

0:52:46.3 HI: I can do the script. You can put me in Israeli military uniform, and I can make the speech today that I will hear sometime in the foreseeable future. I think this is not inevitable, but everything is in place to get us there, and very little is in place to stop it. And that's very much where we're headed in my view.

0:53:05.9 SP: And what do you say to that? Do we have a rebuttal? Aaron?

0:53:13.0 AM: I mean, look, none of us can see the future, not even Pythia, the famed oracle of Delphi, can play the role that Hussein is playing by predicting this. I mean, he's right about one...

0:53:23.5 HI: Hold on, Aaron. Wait, wait, hold on. I didn't say it's going to happen. I say everything is in place to make it happen. That's different.

0:53:31.6 AM: You used a double negative, Hussein. I listen very carefully to everything that you say. You said it was not inevitable. So here's the thing. I mean, Hussein may be right. I mean, who could deny? But then on the other hand, Hussein could be wrong. And I just look at the last year. No one that I know, including Hussein, would have predicted the explosion would occur in Gaza from Hamas.

0:54:00.0 HI: No, you're right. Yeah.

0:54:00.6 AM: And he may be right. I mean, the other reality is that even though the Israeli government could easily go to term in 2026, I mean, I would go out on a limb here. And I would say there will be a leadership change in Israel. Now, it'll be a leadership change, I would argue, to a center-right government without two homophobic white Israeli supremacists, racist ministers in the coalition. It will be a government that will be high on civil discourse, high on the independence of an Israeli Supreme Court, high on cooperation with the United States, maybe even high on addressing the inequities that exist and the asymmetries between the 7 plus million Israeli Jews citizens and the 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel who suffer systemic economic and systemic... Discrimination. But it will be very withholding when it comes to bold and dramatic and positive policies with respect to it.

0:55:22.0 HI: It sounded like a prediction, I figure.

0:55:23.2 SP: How does a new administration come into... Come into being when the population who really want their hostages returned but for whom the current government is not necessarily listening, but also the war is expanding with seemingly a majority of the population being okay with that?

0:55:49.6 AM: Well, okay with it. I mean, Israel, like our political system, unlike it in many ways, has a government, and the government rules, governs by getting 60 plus one in a 120-seat Knesset. I mean I railed at the University of Michigan against the policies of the US government during the Vietnam War, and ultimately they were changed. And I will say this about the Israelis. There is no way in this country that we could put a half a million people into the streets 42 weeks in a row, most of whom were campaigning for a vision of their country that was enlightened, rational, non-annexationist, I dare say it, a liberal democracy. We could not do that here. And frankly, that gives me a measure of hope in the dynamics of the Israeli political system. I can't make any, I won't make any predictions, but change, but there will be change, even with the prime minister who has nine lives, maybe more.

0:57:10.4 HI: Two quick points about change, if I might. One is, I really agree with point seven that you made, the radical contingency of history. We don't know, right? You don't know if there'll be another Israeli government or Netanyahu carries on for four more years. I don't know if there's going to be a mass annexation and whether or not that'll be accompanied by expulsions or not. I don't know any of that. These are where you think Israeli policy seems to be going, it's where I think the conflict seems to be going. But we don't know. And there is this radical contingency of history and we should not forget it. The second thing is that I was very impressed, I think the whole world was very impressed with the mass Israeli protests in favor of a liberal democracy and democratia, democratia. That was very impressive.

0:57:58.9 HI: However, it wasn't lost on us that the organizers specifically excluded anything to do with the occupation from those rallies, rationally, in order to maximize the size of the coalition in favor of that. So there is a real question mark about how far Israel's liberal democracy applies to the question of ruling over the Palestinians outside the borders of Israel, right, in East Jerusalem and especially in the West Bank and in Gaza, who've been part of the greater Israeli state for most of the history of the country since 1967. That's only 19 years without those territories and the whole rest of the country's history has been a greater Israel, divided in this way with people pretending that it's not part of Israel, but the Israeli government generally behaving when it wants to, as if it were.

0:59:00.4 HI: And with the military saying, oh no, this is an occupied area, whenever it comes up in court, because then they have the authority to do all the things they do, like checkpoints and roadblocks and firing zones and military bases, and that's all okay, according to international law, if it's an occupation, but then whenever the question of the settlements comes up, oh no, it's not occupied at all, because if it were, Article 49, Paragraph 6 of the Geneva Convention might actually, does in fact, strictly prohibit it. So I'm just not clear that it's, in other words, here's what I'm getting at. It could be that Netanyahu's judicial overhaul is, in part, the occupation ethos coming home. In other words, that it wasn't actually possible for liberal Israeli democracy to conduct one of the probably the single most repressive regime in a very repressive region in the occupied territories, right, and at the same time remain untainted at home.

1:00:05.7 HI: And I'm not clear that Jewish Israelis won't be capable of maintaining a liberal democracy for themselves and a manageable minority of 20 percent of Arabs who are kind of included, and still maintain a kind of apartheid-style rule over disenfranchised another, five, six million of Palestinians who are inside and yet outside the greater Israeli state. I don't see why that shouldn't be a plausible scenario for a while, and if Israelis are looking for a solution, I fear the solution may well be the one I laid out.

1:00:47.7 SP: Okay, so we are now going to turn to the audience and the questions that have been submitted in advance, but I think, as Daniel mentioned, there are the QR codes or something, right? Okay, so I will turn first to you.

1:01:05.1 Shania Baweja: First of all, I wanna thank you so much, both of you, for your insight. My name is Shania. I'm a BA student here. Abdullah and I will be asking some questions from the audience. First, just something a bit more general, but also something that might be top of mind for us. Sort of, both of you somewhat addressed this, lack of urgency for Hamas and Israel to come to an agreement, part of it being somewhat implying Biden's failure to bring that to the table. So the question is, what do we have in our toolkit as the United States to create urgency for both Hamas and Israel, and would the election substantially alter this toolkit?

1:01:41.0 HI: Great question.

1:01:42.3 AM: I'm gonna try to, I'm gonna make my answers very short. 'Cause we have a tendency, both of us, to go on far too long. In my judgment, between now and next Tuesday, there's zero chance that this administration, the Biden administration, would apply any significant pressure. If Kamala Harris wins, and I hope she does, I think it is reasonable to expect that the transition before she actually assumes office. I've been through Republican to Republican transitions, Democrat to Republican, Democrat to Democrat, and Republican to Democrat. A Democrat to a Democratic transition holds out the real possibility of doing serious work on discrete issues during the lame duck period. Whether or not a Harris administration is willing or ready to engage and to apply significant pressure on Israel and on the Netanyahu government is a matter of speculation. I think not, frankly, given the fact that she is going to inherit.

1:02:47.7 AM: It'll be the first administration of Kamala Harris hopefully with a second, and she will be under some of the same political constraints. If it's Trump, whatever the Biden-Harris administration does in the next three months will be reversed. Mr. Netanyahu will have no incentive whatsoever in making any concessions when he knows that Donald Trump will assume the presidency in January.

1:03:13.6 SP: Do you think that's his calculation right now, even expanding into Iran?

1:03:19.6 AM: If Benjamin Netanyahu could vote in this republic, I think it's clear who he'd be voting for.

1:03:25.0 HI: Sure.

1:03:26.2 AM: And yes, it's very much his calculation.

1:03:28.6 SP: Great.

1:03:29.3 HI: I have nothing to add. I think that was perfect.

1:03:31.8 SP: Excellent. Abdulla.

1:03:35.3 Abdulla Tarabishi: Thank you again for coming.

1:03:36.3 HI: A little louder.

1:03:37.4 AT: Thank you again for coming. So you spoke a lot about leadership on both sides, or on all the sides, I guess. We know that leadership is often driven by internal factors and ultimately public opinion, whether in the Arab world, Israel, amongst Palestinians. And so how do you think that public opinion has really shifted in the last year? And how do you think that we can get public opinion.

1:04:01.4 SP: American public opinion?

1:04:02.6 AT: Across the region, in Israel, amongst Palestinians? How do you think we can get that public opinion to a point where peace or some type of agreement is possible?

1:04:14.5 HI: Okay. I'll do the Arab bit, and then maybe Aaron can do the Israelis, or he can talk about anything he wants. I'll just say, among Palestinians, I think the emotions and opinions that follow emotions have shifted pretty dramatically over time. But broadly speaking, I think there is a real constituency against Hamas has developed in Gaza. There's anger, and it's bubbling under the surface. Now, as long as Israel is there, continuing to bomb people every day. We had another atrocious massacre, and I'll use that word. I won't use other charged words, but I'll use that word for this killing of a major number of people. We don't know how many were killed because there are all these cries from under the rubble. There are lots of Palestinians in Gaza who've had time to reflect on Hamas leadership decision to sign 2.2 million people up for martyrdom without any consultation. And Fatah's criticism along those lines has actually registered in Gaza to a lot of people. Now, they still have their core constituency of maybe 22%, 23% that are fully bought in to the Muslim Brotherhood agenda, who just agree with the religious politics, and that's their constituency, and that's sort of zero.

1:05:46.9 HI: That's base zero. They've often been able to get to 40%, 45%, 48% in Gaza, not in the whole Palestinian territory, but in Gaza by adding on the rhetoric of armed struggle, which kind of animates people at times of crisis and what have you. But I think there's a real desengaño. We don't have a great word in English, but it's a stronger Spanish term for something more than disenchantment with Hamas in Gaza among a lot of people. And I don't think they do very well in an election right now in spite of their base of support. In the West Bank, though, I think there is more of a surge in interest in, if not Hamas, then at least the armed youth groups, like the Lions Brigade and the Janine Brigade, who were taking the conflict to these areas and are now the targets of the settlers and the IDF, etcetera.

1:06:57.5 HI: In other words, the romance of armed struggle may still have legs in the West Bank because the full consequences haven't been felt that recently. On the other hand, there are still lots of people in the West Bank who remember the Second Intifada, and that's why I think there's been a lot of restraint. I further think that in the West Bank there is an understanding that the Israeli right would love to take advantage of violence to annex and expel, and I think they're loath to give them that excuse. So all of that allows the PA to limp along despite having a lack of credibility. It's still seen as a necessary kind of function. And one other point. I think that it's still true that Palestinians would respond to a genuine two-state peace offer. They need independence. They need this to end. They are exhausted. They are depleted. They are done.

1:08:00.5 HI: They would take anything. I believe they would take anything remotely approaching a reasonable deal at this point.

1:08:06.8 SP: Aaron David Miller, do you wanna add?

1:08:08.1 AM: Yeah, just in one minute. Israel is a right-of-center country. After most military conflicts that had traumatic endings, the governments have moved to the right. 1973, after the October War, it took four years, but Menachem Begin in 1977 demonstrated the beginnings of Likud dominance in Israeli politics. After The Second Intifada, 2001, Ehud Barak suffered the worst defeat of any Israeli prime minister in the country's political history and was succeeded by Ariel Sharon. So in a right-of-center country, in a state of collective PTSD, and if the hostages, roughly 97 who are still alive, excuse me, 97 that the Israelis estimate are held 40-50% are no longer living. If those hostages are killed, and Hamas has already demonstrated its willful intention by executing six, including an American citizen, if those hostages are killed, then I think the drift to the right is even gonna be more severe.

1:09:25.6 HI: Sure.

1:09:26.5 SP: Great. Okay Shania.

1:09:30.8 SB: So I think you briefly mentioned that with Iran and its future actions, specifically with this nuclear power, there is perhaps a new outlook towards a new or an altered JCPOA. So the question that I am asking is, what may this look like? How would it be implemented? Who would implement it? And then second, is there even any chance that a Trump administration would want to do it?

1:09:54.1 HI: Great questions. All right, so I think there is a chance that Trump administration might do it. It's a better chance that a Harris administration would do it because you have people like Phil Gordon and Susan Rice, who may well be involved in Middle East policy in her administration, who carry the legacy of the original JCPOA in their muscle memory, and who know a lot about what it was like and how it was achieved and what have you. So I think it's entirely possible. I think Trump might go for it too, though. If he thinks he can make a deal, he would be I think interested in perhaps saying that this is the deal of the century and it's so much better than any other deal that was ever made and people have never seen such a great deal and many people are saying that it's the greatest deal of all time. So I think it's possible that he might go for it, but it's by no means certain. What would it look like? Well, I think the Iranians would insist on the right to enrichment.

1:10:57.1 HI: That they're not gonna shift on. They might be willing to again put some of their enriched uranium in a kind of an escrow of some kind, but it's hard to imagine that working inside Iran. Now the thing was that during the JCPOA era, you had Russia as a cooperative power that could hold that in, sort of on behalf of both parties. On behalf of, really it was an American-Iranian deal in effect with Russian and Chinese and other buy-in.

1:11:35.2 HI: But I'm not sure that, I very much doubt that Russia would play that role now. So who would play that role is a big question. Could India do it? Could another power do it? I don't know. I think it's hard to imagine, but where there's a will there's a way. And if both countries deemed it necessary could find out a solution for that. I think it would be an agreement that would essentially freeze Iran's progress where it is and maybe roll it back in certain ways in terms of the stockpiles and maybe even some of the centrifuges. But where they have the knowledge, they already have the knowledge and they can reconstitute that quickly. So they might be willing to go for that.

1:12:18.5 HI: They really need an agreement at this point. I think there is an opportunity to make up for the deficiencies of the original JCPOA by putting missiles and the militia groups on the table. Now I think the Iranians will not negotiate over their missiles. Their ability to make solid fuel has just been wrecked by the Israelis, but they can rebuild it over time. And I just don't think they're going to negotiate over their missile stockpiles. But I think you can get them maybe to negotiate over the militia groups because they have failed. They have been tested and they have failed. They do not provide the kind of forward defense that Iran imagined they would. And so negotiating something like the transition of Hezbollah into a more normal political party, the standing down of the Hashd al-Shaabi and their incorporation into the Iraqi army, the removal of the Fath al-Mu'in and other brigades from Syria and back to Afghanistan and Pakistan, all of that, I think, is possible.

1:13:20.5 HI: I think it's in Iran's interest to at least discuss aspects of that. And before, they wouldn't discuss it. And I think now they will. That's what it would look like.

1:13:31.7 SP: Do you wanna add anything, Aaron David Miller?

1:13:33.6 AM: I mean, I'd let Hussein continue to blue sky in this one, but I just would point out one elemental reality. If the Republicans control both the House and Senate, all of these concessions Hussein is talking about is going to have to be compensated by massive sanctions relief on the part of Iran.

1:13:50.4 HI: Sure.

1:13:51.8 AM: I can't envision any set of circumstances with the Iranians supplying drones to Russia, given Iran's repression of its own citizens and its human rights record, that any Congress, Republican or Democrat, is gonna be interested in some grandiose deal to somehow restrain Iran's nuclear weapons program. I think it's highly unlikely, even more unlikely, if Donald Trump becomes president.

1:14:25.8 HI: Yeah. So I think that's right, but the alternative is...

1:14:28.7 AM: Let's go on to the next question.

1:14:29.9 HI: Well, no. Thanks Aaron. But it will, the alternative is a sprint to a bomb.

1:14:35.5 SP: Okay. And on that now we will go to the next question.

1:14:39.4 AT: All right. So you talked a lot about the long term vision of the Israelis or whether they have one. But what is your view of the long term vision of other actors such as the United States or the Arab Gulf States? And so there have been leaks about a possible proposal to have the Gulf States rebuild and govern Gaza. Do you think this is realistic or possible? And is there an appetite from those Gulf states or Israel or the Palestinians for something like that?

1:15:02.8 SP: Let's start with you.

1:15:03.6 HI: Yeah, absolutely.

1:15:04.3 SP: Let's start with Aaron.

1:15:06.4 AM: The price that the Gulf states would demand for either bankrolling the reconstruction of Gaza, which according to the UN will take 80 years, will be very high, one that the current government of Israel will simply not accept. It would be a political horizon involving a commitment to two states, probably time-bound and irreversible steps toward a Palestinian state. It will be some role for the Palestinian Authority, reformed and/or otherwise. And I just don't think that the current government of Israel, which will be around for at least the next year, will want anything to do with that or be willing to pay that price. Now, another Israeli government, perhaps you could be in business and you could end up constructing interesting pathway, including Israeli-Saudi normalization. But without significant steps from the Israelis, which will not be forthcoming, I see little hope there of a comprehensive Gulf commitment, either financial or political, let alone boots on the ground.

1:16:13.4 HI: Move on.

1:16:14.1 SP: Okay.

1:16:16.2 HI: That's as concise as I can be.

1:16:20.2 SB: So one of our students is asking about how we've heard a lot about political groups and leaders acting rationally, particularly with discussions of leaders before Netanyahu and Sinwar acting towards rational incentives, or at least acting more predictably. But what is the role of and risk of irrational action? Is there gonna be some sort of transition between the two, or will it keep like flipping in between? Is there some way we can predict that?

1:16:47.6 HI: I don't see a lot of irrational action here. I see a lot of rationality and a lot of, there's emotion, especially in Israel's response to Hamas's overkill provocation, but that is a predictable and it's a human response. We had the same kind of dynamic after 9/11. And other than that, and the fact that Hamas's brutality is the way that people break out of cages in colonial situations have often behaved. If you look at a century beginning with the Indian uprising in 1857, straight through to the war in Algeria in 1961, which is pretty much the end of the colonial era except for the occupied territories. Well, there's southern Africa, but that also featured similar kinds of breaking out of cages and lashing out. So, I'm just saying, less so. I'm not saying South Africa, but I'm saying.

1:17:50.1 SP: Zambia? Zimbabwe?

1:17:52.2 HI: No, but Angola, I think for sure, yes. It's not the same. I agree. It's not the same, but, and you don't always have it, but you have it frequently in the, in the history of colonized peoples. This breaking out and lashing out. So, those are the two pieces of irrationality I see.

1:18:13.5 HI: But it's politically rational for the Israeli government to act like this. As Netanyahu has told people many times, the people want revenge. He's quoted as saying that on many occasions. And the rest of the actors, it seems to me, are acting rationally given their own framework of reference. And even Hamas and the Israelis are acting rationally in their own framework of reference. And they have a strategy. They think they know what they're doing. I believe they're kidding themselves, but they are not behaving irrationally in my view. What do you think, Aaron?

1:18:49.3 AM: Yeah, it's a big question. I don't, I mean, I think you're right. I think people act according to the organizational imperative, their own political survival. Creating bonds with their constituencies. I mean, it's a lot of... I wouldn't call any of it irrational or mad.

1:19:08.5 HI: Right. I agree with that. Yeah.

1:19:10.8 SP: Okay. Abdulla.

1:19:11.6 AT: So, once again, thank you guys so much for coming. And as a final closing question, what's your advice for engaging in thoughtful discourse, holding space for both perspectives on the conflict, and more generally, what do you see as the pathway forward for us here in America where we've become divided and polarized?

1:19:30.0 HI: I'll leave advice for America to Aaron, who's written a book about America and presidents and all that. I'll tell you what I think the bases of a constructive and respectful discourse on this issue are. Number one, and I think it would be easy enough for universities to hold many forums based on these principles. And there are just three, that's all. One is respect for all human life as equally worthy and equally dignified and equally valuable. Nobody is better than anybody else. No one is worse than anybody else. That's number one. Number two, all people's narratives have validity in their own context. And national projects are valid. It is unacceptable to say to Jewish Israelis, you are not really Jewish Israelis, and/or your national projects and institutions are by definition unacceptable.

1:20:37.4 HI: Or to say to Palestinians, you are somehow usurpers, this is a Jewish land, only Jewish sovereignty between the river and the sea, which is something that's in the Israeli coalition agreement in the current government. All that stuff has to be set aside for a mutual respect for the two national identities and the fight for national self-determination for the two peoples. And the third is the understanding that all, that everyone is entitled to their own narratives, but the facts are the facts. That historical facts are rarely in dispute among honest historians. What's in dispute is not who said what and did what, when, and where. That what's in dispute is why. What did they think they were doing? What were their motivations? That's what's in dispute. And that's what we can debate. But making up alternative facts, just making up nonsense to justify people's actions is not okay. And those, those three principles, right? That you get your own narratives, but not your own facts. That all human life is equally valuable, and that all national projects are to be respected on their own terms. I think you can, once you have people accept those things, you have a very good conversation. No problem.

1:22:01.8 SP: Last word on this one?

1:22:04.1 AM: I'd only add to what Hussein said. I feel very strongly about this. I do not understand, and I pose it as a question. I think I posed the question when Hussein and I were together in April. I do not understand how Arab Americans, Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, thousands of miles away from the center of conflict, cannot hold in their head and in their hearts the narratives, the pain, and the trauma of both Israelis and Palestinians. I do not understand it, and I will not accept it. You are living in a protected environment, by and large. We can talk all day long about Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. By and large Universities should provide a safe environment. That's not the problem. When an Israeli living in Jerusalem says to me, we will never give this city back. It is ours. It is our internal capital. Muslims have Mecca and Medina.

1:23:13.2 HI: Mecca yeah.

1:23:14.5 AM: I cannot accept that, but I find it more legitimate because I know that that Israeli will have to suffer the costs and the consequences of those views. And it's the same when a Palestinian tells me that Jews have no right to the Haram al-Sharif or Har haBayit, that underneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, that reliquary, why the remains of... Arafat said this to us repeatedly in the negotiations, that the Jewish temple was in Samaria, the Northern West Bank. He knew, but even Arafat knew better.

1:23:50.5 HI: Yeah he knew better.

1:23:52.6 AM: Maybe you can explain to me. I ran Seeds of Peace for three years, an organization that brings young Israelis, Palestinians, and Arabs to conflict resolution training, all right? These are 14, 15, 16-year-old kids. They come with unbelievable stereotypes and prejudices. And yet within three weeks of living with one another and dialoguing with one another, they are openly mourning the fact that they're going back from the future, a little bit of the future, three weeks, to the past, where their imams, their rabbis, their preachers, their parents, their grandparents, their politicians will tell them. So if these 14 and 15, 16-year-old Israelis and Palestinians who have suffered actual loss can have this conversation, why am I watching in my alma mater a degree of intolerance and intransigence and discord that goes beyond anything that we've experienced since Vietnam? American kids were protesting because their own lives were on the line, and thousands of Americans were dying. So I don't get it, and I don't have an answer. But I think it's worth thinking about.

1:25:23.5 HI: Amen.

1:25:23.6 SP: I think this is a great way to end because I do think a lot of that is about leadership, and these were really, I think, the way that the questions were designed. What kind of leadership do we want at the local level, our university levels, colleges around the world, etcetera, but also at the national level on the eve of an election? I wanna thank you both, Hussein Ibish and Aaron David Miller, for your conversation. You've given us also a lot to think about and continue the dialogue, which this is also my alma mater, and so it's very important to me as well, and I also am pained at what I am seeing, and so I was honored to be asked to moderate this discussion, and so thank you for allowing me that opportunity and to hear your voices. Thank you both very, very much. Thank you.

[applause]

1:26:26.9 S?: Good job, guys.