Israel – Shereen Shafi

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This is part of a series of posts on my participation in the Ibrahim Leadership and Dialogue Project during June 2012.

Mark’s lecture on the state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Before our departures, the group had lunch at Bistro Français in Georgetown, where Mark delivered a lecture to prepare us intellectually for the trip. Mark’s primary realm of expertise is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so this was the focus of the conversation. He started by talking about the Arab Spring in this context—phenomena that he called the “Israeli summer,” where Israel’s middle class rose against increasing costs and huge inequality, and the “Palestinian fall,” in which Palestinians gave up on negotiations and Abbas took their statehood bid to the UN. Also, Israel has itself moved the focus away from peace with the Palestinians—and instead toward war with Iran. With concerns growing about the Iranian nuclear program, IAEA demands with lack of compliance, and a loss of faith in diplomacy and sanctions, for many people the situation is basically, “either Iran gets the bomb or gets bombed.” This is the foremost foreign-policy concern of Israeli politicians at the moment, so it’s easy to see why there is now such little traction on the Palestinian issue.

Continue reading Ibrahim Project, June 2: Primer on Israel/Palestine before takeoff

This is part of a series of posts on my participation in the Ibrahim Leadership and Dialogue Project during June 2012.

Introduction

On June 1, 2012, five other students and I walked into the Institute of International Education knowing few details about how we would spend our two weeks on another continent. The trip had been in its last stages of planning, partly due to the fact that cultural attitudes about time in that part of the world are not nearly as rigid as in the United States. Only two days earlier did we find out that we would not be able to visit Saudi Arabia and thus were traveling to Oman instead (the program coordinators, due to some unforeseen circumstances, could not get us visas into the Kingdom—last year’s group of students were the first to make that trip, and whatever connections it took to make it happen were less successful this time around). So we arrived at the IIE office, eagerly anticipating the revelation of the final itinerary for our travel between the Sultanate of Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and the State of Israel.