cc  >> Our topic today  is the Dynamics of the  Israeli/Palestinian Conflict.  And our speaker is Nadav Shelef,  who's an assistant professor  in the UW Department of  Political Science.  He is the Harvey Meyerhoff  Assistant Professor of Israeli  Studies, and an assistant  professor in Political Science.  He's working on a book  manuscript explaining how and  why Zionist movements changed  their conception of the land of  Israel, who can be Israeli, and  the appropriate role of Judaism  in the Jewish state.  His work extends beyond Israel,  and his teaching and research  involves the broader Middle  East, nationalism and the  intersection of religion and  politics.  I hope you'll join me in  welcoming the speaker.  I'm sure we'll all learn a lot.  Thank you.  (applause)  >> You should hear what I have  to say before you applaud.  (light laughter)  Can everybody hear me?  Good, all right. 

 So thank you all for coming.  The Israeli/Palestinian  conflict is one of the most  intractable conflicts  that we have around the world.  The interest it generates,  or the enthusiasm--  Well, enthusiasm is the wrong  word.  But the interest it generates is  a testament to how important it  is, right, not just for the  people in Israel and Palestine,  but for the United States,  as well.  A lot of our crucial interests  are currently tied up with  resolving this conflict.  So a lot of people are paying  very close attention to it, to  try to figure out what to do.  At the core, this is a conflict  between two nationalisms.  We have two groups, both  Israelis and Palestinians.  Both conceive of themselves  as a people, as a nation.  And both want control over their  political destiny. 

 This is at heart, what is at  stake here.  Everything else may be  important, but everything else  comes behind these two  principles.  We are a people.  We want nobody else to rule us.  Now, the fact that nationalist  movements very rarely abandon  this claim, right.  Once we decide we are a people,  once we decide that we don't  want to be subjugated to anybody  else's rule, very rarely do  national movements step back and  say, actually, we're okay.  Right?  If somebody else rules us.  It happens occasionally.  But pretty rarely.  What this means, is that the  most likely solution to this  conflict is going to involve  giving both groups most of what  they want, right, in the sense  of giving both groups control  over their political destiny,  but not everywhere they want it. 

 That is, not in the entire  territory that they claim as  their homeland.  This fundamental logic is what's  behind what we call the two  state solution.  The longer version of it is that  two states for two peoples,  which is another dimension that  we'll get to in the  conversation.  But this is sort of the basic  logic.  And there's actually a  widespread consensus that this  is where things are headed.  So the Oslo Accords from the  1990s, that I'll spend a little  more time talking about in a  little bit; President Clinton's  Middle East Peace Initiative;  President Bush's Roadmap to  Peace, and Annapolis Process;  and the Saudi/Jordanian/Arab  League Peace Plan, are all based  on this fundamental realization  that the conflict is about two  nationalist movements, and  something has to be split.  And since control over political  destinies is hard to split,  right, territory, while  difficult, is easier to split.  So each of these plans and  visions, territorial split, the  Palestinians in each of these  plans also give up something,  right, they give up a right of  return to their homes, in  exchange for a right of return  to the newly created Palestinian  state.  The Palestinians get a state,  alongside Israel, for  themselves.  Israel gets to stay a Jewish  state, right, where Jews can  control their own political  destiny. 

 Therefore satisfying everybody's  minimum demands.  Not their maximum demands, but  at least the very minimum  demands.  Indeed, even among Israelis and  Palestinians, public opinion  polls tells us that they get  this.  Significant consistent  majorities among both Israelis  and Palestinians show that  John Q. Public supports the idea  of a two state solution.  So before the latest data we  have, for instance, from the  Palestinians, before the recent  war in the Gaza Strip, suggests  that roughly 60% supported the  peace process with Israel after  everything that has happened.  And on the Israeli side, the  numbers are quite similar.  The idea of a two state solution  is widely held, not just among  scholars and policy makers, but  among the public at the same  time.  Yet, despite all of this  consensus, we're still here.  That is, neither Israelis nor  Palestinians, nor policy makers,  nor scholars have been able to  break through this cycle and  actually move from where we are  now, from the fighting and the  conflict, to the end goal, where  everybody more or less thinks  they know what it's going to  look like.  This is puzzling. 

 I mean, if everybody agreed, why  can we just go get along.  Now this picture is complicated  by a number of--  I'm sorry, I want to move,  but he told me not to.  (laughter)  Forgive me.  This picture is complicated  by a number of other factors.  For all the consensus about what  we think the end is going-- what  the end goal, eventual  accommodation is going to look  like, both Israelis and  Palestinians are actually deeply  pessimistic that it's possible  to get there.  All right, so again, recent  polling suggests that about 56%  of Israelis and up to 70% of  Palestinians think that even  though they support the idea of  a two state solution, that it  will never happen.  So we have this combination of,  we know where things ought to be  heading for solution, and deep,  deep pessimism and skepticism  that it's even ever possible to  reach there.  One indicator of this  skepticism, all right, is the  fact that in both societies, in  recent months, the extremes have  gotten stronger.  That's not just in recent  months, but it's a trend over  time.  That is by extreme, I mean  opponents of the peace process. 

 Extreme is a problematic  designation.  Among the Palestinians, Hamas is  gaining popularity, even after  the devastation from the war in  Gaza.  Maybe because of the devastation  of the war in Gaza.  Among Israelis, while the  overall electoral support of the  Israeli right has actually  remained fairly constant since  the 1980s, the balance of power  within the right has shifted to  people who are more right,  people who are more extreme.  The center right is losing to  the fringes.  What I want to spend a little  bit of time today doing is  unpacking just one of the  dynamics that explains this  picture.  So the title is a little  misleading.  It's not dynamics, it's just  dynamic.  Dynamics takes me 15 weeks.  (laughter)  But you all are welcome  to join me. 

 It involves more reading.  In particular, what I want to  spend our time today talking  about is the interaction between  domestic Israeli politics,  domestic Palestinian politics  and the conflict between the two  societies.  There are lots of other things  going on.  I could talk about international  influences, right.  I could talk about changing  military technologies.  There's all sorts of other  dynamics at play.  If we have time in this  discussion, we can talk about  those as well.  I want to focus just on this  one, narrow question.  The impact of domestic politics  among Palestinians, and of  domestic politics among Israelis  is important, especially because  it's almost always left out of  the analysis.  And indeed, in the very  portrayal for the framing of  this talk, right. 

 This is a talk about  Israeli/Palestinian conflict.  The image that that generates,  right, is sort of two entities,  right, sort of fighting each  other in sort of a B-movie to  the death.  This is a problematic image,  because neither Israeli society  nor a Palestinian society is  monolithic.  They are deeply internally  divided on a whole number of  dimensions, not all of which  have to do with each other.  And these divisions are the  bread and butter of their   politics.  Israel has normal politics.  Palestine has normal politics.  And normal politics influences,  what I'm calling normal  politics, the day to day  struggle by politicians to get  elected, right, gain power, the  things that we see every two  years here, animate politics,  animate political life among the  Palestinians and Israelis, and  influence the conflict.  So what happens in Israeli  politics shapes Palestinian  politics.  And what happens in Palestinian  politics shapes Israeli  politics. 

 And what happens in both  influences the conflict, how  each perceives the other, and  actually what happens on the  ground, independently of this  overall consensus about a two  state solution.  So rather than two parties  fighting it out, a more apt  analogy--  I actually couldn't come up  with a really good one.  But it's something like  a Rubik's cube.  Remember from the 1980s?  There are lots of multiple  different parts, each connected  to each other.  You move one, then others  change.  Sort of lots of interlocking  mechanisms that are important to  tease out.  So how does this work.  How exactly does domestic  politics do what I will argue  today that it does do?  We start from the premise that  one of the important divisions  in Palestinian society and in  Israeli society is between,  called doves, right, people who  say we want the peace treaty  with the other, all right.  Rejectionists, people who say a  peace treaty with the other is  not just impossible, it's bad,  all right, it's evil.  God gave us this land and it is  our land by right, or this is  the national homeland and it is  our right. 

 There is nothing to talk about.  And what's often left out of the  analysis, a much bigger, much  bigger than either of those two  groups, a group in the middle,  who don't particularly like the  other side, but are willing to  reach an accommodation with  them, if it serves their  interests.  They sort of, really just  basically want a normal life.  They want to be able to go to  work, send their kids to school,  come home in the evening, and  not have to deal with this  problem.  It's the existence of this  middle group that helps explain,  this is a big group that is both  yeah, sure, they're willing.  It'd be nice if there was peace.  It would be nice if there was  accommodation.  But it's this group that is so  deeply skeptical.  If you add up the numbers,  that's really where the  difference between the two comes  up.  So this group in the middle,  they accept the premise of two  states. 

 But they say, and the reason  they're skeptical, either that  it's unachievable.  On the Palestinian side, we hear  the claim that Israel does not  want to get out of the  territories anyway.  Because Israel doesn't want to  evacuate the territories,  nothing we Palestinians do can  affect that, therefore there's  no use pursuing a two state  solution.  On the Israeli side, you hear  the claim by this sort of middle  ground, that a two state  solution is unwise.  Even if we could get out of it,  if we did get out of the  territories, all that would  happen would be that these lands  that Israel gets out of would  become a launching pad for  terrorist attacks on Israel  proper.  In any case, once this middle  group sees a negotiated two  state solution as unlikely,  either because it's unwise or  unachievable, other options  start to look more attractive,  including support for violence,  the unilateral disengagement  that we saw, Israel withdrawing  from the interior of the Gaza  Strip in 2005, and the use of  military solutions in Israel to  solve tactical problems.  How do you stop a terrorist from  getting from point A to point B.  On the Palestinian side, not  only do you see support for the  use of violence in the form of  terrorism, but you see very  popular support for the rocket  attacks that Hamas has been  launching for the last eight  years into Israel proper from  the Gaza Strip.  This tripartite division of  each society means that an  eventual accommodation, how we  get from here to there, has  actually two hurdles to pass.  Not only does it have to satisfy  the minimum requirements of  Israelis and Palestinians. 

 There's an Israeli negotiating  team and a Palestinian  negotiating team.  But it has to leave enough room  for the doves, who presumably  are negotiating this, to  convince the skeptical middle to  support them.  And the logic of satisfying one  of these hurdles undermines  satisfying the other hurdle.  So the more territory Israel  gives to the Palestinians, the  harder it is to convince the  skeptical Israelis that that  territory won't be used against  them.  And the converse is true among  the Palestinians.  So to illustrate how this works,  take a step back a few years and  talk about the conditions  created by the Oslo Accords  between Israel and the PLO in  1993.  By now, this is sort of ancient  history.  But the conditions for this  political dynamic are set by  what happened in the Oslo  Accords.  So the Oslo Accords, as a quick  refresher, had a number of key  features.  First, Israel and the PLO  recognize each other. 

 This was a big deal.  All right, for years before,  Israel wouldn't talk to the PLO,  they don't exist, they're not  real.  Well, they never said they don't  exist.  But Palestinians don't exist as  a right, there's not a national  movement.  We're not going to talk to them.  The Palestinians refused to  openly recognize Israel.  They wouldn't talk about Israel.  They'd talk about the Zionist  entity.  That ends in 1993, which is a  big symbolic deal.  You can ask what else came out  of that. 

 The Oslo Accords also created  what we now know as the  Palestinian Authority, which was  created in order to govern the  large areas of autonomy for the  Palestinians in the West Bank  and Gaza that were envisioned  under the Oslo Accords.  And it was hoped it would become  the embryo of the government of  Palestine when a two state  solution was eventually reached.  Now, the Oslo Accords never say  Palestinian state anywhere in  them.  But everybody involved knew  where they were going.  But for political reasons,  they couldn't write the words  Palestinian state.  Under the Oslo Accords, however,  Israel kept control of all  security matters.  That is, Israel kept their  rights to do what it thought was  necessary to protect its  citizens.  And almost as importantly,  Israel and the PLO decided not  to talk about the really, really  difficult questions.  So Jerusalem, what to do with  the refugees, exactly how to  manufacture security  arrangements in the long term,  what to do with Israeli  settlements in the territories,  and where exactly do you draw  the border between Israel and  Palestine.  All of these questions that are  the core of the conflict, they  said, well, we're not ready to  talk about them yet. 

 Let's wait five years.  And the logic is--  Now, I'm not sure, it could have  been that in retrospect it  looks, gee, why did they do  that.  But at the time, right, it may  have been unavoidable.  The Oslo Accords provided space  for the Israeli public to get  used to the idea of a  Palestinian state.  You couldn't even say that  combination of words in Israel  before the Oslo Accords.  One of the things the Oslo  Accords did is make that  legitimate, make that okay.  To condition the grounds.  In the meantime, you know, we'll  learn to like each other, at  least work together.  We'll build trust.  We'll be able to do joint  projects, joint security  patrols. 

 So, our cops can work with their  cops, and our soldiers can work  with their soldiers.  And then, you know, there'll be  less distrust.  And where there's good faith,  anything can happen.  So this was the rationale.  The Oslo Accords, however,  failed miserably, we all know.  Israelis expected the Oslo  Accords to bring an end to  terrorism.  Palestinians expected the Oslo  Accords to give rise to an  independent Palestinian state.  Neither got what they were  looking for.  In fact, this delaying of  dealing with the real issues for  five years down the road, for  the sort of final status  negotiation, which was supposed  to be over by 1999.  It's almost ten years later and  I guess we're still waiting. 

 What this gap allowed is that it  allowed the rejectionists, the  people who opposed, whether it's  ideologically or religiously, to  a two state solution, lots of  space, right, to torpedo it.  And indeed torpedo it, they did.  On the Israeli side, the settler  movement picked up the pace, in  terms of numbers of people, not  in numbers of settlements.  And Palestinians received  nothing like even the autonomy  they expected, because Israel  kept control of the roads.  They closed the territories for  their own reasons, when they  thought it was best, or in order  to meet security challenges.  And Hamas launches a massive  wave of suicide terrorist  attacks, right after the Oslo  Accords.  So they're not doing it, right,  because they're not happy--  Well, they're doing it  specifically to derail the  potential for peace.  That's why the terrorist attacks  spiked the closer Israelis and  Palestinians get to peace, and  decline when peace gets further  away.  If you think peace with the  devil is bad, you might as well  do whatever you can to stop it.  And this is the logic for the  timing of spikes in Palestinian  terrorism. 

 We see this as we get closer,  violence will increase the  closer we get to a resolution.  So the extremes on both sides  try to undermine an  accommodation.  What this meant politically is  that the doves, both among the  Palestinians and among Israelis  were left holding the proverbial  bag.  They made all these compromises,  at least the way it appeared  domestically, in both Israel and  Palestine, to the other side.  And not only had nothing to show  for it, but Palestinian  moderates were now saddled with  increasing settlement growth,  and a corrupt and ineffectual  Palestinian authority, which  made it a very difficult  political platform for them to  run on.  Israeli moderates, right, in  exchange for their willingness  to talk with, in Israel at the  time and still today, the  murderous PLO, people with blood  on their hands, right, all they  had to show for it were buses  blowing up in the middle of  Israeli cities.  This made easy fodder for the  domestic fight inside their  societies.  In fact, the rejectionists made  the same argument.  So the argument of the Israeli  right and the Palestinian right  is identical, except they switch  reference points.  Both of them say, look, we tried  it your way. 

 Look how much we gave to the  other side, and look how little  we got back.  Look how much worse life is now  than it was before we started  this.  Let's try it our way.  This turned out to be a very  powerful political argument.  And indeed, if democracy has a  downside, all right, it's that  the opinion of the people really  matters.  And in Israel, there are  elections, in theory, every four  years.  But we're averaging two at the  moment.  This helps account for the rise  of the right in Israel, and the  shift to the right.  And among the Palestinians, one  of the positive legacies of the  Oslo Accords are the creation of  free and fair elections in the  Palestinian territories,  reasonably free and fair  elections.  What happened as a result of  this dynamic?  Well, Hamas wins. 

 Right?  The Palestinian public showing  its displeasure with the failure  to reach the promises of the  Oslo Accords.  Now this cycle repeats itself a  number of times.  In fact, only deepening and  reinforcing this vicious cycle.  So the failure of the  negotiations at Camp David, in  1999, the eruption of the second  Palestinian uprising in 2000  continued this logic, where the  moderates only lose political  ground by virtue of making  concessions and seeming to get  nothing in return.  Now, the second Palestinian  uprising, right, was important,  and served its purpose quite  explicitly.  Its strategic logic was very,  very different from the first  Palestinian uprising.  The first Palestinian uprising  in 1987 essentially told  Israelis, look, life in the  territories is different than  life in Israel proper.  The fighting of the first  Palestinian -- was by and large  constrained to the territories.  In Israel, life continued  virtually the same way, even  among Palestinian citizens of  Israel who supported  Palestinians in the territories,  morally and financially stayed  out of the actual physical  confrontations.  In the parlance of people, sort  of the area of the green line,  which was the line drawn on the  map in 1949 by -- and -- the  Jordanian General, that became  the border between Israel and  the West Bank. 

 The first Palestinian uprising  re-drew this line in the minds  of the Israelis.  So look, those areas are  different than Israel.  The second Palestinian uprising  had the opposite strategic  logic.  Instead of confining the  violence to the territories, the  violence quite explicitly  spilled over the line.  So you start having attacks,  including significant suicide  terror attacks in major Israeli  cities, taking the Israeli  public, especially the skeptical  middle public, in exactly the  opposite direction.  Saying, hey look, if it doesn't  matter if I live in a settlement  in the Gaza Strip, or in the  hills of the West Bank, if I'm  living in Tel Aviv, and I'm  still subject to these attacks,  why should I give them anything.  In fact, the main impact of the  second Palestinian uprising was  to sweep Ariel Sharon to power  in 2001.  He came to power, and he put an  end, right, to this uprising.  It took him a few years.  But he did so very successfully. 

 How did he do that?  Well, he crushed it.  That is, there are military  solutions, limited military  solutions to some of these  problems.  So we get what we know today in  the West Bank.  The closures on the territory,  the assassination of leaders of  the militant wings of  Palestinian movements, and  position of regimes of  checkpoints that make daily life  for the Palestinians nearly  impossible.  That is, it's impossible to get  from point A to point B without  going through any number of  checkpoints.  The wall, security barrier,  fence, the terminology is  loaded, so pick your own  favorite term, but that Israel  is building serves the same  purpose.  It makes it harder for  Palestinians to get from point A  to point B.  In this case, from either  territories inside to Israel.  Which are very effective in  preventing individuals, namely  suicide bombers, from getting  from their homes to Israel,  where they might carry out  attacks.  You might imagine, these  policies are very popular inside  Israel. 

 Israelis say, I understand the  Palestinians are suffering, but  they're making me and my kids  safer.  So really, we're going to take  care and make sure that my kid  can come home from school alive  first, and then see what happens  over there.  But these very same policies and  the reasons they're so popular  in Israel, means that they have  the opposite effect within  Palestinian politics.  So here, the Palestinian  authority, in Fatah, right, the  Palestinian moderates, are left  responsible for the increasing  misery of the Palestinian  worker.  It takes them four or five hours  to get to work every day,  whereas before it took five  minutes.  The impossibility to get to  clinics, to schools, just the  very difficulty, as life in the  territories for Israeli security  reasons gets so much worse for  the people living there.  Popular on the Israeli side,  because it improves security,  makes it deeply unpopular within  Palestinian politics, making it  very difficult for Fatah to  stand up to Hamas and say, look,  here's what we got for the  concessions that we made  vis-à-vis Israel.  Now the Palestinian walk of  fire, right, has the same  analogous impact.  So for the last eight years,  Hamas has been launching, first  homemade, and now increasingly  sophisticated both Syrian and  Iranian manufactured missiles  into Israel proper, from the  Gaza Strip into sort of sections  of Israel, under what everybody  thinks are part of Israel, which  actually is saying something.  The reason these rocket attacks,  right, are so important is  because they target this  skeptical middle, and they  eliminate their reason for  supporting a two state solution. 

 The skeptical middle in Israeli  politics, right, says look, we  don't like the Palestinians.  And in our ideal world, all of  this would be ours.  But look, in order to reduce the  violence, right, if that's what  it takes, we're willing for  there to be a Palestinian state.  Now this security argument,  right, is actually relatively  new.  Historically in Israel, the  security argument used to say we  need to hold onto these  territories because they provide  us strategic depth, right, or in  a tank, you know, armor battle,  you need to control the high  ground.  And the high ground is in the  territories, so we can't give up  the West Bank in the Gaza Strip.  In the 1990s, this changed for  that skeptical middle, right.  This is why, one of the reasons  why the Oslo Accords, happened  in the 1990s and not five years  earlier.  In the new -- political context,  right after the fall of the  Soviet Union, the Arab states  lose their major patron.  And it's hard to think of the  Soviet Union these days. 

 But it used to matter.  I guess I don't have to tell  most of you.  But Israelis started to feel  that their existential security  was no longer under threat.  Israelis grew up thinking the  state of Israel is about to be  wiped off the face of the earth,  right, this is the fear of  Israelis.  This is what animates them.  This fear animates them quite a  bit.  As a matter of fact, one of my  colleagues in Israel says that  in Israel that the Jews in  Israel are the majority with the  mentality of a minority.  They're always afraid that they  would be persecuted.  But in the 1990s, close to 90%  of the Jewish Israeli population  didn't have this fear anymore.  So there's a standard question  on public opinion surveys say,  are you afraid the state of  Israel will be destroyed. 

 Now, the very existence of this  question shows how important  this is.  When Gallup calls you up during  the presidential election, they  don't ask you, are you afraid  the United States will be  destroyed, right?  This is a real fear in Israel.  But in 1990s, it was not really  relevant.  People were not afraid that the  state of Israel will be  destroyed.  It's powerful.  It's strong.  That's clearly evident to  Israeli citizens.  After the Oslo Accords, and the  spike in terrorist violence,  Israelis started to fear again.  Except, again, they're not  fearing, in the 1990s, the  destruction of the state of  Israeli.  Now Israelis were afraid of  their personal safety. 

 So in the height of this wave of  suicide terrorist bombings on --  Hamas in response to the almost  peace of the Oslo Peace Accords,  more than 90% of Israelis were  saying that either me or  somebody that I know is going to  die in a terrorist attack.  And this, as you might imagine,  changes what people do.  And in this context, right, the  security argument changed again.  And changed in a security--  This is why it changed for that  sort of skeptical middle.  It changed, because now they  said, now we need to control the  territories to do efficient  police work, not because it's  going to prevent an Arab Army  from invading, right.  We're not really worried about  that so much anymore.  But we want to do preventive  actions to prevent terrorist  attacks.  When this didn't work, people  said, I guess there's nothing  else we can do.  Look, we can't put down the  Palestinians by force anymore.  We don't like it, but we're  willing to reach some sort of  accommodation for them because  it would make us personally  safe. 

 And this rationale is important,  because as soon as the rockets  start flying over the fence,  which by the way, that's how you  defeat a fence, right, you  either go under it or over it.  And Hamas--  All of these types, it's sort of  a give and take, right,  tit for tat.  You develop better armor,  they develop a better bullet.  You develop better armor,  they develop a better bullet.  Hamas figured out how to deal  with the fence, right, you don't  need to send suicide terrorist  bombers.  You just fire a missile over the  fence.  The fence can't do anything to  stop it.  And that Israeli fear returned.  Now it's not of suicide  terrorist attacks, though that  still exists in Israel.  Now, especially in southern  Israel, it's that you are  walking, doing your groceries,  and all of a sudden, a missile  falls down on top of you. 

 Now, we should note that there  have been thousands of missiles  fired into Israel over the last  eight years.  Relatively few casualties.  These are statistical weapons,  which means you sort of shoot a  bunch of them up and you hope  something hits.  So they're not really well  controlled, except for the new  generation of Iranian missiles  that are actually quite  sophisticated, which also makes  them harder to use, which is why  they're used relatively less  frequently.  But as soon as the skeptical  middle started to be afraid,  right, of these missiles, the  logic of saying we should get  out of the territories  disappears.  And the skeptical middle is back  in the right.  And so, intentionally or not,  Hamas' rocket strategy drove the  Israeli middle to the right.  And the mirror image of the  dynamic that we saw earlier  inside Israel.  Now, ironically, paying  attention to this sort of  domestic politics dynamic in  Israel and in Palestine also  helps explain another puzzle.  The previous government, I guess  it's still the current  government of Israel, is a left  government. 

 It's a government led, and with  a clear majority, supporting a  two state solution.  And yet, this is the very  government that has launched  two wars.  One against Hizbullah in the  summer of 2006, and another in  the Gaza Strip this past  January.  Why?  Well, paying attention to  domestic politics inside Israel  suggests that both of these wars  are, or can at least be seen as  the last gasp of doves in Israel  to show that withdrawing the  territories can still bring  security.  That is, even if we leave the  territories, right, if we're  attacked, we can still hit back.  That is, there are other ways of  providing security.  The failure to do so, right,  undermines the Israeli left.  It undermines the doves in  Israel because today at least in  Israel, it's not apparent to the  skeptical middle that  withdrawing from the territories  is going to bring security.  Of course, the decision to wage  this internal domestic fight  between, or at least recruit, by  the doves, the skeptical middle,  by the use of force against  Hizbullah and Hamas, well, I  have to say probably  unavoidable, right.  It has consequences for the  Palestinians. 

 So those in the Palestinian  politics who say, look, we told  you that you can't talk to these  guys, right.  Israel doesn't understand  anything but force.  They don't want to get out of  the territories anyway.  It makes their argument resonate  that much more so.  So the result, in both Israel  and the Palestine is a  territorial compromise, right,  which is the key to the shared  consensus of a two state  solution, is actually very  unlikely to happen in the near  term.  -- everybody deflates.  Now, I've been told actually  that I have to end, when I give  this kind of lecture, on a more  optimistic note.  (laughter)  And indeed, in historical  perspective, there is reason,  right, for cautious optimism.  The problem today, right, as  difficult as it is to resolve,  is a mundane political one.  These are mundane political  problems of people running for  office, trying to get as many  votes as possible. 

 We no longer hear, it's not  among the main actors in Israel  and among the Palestinians, that  they completely reject the right  of the other side to exist.  It is legitimate today in Israel  to speak about a Palestinian  state, and the Palestinians as a  people.  In fact, survey data shows not  just support for the idea of a  two state solution, but a  majority of Jewish Israelis, a  significant majority of Jewish  Israelis think that the right of  the Palestinians to a state is a  just one.  This is a huge transformation  from even 20 years ago, when  only the fringe left could even  bring themselves to utter the  words Palestinian state.  The same thing is true among  Palestinian attitudes toward  Israel.  Nobody in the Middle East knows  Israel better, knows how strong  and vibrant Israel really is  than the Palestinians.  The rest of the Arab world is  actually reasonably ignorant  of what happens inside.  It's just the Palestinians,  because they're so close,  because they've been so deeply  integrated into the Israeli  economy, they see what life is  in Israel.  They like Israel.  They want their life to be like  it is in Israel. 

 In fact, their ideal, they want  to build a democracy.  The democracy they're thinking  of is not the United States,  it's Israel.  Wow, right?  (light laughter)  As a political scientist, it  makes me want to cringe.  This is not where we are today.  We're not at that point where  the two sides sort of deny that  the other side exists.  This is a huge, right,  transformation that in  historical terms we shouldn't  minimize.  The fact that a conflict today  is over mundane politics, right,  doesn't make it easier to solve.  In fact, it certainly doesn't  say it's inevitable.  In fact, it's going to be very,  very, very difficult.  It is, this is the optimistic  part, actually possible. 

 But it's going to take a few  specific things over which we  have no control.  This is, we're back to, I don't  know if pessimism is the right  word.  But we need to be aware of what  we can and can't accomplish in  the world.  Not just us, but the average  person on the street in Israel  or Palestine.  Any resolution has to take  account, not just of this  conflict between these two,  right, fighters fighting it out  in the ring, but of their  domestic politics.  Doing this requires two things.  It requires first a package  deal.  This idea that you can solve one  item at a time, first we'll deal  with refugees, then we'll deal  with borders, right, then we'll  deal with Jerusalem, then we'll  deal with settlements.  That works in other kinds of  conflicts.  You get sort of phased  withdrawals, right,  when Israel--  In this context, too, when  Israel withdrew from the Sinai  Peninsula, it did so over three  years. 

 It was phased.  We'll do a little bit.  You'll do a little bit.  We'll do a little bit.  You'll do a little bit.  That won't work here because of  this political dynamic.  A package deal let's leaders  do is say, hey look, we didn't  get everything we wanted, right,  in fact, we had to make very,  very significant concessions.  But here's the deal.  And let's people make the  argument for better a bird in  the hand than two in the bush.  Now, they might not win. 

 That's the other thing that  attention to this political  dynamic says.  Even if a solution is reached  that makes technical, rational  sense, even if one is reached  that meets the minimum criteria,  that satisfies the actors, there  are no guarantees that it will  win, right.  Because then you get into  politics and once you get into  there, anything can happen.  What is needed at this stage are  leaders who can actually cobble  together this coalition of doves  and the skeptical middle, right,  and win this political fight.  And these leaders need to emerge  in Israel and among the  Palestinians simultaneously.  That is, they both need to have  leaders willing, not just  willing, willing and able to do  this, right, at the same time,  to have a chance that they will  succeed.  Because they'll fail, right?  You run for office, who knows.  It turns out that you're corrupt  and you lose because you're  corrupt, not because you don't  support this plan.  There's all sorts of little  things that can still derail it.  The emergence of these leaders  is not impossible. 

 It's also not inevitable.  And so it's possible that things  will muddle along in this way  for a while.  We'll just have to wait and see.  Thank you.  I'm happy to answer any  questions.