The Israeli Elections: Implications for U.S. Policy and Palestinians

 

Video and Edited Transcript
Mr. Guy Ziv, Mr. Yousef Munayyer and Mr. Philip “P.J.” Crowley
Transcript No. 379 (29 January 2013)
 

29 January 2013
The Palestine Center
Washington, DC

Mr. Guy Ziv:

Well, good afternoon. I want to thank Yousef [Munayyer] for inviting me to participate in this panel. I want to keep my comments relatively brief because I’m sure there are going to be a lot of questions here from the audience. I wanted to make three basic observations about these elections. First, the voters showed their dissatisfaction with the status-quo. Second point [that] I’m going to be making is that socioeconomic issues largely dominated. And third, I think we have seen, or what I’ve called, the “Tea Partization” of the Israeli right[wing]. And I want to talk a little bit about that and its impact on last week’s elections.

With respect to the status-quo, on the face of it, it seems that nothing much has changed, because Prime Minister Netanyahu was easily reelected. There was not an analyst out there who seriously predicted anybody else will be reelected. So it was almost a foregone conclusion that the next Prime Minister is going to be Netanyahu. But if you look more closely at the results and the motivations behind the results you will see a slightly different story, and I think that that story is worth telling.

First of all, the voter turnout in a typically status-quo election tends to be pretty small, yet last week it was higher than, much higher than expected, it was in fact the highest of the past ten years, 68 percent. There are many new faces this time around. Typically the average turn-over in an Israeli election [is] about 40 seats, and in last week’s election, nearly half of the Knesset is going to consist of new fresh faces, 47 members will be new, five are going to be returning, so we are really seeing a different kind of, many new faces, very different kind of Knesset slates being elected.

Also, more religious, they were more religious members that were elected this time around and an unprecedented number of women, 27 women will be entering the Knesset, this is an all time high, about 22 percent, slightly higher than the unprecedented women that were elected here in this country in the November elections. We had about 19 percent. And as you know the party in power was somewhat weakened, Likud Beiteinu which was the joint list that Netanyahu and foreign minister Lieberman cobbled together. They lost eleven seats; they went from 42 together, to 31. And a brand new party that nobody really outside of Israel had ever even heard of the Yesh Atid headed by a man who very few people outside of Israel had ever heard about: Yair Lapid, was the very big surprise being the second place finisher getting 19 seats.

I also want to mention in that regard that Netanyahu, is a relatively unpopular Prime Minister, he has never been very popular, and there have been very few times, and very few occasions where he has surpassed the 50 percent mark in Israel. And I am talking about Jewish-Israelis in public opinion polls, the opinion polls that have been taking place over the past two decades. Only rarely has he surpassed the 50 percent threshold; for example I think a couple of years ago, he addressed a joint session of the Congress in the May of 2011, so he came back, and because of national pride, he got 53 percent and he went up from 38 percent to 51 percent in approval ratings, and now it’s back to 38 percent, or it’s been around 38 percent for the last few months. So, this is not somebody who is a very popular Prime Minister.

At the same time, when the public is asked who can you see as the next Prime Minister, they put him upfront because his opponents have virtually no experience. Shelly Yachimovich, who is the head of the Labor Party, has never been a minister, she never really served in any kind of government. The same goes for Yair Lipid, same goes for Tzipi Livni. Well, Tzipi Livni was experienced. She has seen some experience, but she was only Foreign Minister for a few years and she was seen as a largely ineffective opposition leader who lost the chance to form her own government, despite the fact that in the previous election, the 2009 election, Kadima, formerly her Kadima Party got more seats, or at least one more seat that the Likud Party.

With respect to my second point, on the socio- economic issues, this is really the first time that I can recall, that many people can recall, where the peace and security issue was not front and centre. This is very unusual because traditionally every election is about the peace and security issues. This time it was really about bread and butter issues: something as mundane as the price of cottage cheese, the cost of housing, a little less mundane. There were major protests, major demonstrations, in the summer of 2011 that continued in the fall and to some extent later. And, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, middle-class Israelis, protesting what they thought was an inequality, the unfair costs of living, and the second major complaint that they had was the unfair burden with respect to serving in the army, because the ultra- orthodox typically don’t serve and more than 60% of the ultra-orthodox men do not work , as compared to the fifteen percent in the general population. More than 50 percent of the ultra-orthodox women do not work, as compared to the 21 percent of the mainstream Jewish women. The majority of the ultra-orthodox, 56 percent, live under the poverty line and receive government subsidies. So this inequality and the unfair burden has been a major issue that has simmered in the past years but has really come up front and center during this last election.

The government’s priority with respect to settlements, I am sure that’s going to come up in this discussion, in the view of many Israelis is misplaced. This is not to say that they are as outraged about settlements as some of you are, but they don’t think that the priorities are the right priorities; they don’t think that this is the right set of priorities, especially given the other economic issues, the prospects for making some sort of progress in the peace process that they haven’t seen in recent years, they’ve seen really status quo. And I think that that has been really changing here, in terms of the priorities (that) the average Israeli is putting on these other issues.

And, finally as I said the Tea Partization, the radicalization of the Israeli right. I should note that there is wide spread skepticism among Israelis about the prospects for peace in general, and the idea that there is a Palestinian partner. The majority of Israelis feel that there is not a partner on the other side. They cite President Abbas’s weakness, which pretty much everyone in the region agrees, that he is relatively weak. We can debate the reasons for it, but by most objective criteria he is seen as weak. They cite his anti-Israel incitement or what they view as anti-Israel incitement coming from the Palestinian territories, where one sees in the media and in schools, everything from the use of Hitler’s ideas and analogies, to the omission of the state of Israel and state maps, offensive cartoons, and so on and so forth. They see Hamas in control of Gaza where ever since they’ve been in control of Gaza there have been barrages of rocket attacks that have significantly affected the residents who live in the Southern part of Israel. They took a look around them and they see a very dangerous region. Syria is very unstable. They’re worried about a spill-over effect. Egypt, the one country that they have had in the past a decent relationship with is right now very unstable as well. Even Jordon seems to be a little bit unstable. So they see themselves as weak and vulnerable and peace is simply not the foremost issue in their minds.

At the same time, the majority of Israelis, consistently and in every single poll that has been taken that I have seen, support a two-state solution to the conflict. They want to see a two-state solution to the conflict, as skeptical as they are about the things I’ve mentioned. And they are uncomfortable about the radicalization of the right. Even though it was not a major issue, they have been watching from the sidelines and they have been disturbed with what they have seen.

The similarities between the Tea Party movement in this country and some of what we have seen in Israel are pretty striking, and I wrote a piece about that today in the Huffington Post. First, we’ve seen a rightward turn in party platforms: the Tea Party was very influential in getting the Republicans to move to the right in the last Presidential elections, and same thing with the party platform in Israel where many members of the Likud rejected the very notion of a two-state solution and tried to remove that from the platform even though the Prime Minister and Chairman of the Likud Party had endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state, publicly at Bar Elan in 2009. I can’t tell you for sure what’s in the platform because Likud Beiteinu refuses to release publicly its platform, so we don’t know what’s in there, but we do know that it’s had this rightward influence.

Another similarity is the ousting of moderate members. We saw it here in Republican Party primaries, the removal of long time, well respected moderate Republicans such as Senators Robert Bennett, and Richard Lugar, and Lisa Makowski, all of them ousted and replaced with Tea Party favorites. The same thing happened in the Likud Party primary that took place a few months ago. Long time moderates or pragmatists, people like Dan Meridor, Benny Begin, and Michael Eitan were replaced with far rightists. Offensive statements were made by candidates: everybody here has heard about “legitimate rape” comments made by some of the Tea Party favorites in our elections here, and in Israel some of the candidates really made some outlandish comments. One candidate from Netanyahu’s rival party, Bennet’s party, talked about he was revealed to have told a group of Christian Zionists last year that the Dome of the Rock should be bombed so that a third temple could be rebuilt. Now of course, he says that that was said in jest and that he didn’t really mean it, and was actually critical of it, but I mean very outlandish comments that raised eyebrows in Israel. And racism: the Tea Party here was involved in a number of different bills that sparked outrage among African Americans, the NAACP protesters, some of these things; and in Israel there have been a couple of bills unfortunately that passed in the recent Knesset, the last Knesset that were seen as very harmful and borderline or even fully racist, and that includes the Nakbe bill, and the establishment of a commissions committee to review who can enter certain communities in the Negev and the Galilee.

And the last point that I want to make with respect to this radicalization of the right, is this antagonism that has been displayed towards President Obama. Now a lot of Israelis are indifferent or ambivalent I would say, towards Obama. He is not disliked but they don’t really have a strong sense of where he fits in the “Pro-Israel” spectrum. But they don’t want to see any kind of deterioration in U.S.’s relations with them. That for them is a red line, and Nateyahu appears to have crossed that red line, and some of Natenyahu’s staunch supporters and associates have gone further. I mean there is one Likud Knesset member Danny Danon who wrote a book, an anti- Obama book, and came to the States and promoted it, and he’s very popular among certain Republican Christian circles. But that doesn’t sit very well with a lot of Israelis.

So, for these reasons they chose Natenyahu, because they felt that there was no other alternative to Natenyahu, but they really wanted to weaken Natenyahu and they see, the Israelis see Lapid as a possible check on Natenyahu and I think they are comfortable with that idea: a more moderate version of the previous government, a more open version of the previous government, a government that’s going to be a little bit more conciliatory and that’s going to maybe reevaluate some of the national priorities. And I end my comments there.

Mr. Yousef Munayyer:

Thank you Guy. Just a few general comments about some of the numbers coming out of the election that I feel were a little bit under-discussed that I want to talk about, and then talk more about what the election result means in general: First, just to go over some numbers, a number of people have asked about how Palestinian citizens of Israel voted, and what the turnout was like. That has not been part of the discussion. Of course, Palestinian citizens of Israel make up 20 percent of the Israeli voting population. Palestinian citizens of Israel largely voted for Arab parties, three parties for the most part. While they are Arab parties, they do have their differences in terms of their orientations.

What was interesting, though, is that there was significant debate—more so this time than at other points in the past within the community of Palestinian citizens of Israel—about whether or not to participate in these elections. There was a vocal movement to boycott the elections all together, and there was significant variation across different towns that are Palestinian towns inside Israel in terms of the turnout. Some of them saw significant increases in turnout, whereas some of them saw significant decreases in turnout.

On the whole, the participation of Palestinian citizens of Israel in the election was up, as was the trend throughout the entire election, up. In 2009 about 52 percent of Palestinian citizens of Israel participated in the elections. This time around it was about 55 percent. So you see a three percent increase. On the whole, with Israeli voters in general, you saw a similar increase, but it was an increase from 59 percent to about 62 percent, and so the middle of Israel is voting in larger turnout numbers than the Arab population.

When you look at the settlements, though, and how they voted, what you find, really, that is very interesting, is two things. First, turnout in the settlements also went up, but it was very high to begin with. It was about 74 percent in 2009, and it went up to about 78 percent in this election. So, the settler community is far more mobilized and active in their voting behavior than Jewish Israelis, and even more so than Palestinian citizens of Israel as well. That’s number one. The other, perhaps more alarming, number, is the increase in eligible voters in settlements this time around versus 2009. You saw a 45 percent increase in the number of eligible voters in settlements from 2009 to 2013, whereas in the rest of the country, the rest of the Jewish vote, that increase was six percent, and in the Arab voting areas that was 16 percent.

So what you have here is these three different blocks, if you will, where you have a growing and steady Palestinian-citizens-of-Israel vote, you have a growing and influential settler vote as well, and then you have this group that is in the middle, the Jewish-Israeli-Zionist vote in the middle. That vote is divided about 55 percent to the allies of Netanyahu and Netanyahu himself, and about 45 percent to the opposition towards Netanyahu. So, the middle is leaning to the right.

The problem presented by this is that, unlike American politics, Israeli politics is far more complicated than the left/right divide lens for analytical purposes. Parties are divided along a variety of ethno-religious interests, and so you have some parties that are relying on ethno-religious communities for their consistent votes, whether this is the eastern Ultra-Orthodox, or the western Ultra-Orthodox, and what have you. So those parties are going to remain fairly steady in their ability to draw votes. What is shrinking is the space on the side of the opponents to Netanyahu to reach 61 seats in the Knesset. Why? Because Arab parties have been traditionally excluded, and sometimes self-excluding, from Zionist politics, and so the ability to reach 61 votes to reach a majority in the Knesset is one that is dominated right now, has been and will continue to be, given demographic trends, by parties on the Right, and Netanyahu’s natural allies. So, I think there is a rightward shift in Israel, one that is structural in the long-term because of demographics. And unless we see truly revolutionary change that shakes up this dynamic for the center of Israeli voters, those that are in the Jewish-Zionist center of Israeli voters, this is not going to change.

What we saw in this election is people coming out that were voting for parties other than Netanyahu, and other than those in his coalition, particularly those that went to either Labor or Lapid’s party, voting really on economic and socio-economic issues. And the reason that this is disturbing is that you have a multi-decade long military occupation of millions of people who are denied self- determination. But the single largest mobilizing factor among the opposition to those policies, in any way, is around economic issues that aren’t related to that. So you see Israelis going to the streets around issues like the cost of cottage cheese, but not around issues like the occupation. And so, even the opposition to Netanyahu, and his allies on the right, has become far more timid in challenging the occupation policies of the right.

So, again, it’s not just a rightward shift of demographics, but it’s a rightward shift in terms of priorities. It wasn’t a challenge to the priorities in that the opposition to Netanyahu was saying, “We need to end settlements,” it was “That shouldn’t be the top priority. You’re putting too much emphasis on this issue, we should focus on these issues as well.” So, I think there is, a lot of the speculation in a lead-up to this election was about the growth of Naftali Bennett’s party and what that would mean. And I think one of the missing pieces in the analysis was the failure to really understand where these other parties lie. Too much emphasis was placed on using the success of Naftali Bennett’s party as a metric of right-wing movement in Israel. That’s simply not the only metric. There were a lot of other things going on.

What this reveals, I think, more than anything else —and this is where it comes back to policy—is the fact that, more than ever before, and as Guy rightly stated, this is kind of remarkable that the peace question was not a major issue in this election, more than ever before, Israelis have become complacent to the military occupation of millions of people. It’s become a thing that is acceptable. There’s no movement to bring this to an end. There’s no sense of urgency among Israeli voters to bring this to an end, and I think a lot of that is because the costs of the occupation have become very acceptable to Israelis. And if we’ve seen anything over the past 20 years of the peace process, it’s been the displacement of these costs from Israel and onto Palestinians and international financiers of the Palestinian Authority as well. So, there’s no motivation to end the Israeli occupation if that occupation can be profitable and the costs continue to be low.

So, I think what that means is we need to look for ways to change that equation, because the interests are structured in such a way right now that Israelis are not going to act unilaterally to end the occupation. They need to be incentivized to doing so. And while I agree with Guy’s interpretation of the Israeli perception of not having a peace partner, I think a lot of that is due to the conditioning of the Israeli electorate from the statements of their leaders, more than the actual reality. You have, during this same period, probably the most cooperative and collaborative Palestinian Authority that has ever been seen. And so, there’s never going to be a lack of excuses to not make peace.

The question that I think we need to be asking here in Washington is, how can we create incentives so that ending the occupation becomes a reality? And I think that if we are continuing to support Israel in every possible opportunity, through economic, military and diplomatic aid, and not pushing them to end this occupation, we simply cannot expect that it’s ever going to end. We are part and parcel of why this is happening today.

Lastly, I would just make two points. One, on the Likud platform, you’re absolutely right, they didn’t put anything out, so we really don’t know where the most recent iteration of Likud-Beiteinu stands right now. But their most recent platform is something that we do have, and is very clear. They flatly reject the existence of a Palestinian state on the western side of the Jordan River. They oppose the division of Jerusalem and will work to develop and strengthen the settlements in the West Bank that they refer to as Judea and Samaria. And aside from the lip service that we’ve seen from the Israeli prime minister in that one speech, there’s really no significant reason to believe that the party has wholeheartedly changed from these positions when, in fact, the policies that they’ve pursued suggest the exact opposite.

And the last point on the issue of support for the two-state solution within Israel: when we look at that specific question, when you ask Israelis “Do you support a two-state solution to this conflict?” a slim majority have consistently said yes. The problem is, when you ask them about the specific steps necessary to meet the minimal Palestinian requirements for a viable two-state solution, you don’t have majorities that say yes on those key issues, when it comes to the division of Jerusalem, when it comes to the removal of the majority of settlements. So, what I think that polling ultimately tells us, is that the Israeli polity supports separation from the Palestinians, as a general policy. What is doesn’t show us when we look at the more nuanced view, is that they’re ready to make the moves necessary to make that separation a peaceful one, or a just one. What is happening instead is separation is being achieved by perpetual occupation. And so long as the costs of that are inexpensive to Israelis, they don’t seem motivated to challenge it in any way. With that being the case, I think the onus then lands on outside parties to motivate the Israelis to make changes to their policies, and I think that the need for that has never been so clear after these elections. So I will end there and pass it on to P.J.

Mr. Philip “P.J.” Crowley:

And let me pick up right from that point. That’s a dilemma. In 2009, a brand new Obama administration on its first full day in office, George Mitchell was appointed as a special envoy, and there was a fairly significant two-year investment in the peace process that failed. There was virtually no return on that political investment. Then, over the next two years, the security landscape, not only for Israel, to some extent for the Palestinians, and particularly for the United States, has changed fundamentally, and I think we are still in that kind of transition period where everyone is recalculating, what is this new environment, and so there’s a much different lens through which to evaluate Israeli/Palestinian politics.

I should say, I got my first up-close exposure to this subject in 1998 at the Wye talks and then at Camp David in 2000 and so I recognize I’m only a relative novice, only fifteen years of looking at this, but I do think that the best thing that can be said right now is, “It could be worse.” I could argue that that’s not necessarily bad. And ultimately the real dilemma for all of the players both inside Israeli/Palestinian politics in the region and here in the United States is how do you calculate time? Who does time favor? And there are a myriad of views about that.

But as both Yousef and Guy have said, having watched in 1998, what happened in 1998 where the difficult dynamic between Bill Clinton and then- Prime Minister Netanyahu did become an electoral issue that brought Ehud Barak to power, it is remarkable what did not happen here. That, yes, there was a subtext, Netanyahu had his fingers in the American election, Obama had some comments that worked their way into the Israeli election, but it didn’t necessarily change—it may have changed a couple of seats here or there—but it didn’t really change the fundamentals. And that’s because the overall U.S.-Israeli relationship has expanded, it’s no longer driven just by the personalities of the two leaders, it’s driven by a much broader agenda, and of course you now have Congress as a very significant counter-weight, where a president in a first-term particularly has got to look a little bit over his shoulder at this.

And so the net effect was you had an administration that came in in 2009 with an understanding that the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic was the number one security issue driving events in the Middle East, and we believed that was true in 2009. It is not true in 2013. The United States is looking at this, within the subtext, first and foremost, of what is going to happen with Iran, and of course that is a challenge that is very much shared in Israel. Again, what we might not have envisioned only six months ago, that not only was the Israeli-Palestinian issue not really a significant electoral issue, nor necessarily was Iran, a driving issue in the election just completed. It was probably more an issue here than it was there.

And I think the second aspect is, obviously the dynamic among the various players has been transformed over the past two years, not only by who is still in play, but by who is no longer in play. You no longer have Hosni Mubarak in a position. You have Mohamed Morsi, he was reasonably constructive in the context of helping to end the skirmish late last year between Israel and Hamas but clearly as we know he’s got a much different perspective coming in and a much different political dynamic in terms of populism of policies, and populism of foreign policies that will change his perceptions and how far he’s willing to go in the future. On the other side, you have King Abdullah of Jordan who has also been a constructive player in the past, and right now he’s got his hands full with his share of 700,000 Syrian refugees. And obviously other leaders are looking very closely at what’s happening in Syria as well. So, what it means is, you have in fact, for a variety of reasons, pushed the Israeli-Palestinian question. It’s on the list, it’s still important, it’s not at the top, and so there’s a different dynamic in 2013 than we saw in previous years.

And then here in the United States there’s been a lot of discussion about the lack of rapport between Barack Obama and Bibi Netanyahu. I would argue that’s not necessarily been a significant limiting factor in the last four years. The real difficult relationship is the relationship between Bibi Netanyahu and Abu Mazen, and there’s no trust on each side. I share the comments of my colleagues here that Netanyahu has done very little to help Abu Mazen despite the fact that the security situation, the level of security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority has arguable never been better. And over an extended period of time you’ve had extensive calm in the West Bank, even with the tumult in the rest of the region, and yet the present Israeli government, and the emerging Israeli government, will still have that same narrative, that they don’t have a partner.

What the United States banked on in 2009 was real sustained pressure from the region to push Abu Mazen forward into the peace process. A lot of reasons why that didn’t happen. The Goldstone Report was, I think, a singular event from which the process has never really recovered. And you also have the unresolved political competition between Fatah and Hamas, but we do know that out of late last year and the latest Gaza crisis, there are three people who perceive themselves as being winners: Netanyahu believes he won something meaningful, Hamas believes it won something meaningful, President Morsi believes he gained something—now he immediately gave it back with the decree—but he gained something. The one guy who was a spectator—you can debate how much he lost—but Abu Mazen was a spectator in the Gaza crisis, and so he’s having to recalculate again, “Where do I fit into this and where does the Palestinian Authority fit into this?” And finally in the region you’ve got no news despite a worsening economic situation for the Palestinian Authority. You’ve had lip service by key donors but not necessarily any real money that allows the Palestinian Authority to pay its bills and really redeems the efforts of Prime Minister Fayyad who’s trying to prepare the Palestinian Authority for a day where it becomes a real state. So, there is an absence of a leader dynamic, I think that is very telling in terms of why the process has been stuck for two years, and I argue that I don’t see anything coming out of the Israeli election, the U.S. election, or the dynamic in the region, that is necessarily going to change that in the short to mid-term.

And then finally it is this perception of time. And I think that I probably disagree modestly with Yousef in terms of, I understand where the various players are, I struggle to offer advice to Abu Mazen in terms of what should he do in this kind of interim period where realistically I don’t think there are conditions for any meaningful progress. I think there is a need for quiet diplomacy, see what can be achieved on some secondary issues while you wait for more favorable conditions that may require at least one, two, or three leadership changes before you have a real prospect of progress.

A couple of interesting things to watch: One will be we will have a new secretary of state starting Monday, he will go to the region in February, he’ll want to get his assessment of the key players, but what John Kerry says coming back from the region middle of next month in terms of how he sees the possibility for some activity will be very instructive. Likewise, what decision does Netanyahu make not only in the fundamental composition of his government but who will be his foreign minister? Lieberman has been the de jure foreign minister for the last four years. Ehud Barak has been the de facto foreign minister for the last four years. Barak did not run for office, is he invited back into the cabinet where he will play a role in the future? That will be one indicator.

A second would be, if not Lieberman, who has some financial issues or corruption issues to deal with, then who? Lapid, as the king maker, might want that job, but he’s got no real international experience. You could bring back Tzipi Livni, who has been there before. As we were talking about before the program started, Netanyahu and Livni do not have a great rapport, so do you see the emergence of a new generation of leaders, and then how much room does Netanyahu give that foreign minister to at least begin to carry out a public conversation and quiet diplomacy that might create some openings down the road? So, we’ll have some early indicators coming up in the next four to six weeks that will really tell us how all of the key players are approaching this.

Guy Ziv is an assistant professor in the School of International Service’s U.S. Foreign Policy Program. He teaches a variety of both undergraduate and graduate courses on U.S. foreign policy, the Middle East, and U.S.-Israel relations. His current research focuses on foreign policy decision-making, the influence of think tanks in U.S. foreign policy, and the role of political elites in the Arab-Israeli conflict. His written works on the impact of Israel’s nuclear policy on U.S.-Israel relations; Israel’s strategic partnership with France in the 1950s; and the role of leaders’ personalities in foreign policy change have been published in both academic journals and newspapers. He also writes a blog for the Huffington Post. Dr. Ziv has a background in policy, having worked at the U.S. Department of State, on Capitol Hill, and for leading non-profit organizations that promote American involvement in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

Philip “P.J.” Crowley, former Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, argues that in order for the Palestinians to gain from the recent upsurge in international support for a Palestinian state, President Abbas must take the new-found political capital to the negotiating tables of the peace process. He argues that it is only through this framework that President Abbas can effectively channel political leverage.

Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of The Jerusalem Fund and its educational program, The Palestine Center. He frequently writes on matters of foreign policy in the Arab and Muslim world, and civil rights and civil liberties issues in the United States.

This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker’s views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.