Palestinian Territories

Panelists discuss the possibilities for governance in Gaza, including the potential role of regional powers and the West. FROMAN: Well, thanks very much, Emily. And thanks, everybody, for joining us this afternoon for this briefing on “Gaza the Day After,” the future of Gaza. I’m very pleased to be joined by three experts on the subject: Steven Cook, who’s a senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations; Dennis Ross, distinguished fellow and counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the CFR member, among other things; and Amaney Jamal, dean and professor of politics at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and also a CFR member. So delighted to have the three of you. We’re going to have a conversation for the first few minutes and then I will open it up to all of you for questions from the group. Steven, let me perhaps start with you. Could you give us a brief update on developments on the ground in the last forty-eight, seventy-two hours, things that we should be watching out for? COOK: Great. Thanks so much, Mike. It’s a pleasure to be with everybody here today, especially my friends Dennis and Amaney. Just for those of you who aren’t keeping up to a minute what’s happening, I think the most important issue at the moment is the fact that the CIA Director Bill Burns was in Doha today with the Israeli Mossad leader and their Egyptian counterpart, speaking with the Qataris about ways in which to extend this pause in fighting even further. And that means finding ways in which to win the release of Israeli men and military personnel, which is much, much harder than women and children, which took quite a long time. But it’s clear that that is the next step and there are ways in which they think that they can move this forward. Of course, if the past is any guide, Hamas will be demanding very, very large numbers of prisoners that the Israelis are holding in order for them to release Israeli hostages. So it’s good that the diplomatic wheels are moving, but the price may be too high for the Israelis. Other important diplomatic development is that Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be traveling to Israel, the West Bank, and the UAE also in an effort to seek ways to extend this pause in fighting, perhaps turn it into a durable ceasefire, and to explore ways in which the Palestinian Authority can be reinvigorated, in his words, and ultimately—and ultimately play a greater role in the Gaza Strip, and to seek ways in which the UAE can use its influence with the Israelis on their military campaign. Other developments in the region are American military forces operating now in the Persian Gulf, including an aircraft carrier battle group, which is quite close to Iran, and Houthi military activity in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden which is targeting Israeli-linked shipping. As far as just my, you know, brief, quick view on the day after in Gaza, I think that Secretary Blinken continues to believe that he can pursue a policy which would lead to the reinvigoration of Palestinian Authority and ultimately extend its administration to the Gaza Strip. I hate to start out this discussion by being so, you know, deeply cynical about this, but I just don’t see how that is going to happen. I think that that—in a perfect world, that may be a way towards a day after in Gaza. But it strikes me that the Palestinian Authority is so corrupt, so deeply dysfunctional, and lacks legitimacy in ways that American and international efforts to rebuild it would take too long and not meet the current crisis, if they were even successful. So it strikes me then that the outcome, if there is an outcome here, is likely to be an Israeli occupation of parts of the Gaza Strip for some period of time. I think the Israelis have been clear that they want to establish a security regime on the Gaza Strip. It doesn’t strike me that anybody is going to be their partner in that. And that will leave them there to ensure security as best as they can. FROMAN: Let me push you a little bit on that, Steven. And you’ve called the plan to put the PA in charge of Gaza “fantasies cooked up in Washington.” So you have a strong view of the strength of that of that idea. If Israeli occupation is the only alternative, is it of just the northern portion, a buffer zone to provide security? Or do you see them occupying or ruling over all of Gaza? And how sustainable is that? COOK: Well, let me be clear, I don’t think the Israeli occupation is the only option, though it seems to me the only feasible option at the moment. I think that the conflict has reinforced the idea that the Palestinian Authority is somewhat of an afterthought in all of this. But directly to your question, Mike, it really is the way in which the Israeli military operations unfold. If they’re able to extend the ceasefire beyond this weekend, perhaps the Israelis will refrain from moving into the Gaza Strip, southern part of the Gaza Strip. But regardless, if their strategic goal remains the destruction of Hamas, that means that they will move into the—into the southern part of the Gaza Strip. And that’s why I said that I think that it’s likely that an occupation of some, or part, or a whole Gaza strip for some period of time is a likely outcome of at least the military operations, as the Israelis are pursuing them at the moment. I don’t see—perhaps Dennis, who has, you know, long, obviously, history and experience with this, has some ideas about how actually to reinvigorate the Palestinian Authority and make it effective. But it hasn’t been there in sixteen or seventeen years. And, like I said, is deeply compromised by its corruption, dysfunction, and illegitimacy. FROMAN: Dennis, let’s go to the issue of Hamas. You’ve written in a recent Foreign Affairs piece that Israel needs to completely neutralize Hamas militarily. Is that realistic, given the constraints, given the civilian casualties that we see being inflicted in Gaza? And what does it mean to really eliminate Hamas altogether? ROSS: Yeah. I’ve never suggested that you can eliminate Hamas altogether. You can’t. First of all, it exists outside of Gaza. Secondly, I think to be able to do destroy Hamas’ military wherewithal, its military industrial base, its organizational coherence is something the Israelis probably could do. It doesn’t come at a low cost. But it’s something they could do. And the reality is, Israelis are not going to live in a situation where Hamas continues to be able to threaten them from Gaza. We’ve seen this movie before. We had one conflict in 2014 that went on for fifty-two days; 12,500 buildings were completely destroyed in Gaza, another 6,500 were severely damaged, 150,000 dwellings for housing were uninhabitable. There was a decision, you know, collectively internationally. There was a call for let’s have a massive reconstruction and come up with a mechanism to ensure materials won’t be diverted. But Hamas was still in control. And nothing happened. Hamas remained in control and rebuilt itself. It has three hundred miles of tunnels underground, meaning that all these materials that could have been used above ground to build Gaza were not used for that. So we know what Hamas will do. And they’ve been very clear what they intend to do when this is over. So from an Israeli standpoint, you’re not going to get people to move back to the south. You have 150,000 people who aren’t living in their homes in Israel. You’re not going to get people to move back to their homes unless Hamas is no longer in a position where it’s controlling Gaza. That doesn’t mean every Hamas member or every Hamas fighter, every Hamas guy who’s armed has suddenly been disarmed. But it means that basically Israel has destroyed them as a military force. And that’s something that they probably can achieve. We’ve, I think, achieved a lot of progress towards that end in northern Gaza. Steve is quite right. This cannot be completed unless you go into the south as well. But Israel doesn’t want to be occupying Gaza. They left Gaza in 2005. They didn’t leave Gaza because they wanted to come back in. They left Gaza. People tend to forget, there was no embargo, there’s no boycott, there was no quarantine of Gaza from September 2005 until June 2007, when Hamas carried out a coup. So they didn’t automatically put a quarantine in. And something else that tends to be forgotten, you know, Israel had six crossing points into Gaza when they withdrew, and those six crossing points were a lifeline to Gaza. There was no—because of the Second Intifada, there was no port. We had negotiated a port—I’m sorry. We had negotiated an airport during the—as part of the Wye River Agreement. That was destroyed in the Second Intifada. And Rafah was closed by the Egyptian. So there were six lifelines. And Israel withdraws completely. And Hamas attacks the crossing points. They weren’t a favor to Israel. They were a lifeline for the Palestinians. So those six points were reduced to two. So we have a reality of what we know Hamas will do if they remain in power. And Israel is determined not to leave them in power. The question is, and this is in essence what you’re asking, can they succeed in doing that at some kind of acceptable cost? But one also has to ask the question, if they don’t succeed in doing it what are the implications of that? So if Hamas is still there, the ideology of rejection will be reinforced. Hamas’ appeal will, and the appeal of that ideology, will go up. So the—it seems to be from an Israeli standpoint, they’re quite determined to do this. There is a—there’s a tension here between their desire to get all the hostages out and having pauses and being able to achieve their military objective. And so I also—I don’t see an extended ceasefire. I just don’t see the Israelis accepting that. And I think the question becomes, this is really what Steven was raising, if they don’t want to occupy Gaza, which they clearly don’t, and it’s true there’s no way the PA can come in. I mean, I’m happy to talk about revitalizing or reforming the PA. It was done before, by the way, in 2007. Right after they had lost, by the way, they had lost Gaza in a coup. They had no credibility because of that. There was complete lawlessness throughout the whole West Bank. At the time, I was actually—I was it in the Bush administration, but I was working with a younger coherent—a younger cohort of Palestinians trying to see what could be done in the West Bank. And the Bush administration insisted, organized all the donors, went over to Ramallah and said, you know, unless you appoint Salam Fayyad and empowered him, now we’re cutting you off. And he went ahead, and he did that. And Fayyad did succeed in cleaning up the place. It’s not impossible to do that. It would be harder right now. And it’s not going to be instant. We’re talking about, in my mind, you know, probably eighteen to twenty-four months for that. So you need some kind of interim administration in Gaza, and you need it under some kind of international umbrella. We’ve seen this done before. We look at what was done after the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. There was a U.N. mandate. There was a U.N. administration. Is that something that could be possible for Gaza? Certainly, it wouldn’t get through the Security Council if it’s an American initiative, because the Russians would veto it. But if it was an Arab-led initiative, I’m not so sure it couldn’t be possible. The Arabs won’t do that unless they see this as part of a larger whole. Meaning, they will do things they weren’t prepared to do before in terms of investing in the PA to revitalize it. They want to see two states as the outcome. They understand that if you don’t revitalize the PA and reform it in the West Bank, it can’t come back into Gaza. You can’t have two states unless you politically reunify Gaza and the West Bank. So you can—you can see at least conceptually what could be done. The key challenge is, will you get international forces to go in in a circumstance where Hamas hasn’t been completely defeated and where they would have to impose on Hamas? I don’t see anybody prepared to impose on Hamas. So, again, you come back to can Israel succeed in defeating Hamas to the point where they don’t disappear, but they basically lose their political control and are too weak to resist those who might come in to do a management? Who makes up this kind of international administration? And I have thoughts on that. But that’s, in effect, what you’re going to need if you’re able to succeed in what I think the Israelis, at this point, remain determined to do, which is to make sure that Hamas is no longer in control of Gaza. Which, as I said, doesn’t mean you eradicate Hamas. It doesn’t mean you annihilate Hamas. Because that’s not achievable at all. FROMAN: And just to clarify, is it—you mentioned the U.N. going in following Khmer Rouge for Cambodia. Is it possible that the—some combination of Arab States takes control over it? ROSS: Again, only if Hamas has, in a sense, been defeated to the point where it’s no longer in control, where one has to then negotiate what is going to be the Israeli withdrawal. You can’t have the Israelis, in a sense, defeat Hamas to the point where it’s no longer control. If they simply pull out, you have a vacuum. And God knows what’s going to happen in those circumstances. So you’re going to have to work out some kind of arrangement where the Israelis will withdraw you’ll bring in an international force. And in that circumstance, where Hamas has been defeated and where there’s a U.N. umbrella—and, you know, the tradition there, we always talk about international legitimacy. Then I could see—I could see certain Arab countries playing a role, even on the security side of it. For example, Morocco. I could see Morocco playing a role in the context I just described. If that’s not the circumstance, then I don’t see an Arab role. FROMAN: Amaney, you’re the co-principal of this Arab Barometer Project, which is the longest standing survey of public opinion in the Middle East. Quite remarkably, a version of the barometer came out on October 6, or the data was from October 6, from Gaza, giving a view of the Gazans view of their political environment. Tell us a bit about what the lessons were from that survey, and then let’s talk about what the impact of this war might be on it. JAMAL: Yes, thank you, Michael. And it’s a great pleasure to be with Steven and Dennis as well. So, you know, the Arab Barometer sort of monitors social, political, and economic attitudes of ordinary citizens across the Arab region. We so happened to be polling in both the West Bank and Gaza right before the October 7 incident, atrocity in Israel. And what we found in the Gaza polls, if you may, is that about two-thirds of Palestinians in Gaza said they had no or little trust in the Hamas regime right before the attacks on Israel. About 60 percent of Palestinians in Gaza felt that they couldn’t freely express their opinions. And another about three-fourths said they didn’t feel that they had the right of assembly and protest freely. So, increasingly, Palestinians in Gaza are basically assessing the Hamas regime more and more in terms of a—or, are seeing it more and more in the ways of an authoritarian regime governing in Gaza. More importantly, in terms of—when we look at the economic side of the story in Gaza, three in four Palestinians were saying that in the previous thirty days they ran out of food and they didn’t have enough money to feed—to buy more food. So another—three in four; that’s almost 75 percent. That number is drastically up, Michael, from 2021, where we asked the same question of Palestinians in Gaza. Then, in 2021, only 51 percent of Palestinians said they couldn’t afford to feed their families in the previous thirty days. So that’s almost another quarter of the Gaza Palestinian population complaining about economic conditions. And this is very surprising. When we asked Palestinians, well, who do you blame for this economic crisis? We listed a number of options, including the Israeli blockade. The most oft-cited response was mismanagement of public funds by the Hamas government. The blockade came in second. And it’s not to say that the Gazans don’t believe that the blockade is a problem, but that they—the citizens of Gaza were sort of almost fed up, if you may, with the public mismanagement. Steven spoke about corruption in the ranks of the Palestinian Authority. Seventy-two percent of Palestinians in Gaza believed Hamas was corrupt and was—and there was widespread corruption in the ranks of the Hamas government. If I could say one thing, Michael, about the PA. I have—in our poll, we also found, just to sort of back what Steven and Dennis have alluded to, about 52 percent of Palestinians in Gaza believe the PA, the Palestinian Authority, is a burden on the Palestinian people and think they would be better off if it were dissolved. So this does highlight the serious legitimacy crisis that the Palestinian Authority faces among the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza. But I do want to remind everybody that the Palestinian Authority itself was created alongside the Oslo peace process, and its sort of mandate was to work with Israel to bring a Palestinian state. So a lot of the illegitimacy that the West—that the PA bears, or that—why Palestinians are so skeptical of the PA is 100 percent the corruption, but also the fact that they have not been able to deliver on any of the promises linked to peace. If you look at the settlements on the West Bank, we have now 750,000 settlers on the West Bank. At the eve of Oslo, those numbers were closer to 100,000. So this has not helped the PA. When we ask Palestinians which political party do you have the most faith in? The plurality party still is Fatah on the ground. A third of Palestinians support Fatah. Hamas comes in second, but it has less support than Fatah. So there is something there to work with, some kind of—you know, if you’re asking me, I’m answering questions that I wasn’t asked so forgive me—but to work with Fatah and maybe some elements of the PA that have, like, technocratic skills, to see where this might go is something I think worth taking a look at. FROMAN: I know it’s hard to conclude with any certainty, but what would be your guess about how the crisis in Gaza might be affecting how Gazans view Hamas? Do they—are they likely to show less support for Hamas because Hamas brought this on them, or are they likely to rally behind Hamas because Hamas is defending them and the broader Palestinian cause, allegedly? JAMAL: So, Mike, this is a great question. Previously in our polls when there have been these cycles of violence between Israel and Hamas, we’ve seen that support—Hamas has benefited. Hamas has benefited from the cycles of violence. It sort of basically is able to mobilize public sentiment behind it. Having said that, Michael, this is—what we’ve also seen on October 7 is just basically so atrocious and so unbelievable that we have not seen this before. There are these ongoing debates within the Palestinian camp—and remember, when we talk about support for Hamas, there is a little bit of that zero sum sort of calculation. If Hamas benefits from something, the PA does not. If Hamas is not benefiting, maybe the PA does benefit. There are conversations right now. Did Hamas miscalculate? Did Hamas overreach? Why bring in the—why go after hostages? In ways that are leading to different conversations, which might ultimately benefit the Palestinian Authority in the long run. FROMAN: From your surveys, how much faith do Palestinians have in the likelihood of a two-state solution? JAMAL: So, Michael, by and large, across the board, when we ask Palestinians, what is your—what is the solution that you favor the most? The majority of Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank, will say, a two-state solution based on the ’67 borders, where Israelis and Palestinians coexist and live in peace and harmony. The one-state solution does not track well. It tracks a lot better in the diaspora, if you may. It does not track well with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza are really committed to the national cause, which is to have their own sort of independent Palestinian state. So that, by and large, remains a viable option. In Gaza—when we ask Palestinians in Gaza, of these options, which one do you support the most? We asked them about the two-state solution, the one-state solution, and a confederation. We also allowed for a fourth option, which was “other”. About 80 percent chose one of the solutions that basically coexist with the State of Israel. Twenty percent did write in other—use the other option, Michael. And they wrote in armed resistance. So that’s one in five. But 80 percent is still something to work with, at least for us optimists. It gives us something to work with. FROMAN: Terrific. Let’s open this up. Emily, can we have our first question? OPERATOR: Yeah, of course. (Gives queuing instructions.) OK, and we’ll take our first question from Andrea Martin (sp). Q: Hi, everyone. Thank you for today’s briefing. I wrote the question in the chat, but I’m happy to repeat it. I’m concerned that I don’t hear a Palestinian voice or perspective on today’s panel. I appreciate the professor’s research, but that’s sort of third hand. And if Mr. Cook’s assessment that the Palestinian Authority is not legitimate, then who is the partner for the Palestinian people? What I’m hearing in today’s discussion seems to prolong this undemocratic apartheid practice. I’m a student of history. I’m a legislative staffer on the Hill for thirty years. And I’ve watched Jim Crow in the U.S. I’ve watched Apartheid in South Africa. And I’m not hearing you all describe—I don’t hear a Palestinian voice on this panel. And I’m just hearing this sort of paternal discussion about the Palestinians without hearing their voice today. FROMAN: Probably start with Amaney, and then perhaps, Dennis, you want to chime in as well. JAMAL: Thank you, Andrea, for that. So I think, you know, from the Palestinian perspective, no, they do not want to live under Israeli occupation. They are—they do not want this conflict in Gaza to end with a new occupation. As you know, Palestinians want to end the Israeli occupation on both the West Bank and in Gaza with an independent state. So that’s not viable, I mean, from their perspective. And in we see this in our polls. And if you want me to represent that voice, we know that Palestinians are—Palestinians want to live in peace and freedom and dignity alongside the State of Israel. And that’s really important to take note here. ROSS: I want a two-state outcome I’ve worked for it for, like, the last forty years. So it’s something I deeply believe in. I think the Israeli occupation in the end is not in Israel’s interests. I am not someone who subscribes to the language that Israel is an Apartheid state. You can obviously look at what goes on in the occupied territory as one thing. You look at what exists in Israel, it’s something quite different. When you have someone like Mansour Abbas, who is a member—is actually an Islamic party within Israel, is a member of the Parliament, ask him, is Israel an Apartheid state? And he will say no. So we can use these labels, and the labels sort of tell a story to a lot of people. These kinds of labels tend to add to the sense of demonization of one side or the other. You know, I’ve spent so much time dealing with this conflict over the years that the thing that’s always troubled me is that everybody engages in their debating points, but they never—they never focus on problem solving approaches. So I think there is a Palestinian voice representative here. I would also say that—I won’t speak for Steven, although I will right now. I think that the two of us have had a long-standing position that there needs to be a two-state outcome. Because there are two national movements with two national identities. The idea that one state would be a solution is an illusion because you’re asking these two national identities to submerge themselves. And that’s just not going to happen. So you need two states for two peoples, and you know, we are a long ways from that. But I will tell you, there will be a political reckoning in Israel when this is over. When you have more than three-quarters of the Israeli public holding the current government responsible and holding the current prime minister responsible, there will be a political reckoning. And there will be something else. For the first time, we will actually see a debate in Israel over what the relationship with the Palestinians should be. People tend to forget we had Oslo but it wasn’t a debate. This was something that was a secret channel that became public. Rabin and Peres were committed to it. There was an opposition to it, but there wasn’t really a debate. It was adopted by the Knesset. When Sharon withdrew from Gaza in 2005, there was no debate. There was opposition to it, but there was no debate. So we’re going to see something happen in Israel not only as part of a political reckoning, but we’re going to see a debate for the first time: What should Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians be? And you know, I can envision two positions. One will be: Look, we just saw what happens with Hamas, which was a quasi-state, and you’ll see what kind of a threat that represents to us, so we can’t live with it. And I can see another school that basically says: You know what? We have just defeated Hamas, and if we continue to occupy the Palestinians and think that they will simply acquiesce, you’re in a dreamworld. We will radicalize and we will create successors to Hamas. That will be a very strong voice. In the end, this is going to play itself out. And we can think about what role we play in terms of trying to affect it, but this is—ultimately, it has to be an Israeli—Israelis will be most committed to an outcome that results from their own debate. FROMAN: And, Dennis, if you had to speculate right now, which of those two camps would prevail? ROSS: I think the camp that says we’re going to have to—we can’t continue to occupy Palestinians and assume that somehow they’ll simply accept that. By the way, I’ll just say in passing—not to bring in history, although I, obviously, toil that from time to time—when Jabotinsky wrote about the Iron Wall, one of the reasons he wrote about the Iron Wall is because, he said, there is no reason to believe that the Arabs who live there will be any less attached to their land than we are. It’s too bad that some of the people on the right wing in Israel don’t seem to understand that. FROMAN: Let’s go to the next question. OPERATOR: Our next question is from Rami Khouri. Q: Thank you very much. It’s good to see all of you and hear your thoughts. I’d like to ask all three panelists, if they want to say. When we get some kind of arrangement—when the assault on Gaza ends, and the fighting stops, and whatever happens with the detained people on both sides and the prisoners—there’s probably going to be a big effort to create some kind of negotiation for some kind of outcome, and your discussion here has mirrored what I’ve heard for the last seven weeks. People are just speculating. Nobody has any clear idea what will happen, but we all have ideas about we have to work together. My question is, given the fact that the United States has been the—has almost monopolized mediation for about the last forty years with almost nothing to show for it except the Abraham Accords—which are not serious mediation processes, I don’t think, or serious contributions to real peace and justice for both sides—what do you think is going to be the situation in terms of who can coordinate or manage or lead that process? Because the United States clearly has lost tremendous credibility. Most of the world—the Third World, the South, and many others—don’t trust it. They don’t believe it. You know, Biden’s in the war room with Netanyahu as this war is being developed. That raises a lot of questions about the credibility of the United States. So what kind of—but the U.S. has to be there because they’re the only people the Israelis trust. So what kind of possible multilateral negotiating mechanism can be created, possibly building on the lessons of the Madrid process? Well, I didn’t—I thought— FROMAN: Thank you. Q: You’re supposed to identify ourself. I forgot. I’m from—with the—I’m a Palestinian, but with the American University of Beirut. FROMAN: Thanks, Rami. Dennis, you want to take that one? ROSS: Yeah, I’ll start with it. Look, Rami said at the end the U.S. has to be involved because it’s not just a question of the only one that Israel trusts; it’s the only one that has any influence on the Israelis. I might just say as an aside I went into Gaza in early 2005 after Sharon had announced he was going to withdraw from Gaza, and I made the case when I went there, speaking to a group of a couple hundred—and actually, unbeknownst to me although I saw when I arrived, several leaders of Hamas were there, including one of the founders, Mahmoud Zahar. And I basically made the case. I said, look, the—Israel’s getting out. You turn Gaza into Singapore and, you know, the international community and the Israelis themselves will say: OK, if it’s good enough for Gaza, why not the West Bank? But if you turn it into a platform for attacks against Israel, who’s going to say: Let’s take that failed model? Nobody in the audience was prepared to engage on that, but they were all saying the U.S. can’t be an honest broker. You can’t be an effective broker. And I wasn’t part of the government because this was during the Bush administration. And I said: You know—this was 2005. We’d had the Second Intifada. It wasn’t over yet. And I said: For the last four years, the Bush administration hasn’t been any kind of broker—an honest, dishonest; in fact, it hasn’t been any kind of broker. It walked away. Can anybody here tell me you’re better off with the U.S. not having been a broker at all? And you know, with four thousand Palestinians having died during the Second Intifada, nobody in this audience, who—none of whom had been shy, was prepared to say they were better off without the U.S. being a broker. So my point is, yes, the U.S. is going to have to be a broker. The question Rami is raising is, are there others who can contribute? And I would say one way to think about this differently may be to look at Arab states who can play a role that is different than we’ve seen in the past. One of the things when I was in Saudi Arabia that I heard that was very different than I’ve heard in the past was much more of a readiness to play a role both in terms of revitalizing the PA but also playing a role within Gaza in terms of reconstruction, provided this was part of a whole—I heard the word “holistic”—provided there was a whole approach that also had a political horizon and a political destination, meaning two states. So I do think there is a role that Arabs can play, especially those Arabs that have a relationship with Israel. And even—and we know these days there are Arabs who have a relationship with Israel that may not be all that visible. But, yes, I think there is a role for them to play here. Those that the Israelis have created some kind of—some degree of trust with can play a role. They also can play a role in terms of providing incentives to the Palestinians. So I think that’s different than we’ve seen in the past. And I would suggest—I would—and I wouldn’t be against, by the way—I mean, I would like to see at some point maybe another kind of Madrid II conference. I don’t rule that out as something one might do as a way of creating some agreed set of principles, which will be hard to produce. But again, one of the things we don’t—if we treat our approach as if this is October 6, we are—you know, we’re kind of missing what I think is something that has been transformative. Israel after October 7 is not the same Israel as before, and we’re going to see there’s going to be a reckoning. I also think there needs to be some soul searching on the Palestinian side. Who really is going to represent them? As Amaney points out, if you look at what is the broader consensus among Palestinians, somehow that needs also to be—there has to be some means for reflecting there. I don’t know if the process of revitalization and reform in the PA can contribute to that, but I do think that we’re going to need to see some soul searching both among Israelis and among Palestinians. OPERATOR: Our next question is from Anton La Guardia. Q: Thank you very much for this. To what extent can the U.S. or others play a role in revitalizing the PA? What does it mean? What does it involve? Over what time scale? And, secondly, to what extent does Antony Blinken’s attempt to set out that political horizon that Dennis was talking about put him at odds with Bibi Netanyahu and his government? And to what extent can he press on that, for example, by, you know, acting on what is, after all, American policy to reopen the consulate in Jerusalem, to, you know, be harder and tougher on the whole question of settlements in the West Bank, and so on? In other words, are there things the U.S. can be doing now, apart from saying no ceasefire and trying to mitigate the humanitarian consequences, that would concretely create facts on the ground—to borrow a phrase—towards that Palestinian state? FROMAN: Who’d like to take that one? Steven? COOK: I’ll take a stab at it, though I am the one who said that I think the revitalization of the Palestinian Authority, as Mike was nice enough to quote what I said, a fantasy cooked up in Washington. I think that, you know, there—dovetailing on what Dennis said, there does need to be some rethinking within the Palestinian camp as well, and I think rethinking the Palestinian Authority is primary precisely for the reasons that I pointed out at the—at the opening of this call: corruption, dysfunction, and lack of legitimacy, as Amaney’s polls point out. So if Secretary of State Blinken believes that, you know, he is going to wrangle Saudis, and the Emiratis, and others to contribute funds to revitalize the Palestinian Authority, I think he’s going to run into some significant trouble there because of the view that the Palestinian Authority, from the perspective of these capitals, that the—that is throwing good money after bad. And to answer the other question, you know, it strikes me that the secretary of state is running at odds with the Israeli prime minister, who has ruled out the idea that the Palestinian Authority would play the kind of role that seems to be the one that we’re all speculating about, to use Rami Khouri’s terms there. So I think once again these ideas that are being bounced around about reinvigoration and a two-state solution, I think under kind of the way in which we have done business in the past is no longer the way in which we can do business going forward. I agree a hundred percent with Dennis on that. The question is, how do we lower our sights? How do we actually do something that is practical to help the Palestinians? How do we as the United States make a difference in this conflict when we have become so compromised by it? And one of the—one of the ways of doing that is, one, listening to the Palestinians and seeking a Palestinian solution to it rather than dictating to them along with—along with the Israelis what the outcome should be. I do think, though—and this is counter to what Rami is saying—there is very much an important role for those Abraham Accords countries to play. By their good relations with the Israelis, they have an opportunity to influence and help rethink and approach this. Of course, this is—all of this is an extraordinarily heavy lift, and it’s going to be American diplomacy, if anything, that’s going to help make it happen. But I think that shooting for a reinvigorated Palestinian Authority and a two-state solution is a little too much at the moment. I think we need to start by kind of circling around who can be helpful, how can they be helpful, and in what way. And thus far, we haven’t had those kind of practical discussions. We’ve only talked about reinvigorating the Palestinian Authority and two-state solutions, which I think are the ultimate goal here but not what we need to think about in the—in the short and medium term. ROSS: Mike, could I just add to what— FROMAN: Sure. ROSS: I basically agree with what Steven just outlined. Look, I think when I say the Israelis are going to have a political reckoning, I also mean that they have to work through everything. Look, this is a country that suffered a trauma on October 7, and that trauma is deeply felt right now. So if you suddenly go and you say to them here are the concessions you’re going to have to make, it’s going to fall on deaf ears. That’s why they have to work through this process themselves. There are things we can do to try to help, you know, buy the time to be able to do it. I do think the Abraham Accord countries, but even some who aren’t part of it but have some quiet relations with Israel, can play a role. I also think that the American—the United States could help create the political horizon—not by getting into enormous detail, but one of the things we can be saying is this is a process, this is an approach that has to end the occupation consistent with Israeli security needs. The symbol of occupation is a very powerful, emotive one for the Palestinians, obviously, and for the Arabs. Now, the Israelis have to understand—again, they have to go through this debate, but they themselves are going to come to grips with the fact that if you just think that you can continue to control the Palestinians forever, and things are going to remain, and you’re never going to have to worry about them being anything but quiescent, that’s a dreamworld. And the Israelis, I think, will come to grips with that. But they—we have to construct an approach that gives them the time to be able to do that, and one way to do it is buying time by coming up with a kind of formula. Two states—the administration’s already saying two states, but if we—if we have a formula like ending occupation consistent with Israeli security needs, that is something that I think can buy us some of the time that is necessary. And then you need to do some practical things on the ground for sure. JAMAL: And, Michael, just if I can add, I think just to highlight what’s been said, like, it’s very important that whatever governance is going to come to Gaza, that it’s not simply another governing authority in a vacuum, because by—from the very beginning, that governing authority will lack legitimacy. It has to be part of a larger project here—two states, ending the occupation, but really concrete steps. What we don’t want is a situation where Hamas and Fatah are going at it for another civil war in Gaza. Bringing in some of the Abraham Accord countries to help assist with that sort of transition, if you may, I think is really, really important. But also keeping in mind, you know, if we—if we all agree that the legitimacy crisis or at least part of the legitimacy crisis of the PA is because it could not deliver, we need to make sure that the goals are laid out very concretely and not simply like, you know, something that will happen after thirty or forty years. FROMAN: OK. Emily? OPERATOR: Our next question is from Esmir Milovic (ph). Q: Hi. Thank you for taking my question. Recently, I spoke with Yossi Bellin, who told me that he prefers option when it comes to discussions something like new Oslo, not like a Madrid, because he thinks that that could help to find a solution. But also, Professor Amaney’s research says that the man who’s in jail, Marwan Barghouti, is more popular than Ismail Haniyeh and Mahmoud Abbas. How to find that leader, but also—maybe Ambassador Ross can answer this—to find that way to negotiate that solution and to find the way how to put the plan on paper, as Professor Amaney just said? Thank you. FROMAN: Maybe start with Amaney and then Dennis? JAMAL: So really quickly, Esmir (ph), thank you so much. You’re referring to the poll. I did not mention this, but Marwan Barghouti is the most popular of the Palestinian leaders on our list, including Mahmoud Abbas, Ismail Haniyeh. I believe we asked about others, but Marwan Barghouti, I think, enjoys about 34 (percent), close to 40 percent support among the Palestinians. He comes out of the Fatah party. He’s in an Israeli jail for his, you know, role in attacking Israelis, so I’m not entirely sure where that stands. Some people, at least on the Palestinian side, think this is like a Nelson Mandela moment. Can he be released to lead a Palestinian state? I’m not entirely sure that’s where the discourse is, but I’m curious to hear what others have to say. ROSS: Yeah. I know that he has that kind of popularity. I think part of the reason he has that popularity is because he’s in and Israeli—in the Israeli jails right now. I don’t know. I mean, there—I will tell you there has always been a small constituency within the Israeli security establishment that sort of looked at him as a potential partner. And there were even those, I think, who at different points in the past thought maybe they should open a kind of quiet dialogue with him. I don’t think that’s ever actually happened, and I don’t know whether it’s in the cards right now or not. I still think it’s kind of derivative of Israel having to work through its own process and go through their debate before—I mean, at this point I don’t see anybody making the case to go start talking to Marwan Barghouti. But I do think—I mean, look, somehow there has to be the sorting-out process on the Palestinian side, and, you know, I would love to see a kind of, you know, transitional period of, say, eighteen months, where you have an interim administration in Gaza that is led by Palestinian technocrats, of which there are many. JAMAL: Exactly. ROSS: And, you know, then you have security. The civil administration is largely run by them. There are—you know, you provide police forces. Assuming that the—you know, there’s a certain kind of outcome here where the Israelis have succeeded enough so Hamas is not in control and not capable of preventing anybody else from managing within Gaza. And there is a reconstruction project that is a massive one, that is tied to demilitarization for Gaza, and you revitalize the PA, and then you have an election after eighteen months. Then I think—you know, this is a way to help produce the kind of discussion among Palestinians you’re going to need, and it can also be a way to legitimize a leadership that doesn’t exist right now. I mean, the interesting thing about Amaney’s polls is that, you know, if you go back to 2006, when you had the election when Hamas won, it wasn’t just because they ran one slate and Fatah ran multiple slates; it’s because they were running on an anti-corruption platform. JAMAL: There you go. There you go. Yeah. ROSS: You know, they were not—they didn’t run on a muqāwamah platform. They didn’t run on resistance as a platform. They ran on, we’re going to provide you good governance. And the interesting thing is you look today at your polls, they’re seen as just as corrupt or almost as corrupt as the PA. So there’s a need—there is a need for a new Palestinian leadership, but nobody can appoint that from the outside. It’s going to have to emerge from within. FROMAN: Emily. OPERATOR: Our next question is from Steve Erlanger. Q: Hello, everyone. I have to say, having spent a bunch of time on the West Bank, Hamas is incredibly popular there because they’ve done something, as opposed to sat on their a---- for years making themselves rich. So just to put that out there. The question that, really, I want to ask is the reputational damage to Israel from the casualties in the war. How bad is it? How lasting will it be? Will it produce a new generation of radical kids? I mean, I presume, whatever happens in Gaza, whoever tries to run it, there’ll be suicide bombings, there’ll be an insurrection, there’ll be all kinds of things in Gaza that will make running it, by whomever, very, very difficult. But I am very much interested in your sense from the outside of this reputational damage to Israel in Europe, among Americans of left youth. Is this one of those moments where things change? Thank you. FROMAN: Steven, you want to start off? COOK: Yeah, I’ll start with that, and then I’ll leave the youth to Amaney. I think it’s important to underline Steve Erlanger’s point about the popularity of Hamas in the West Bank. I think there is a reservoir of support for Hamas in the West Bank, primarily because—and I realize, you know, Dennis is right; Hamas won those elections based on corruption. But there is something to be said about Hamas’ narrative about resistance and that—in contrast to Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, which has said we will achieve our national goals and—(off mic)—through negotiation, only to see the number of settlers in the West Bank explode. And Hamas, which has said there is another way, and that definitely certainly seems to resonate with people, particularly at moments of crisis, as Amaney’s polls point out. And so it is important—just to go back to the previous question—that whoever emerges in Gaza not be seen as an American/Israeli proconsul in the Gaza Strip, and that’s a real challenge at this point. As far as Israel’s reputational damage around the world, I think, you know, look, the protests and the social media I think speak for—speak for themselves. I will point out, however, that although the Jordanians have recalled their ambassador, the Bahraini ambassador didn’t go back to—go back to Tel Aviv, no country has broken relations with Israel. Israel is an important country. It is well integrated into the global economy. It’s an important cog—one of the most important cogs in technology, cybersecurity, and those kinds of things. All that being said, a push into the south and enormous numbers of casualties and killed will test the ability of leaders across the Arab world who have established relations with Israel to maintain those relations. I think the Israelis don’t have much more time and certainly cannot kill as many people as they have killed in the next phase and expect there not to be a significant change. As far as youth, I think the politics of Israel is already changing in this country. The question is, how much will this conflict change it? And with that, I think Amaney has a much better view of that, given that she works on a college campus. FROMAN: Good transition. Amaney. JAMAL: Yeah. No, thank you so much. You know, I mean, it does raise the question of just the duration of this conflict, the number of casualties, and that corresponding level of how much is Hamas being weakened by this, right? So it’s not entirely clear where all this stands, and if you’re going to see another, what, ten (thousand), fifteen thousand casualties, it’s going to put a lot of pressure on Arab countries. The populations there, the region, the entire region was turning a page in terms of, you know, who would have imagined twenty years ago you’d have, what, eight countries almost in bilateral peace treaties with Israel in the Arab world? I mean, so there’s a lot of momentum now that is working towards what we’re calling this reconciliation phase and I think this has to be part of this project. And the truth is, you know, more civilian casualties is not really going to solve this conflict, unless we were sure that it was really weakening Hamas. And I’m not entirely—you know, again, I’d like to hear from others. So that’s the first thing. So, you know, this is where we are also going to need those Arab leaders if diplomacy is going to stand a chance. What’s happening on college campuses is—across the country—you know, is—there’s a lot of activism around this issue. There’s—you know, both on the pro-Israeli side, on the pro-Palestinian side. Again, from my lens, what I’m seeing new that I didn’t see twenty years ago is the pro-Palestinian coalition has changed in its character. It now includes progressive Jewish voices; it includes other minorities and other people who sort of are treating the conflict part of a larger set of conflicts that pits sort of the more advanced world against the Global South. So that’s, like, it’s a much broader coalition. But in the end of the day, you know, in our position as deans and as administrators, you know, our job is to continue educating, making sure that the space is provided for—hopefully—open and rigorous debate, free speech on our campuses, and the ability to counter harmful speech, is just to consistently engage our students to be thinking along those lines. I think our universities should be modeling what the future of this conflict is going to look like, which is the following: We are always going to have varying viewpoints on the subject matter. People are going to disagree. You’re going to have disagreement within the Palestinian camp; you’re going to have even disagreement in the Israeli camp, let alone across the divide, but we have to keep—and not dialoguing for the sake of dialogue, because that’s sort of what Oslo sort of what—people sort of thought that was Oslo’s demise. But we need to sort of work together to sort of dialogue around, well, how do we fix this together? How do we address it? How do we—you know, come up with recommendations? And that’s what I hope—I hope this energy that our students are exhibiting is translated into this really meaningful work, because peace-building is not easy work. You know, Dennis and others can tell you that. FROMAN: Thank you, Steven, Dennis, Amaney, for taking the time, joining us. Thank you, everybody, for calling in and participating. This of course was on the record. There will be a video and a transcript posted on our website, CFR.org. We encourage you to go to the website to see other materials that CFR and Foreign Affairs have been putting out on the Middle East crisis. And we will continue to come to you regularly with press and other briefings. Thanks very much for joining us. (END)

The Council on Foreign Relations hosts experts to discuss recent developments on the humanitarian crisis and to analyze the laws of war and human rights in Gaza. 

Steven A. Cook, CFR’s Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies, gives an update on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, background on Israeli-Palestinian relations, and implications for the future of the region. TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach at CFR. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher focused on U.S. foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Through our State and Local Officials Initiative, CFR serves as a resource on international issues affecting the priorities and agendas of state and local governments by providing analysis on a wide range of policy topics. We’re delighted to have you all join us today for this discussion. Again, this webinar is on the record. The video and transcript will be posted on our website after the fact at CFR.org. And we’re delighted to have over 375 participants from forty-eight states and U.S. territories with us today for this discussion. So I am pleased to introduce my colleague Steven Cook. We’ve shared his bio with you, so I will just give you a few highlights. Steven Cook is the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of three books on the Middle East and will soon release a fourth book, entitled The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East. And he is a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine and is published widely in international affairs journals, opinion magazines, and newspapers. So, Steven, thanks very much for being with us today to talk about Israel and Palestine. Can you give us an update? We saw the horrific events on October 7 and the past month has unfolded. Could you give us an update of where we are, how the conflict is playing out in Israel and the Gaza Strip, and maybe some history, as well, to level-set this discussion? COOK: Sure. Thanks very much, Irina. And thank you all to those of you in forty-eight states and U.S. territories. Good afternoon. I’m glad that you’re with us. I just wish the topic was a more uplifting one. Before I get into where we are and some background on what’s been happening, I have two qualifications. The first one is I have absolutely no good news to report. There is no good news coming from the Gaza Strip in the war between Israel and Hamas. I will—there is some good news in the Middle East, and I’ll share it with you at the end of my—at the end of my remarks because I think it’ll be helpful for people to have some good news coming out of the Middle East at the—at the end of this. Second qualification: Recognizing that not everyone—and Irina alluded to this—not everyone is following every development in the war, I thought it would be appropriate to offer you somewhat of a situation report on where everything stands as of three p.m. East Coast time and then provide some analysis on the diplomatic efforts around the conflict. So let me just start where we are at this moment. Today is—and it’s, of course, coming to the end of the day in Israel and the Gaza Strip—today is the thirty-fourth day of the war. Israel has split the Gaza Strip into two and is fighting deep into one of the main cities of the Gaza Strip, called Gaza City. Both its aerial bombardment of the region continues and there is a very, very significant ground operation underway. Anywhere between 1,200 and 1,400 Israelis were killed on October 7. Since the ground operations in the Gaza Strip began, about forty Israeli soldiers have been killed. That brings the total number of soldiers—Israeli soldiers killed in the conflict so far to five hundred. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but given the small size of Israel’s population, it is a—it is very, very significant numbers, both in terms of civilian deaths as well as military deaths. Palestinians killed are now over 10,500, including many, many children. But that number is actually likely to be much higher. Senior U.S. government officials testified before Congress yesterday, saying that the number of people dead actually can’t be accounted for. Because of Israel’s military operations, there are many, many bodies that are buried under the rubble in the Gaza Strip. Keep in mind also that the population of the Gaza Strip is 2 million people, so 10,500-plus numbers killed is an extraordinary number of people if you do it in terms of—you know, think of it in terms of how many Americans that would be if you do a population comparison. It would be a huge, huge number. Obviously, it is a devastating loss of life in this conflict and a disastrous humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip right now. Militarily, the Israelis are closing in on the Hamas leadership. They’ve taken out a number of the organization’s command bunkers, most recently one located in the Jabalia refugee camp. You may remember last week there was Israeli airstrikes on Jabalia that killed large numbers of civilians. That is because Hamas puts its military infrastructure among the civilian population. That doesn’t make it any better, but just to give you an idea of how complicated this battlefield is, that is what is happening. And now the Israelis have set their sights and are fighting towards a major hospital in northern Gaza called Al-Shifa Hospital, and that’s because the Israelis believe that the major Hamas command bunker is in and beneath Al-Shifa Hospital, which has, you know, huge numbers of staff, large numbers of wounded people seeking shelter in this place. And so the coming days are likely to be extraordinarily, extraordinarily difficult. Tension remains very, very high in the West Bank. Now, for those of you who are not steeped in this, let me stop for a second and give you a sense of the geography of this situation. You have Israel, and then actually to Israel’s east is what’s called the West Bank, the West Bank of the Jordan River. It’s confusing because it’s to Israel’s east. In the West Bank is where what’s called the Palestinian Authority is located. The Palestinian Authority was a pre-state/proto-state institution that was set up in 1994 by dint of a diplomatic agreement between Israel and what’s called the Palestinian Liberation Organization, overseen by the United States. The Palestinian Authority used to rule over parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Since 2007, however, when Hamas and the Palestinian Authority fought a brief civil war, those two territories have been split. The West Bank—parts of the West Bank have remained under the Palestinian Authority, which is run by the PLO and has a president named Mahmoud Abbas. And the Gaza Strip, which is to Israel’s southwest, is run by Hamas. But in the West Bank, there are—there’s lots of tension. Israel has conducted mass arrests of Hamas supporters in the West Bank. Israeli settlers—Israel has, depending on how you count, close to half a million settlers in the West Bank. This is not inside Israel—sovereign Israeli territory. In the June 1967 war, Israel conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as East Jerusalem and Syrian Golan—the Syrian Golan Heights. And since the early 1970s, Israel has built settlements in the West Bank, and now there are somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million settlers in the West Bank. Those settlers have, since October 7, taken matters into their own hands, law into their own hands, and have been acting, I’ll sort of say, aggressively towards the Palestinian population of the West Bank, to which the Israeli police and military forces in the area have essentially turned a blind eye. In the West Bank, 165 Palestinians have been killed. There have been a few—handful of Israelis killed in the West Bank. Like I said, there’s mass arrests. There remain 239 hostages that Hamas is holding in—and others are holding in the Gaza Strip. There was a grisly video today that another terrorist organization, called Palestinian Islamic Jihad, released today which showed an elderly Israeli hostage and a young boy. Among the 230 hostages are elderly people, children, and even toddlers. Qatar has been negotiating the release of these hostages, and today President Biden asked for a three-day pause in the hostilities in order for Hamas to release fifteen hostages. The Israelis rejected this idea, indicating that they would pause for a few hours for a hostage release. From the Israeli perspective, a pause, especially one as long as three days, is a slippery slope to a ceasefire that Israeli leaders believe will be imposed upon them before they achieve their military goals. So they have rejected this pause that President Biden suggested, as well as other pauses in the fighting for humanitarian reasons. They have, however, said that they will allow a pause in the fighting on a daily basis to allow Palestinian civilians who are caught in the northern part of the Gaza Strip to make their way into the southern part of the Gaza Strip, which they say is a safe zone. However, we know that it is not entirely safe because the Israelis have conducted military operations against Hamas targets in the south that have killed Palestinian civilians in the process. On the diplomatic front, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in the Middle East last weekend and, quite frankly, he achieved nothing. There was no humanitarian pause. There’s been no ceasefire. Plans for after the fighting seem similarly doomed. The secretary of state came to the Middle East with a plan to, quote/unquote, “reinvigorate” the Palestinian authority. This is this proto-state that is located in the West Bank, in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Over the years, it has become compromised by corruption and all kinds of dysfunction that have made the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority—it has compromised their legitimacy. President Mahmoud Abbas was elected in 2004 for a four-year term. He has since not stood for election again for fear that he might lose. So he is in the fourth year—he’s in the eighteenth year of a four-year presidential term, and has come to really represent very few people, if anyone, in either the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. So the idea is to reinvigorate the Palestinian Authority in order that it is—would extend its administration back to the Gaza Strip, this administration that it lost in 2007. This will be extremely difficult to reinvigorate the Palestinian Authority. Like I said, it has very little legitimacy. And, of course, President Abbas has a demand that it would only—he would only consider being essentially an American and Israeli agent in the Gaza Strip if the United States commits itself to a two-state solution to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, which I’ll get to in just a second. The second piece of Secretary Blinken’s diplomacy was to stir up—stir up support for an international force that would provide security in the Gaza Strip once hostilities came to an end. Not a single country has volunteered for this. The Europeans don’t want to do it. Of the Arab countries, only two really have capacity to do it, that’s Egypt and Jordan. They actually have the most to lose by getting involved in this situation. And no one else has volunteered for this very, very difficult mission. And then we come—and all of this is in a prelude to the United States launching a new diplomatic bid to achieve a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, something that has been on the American agenda for the better part of the last thirty years. But I think that the chances for a two-state solution in which there is an Israel and a Palestine sitting side by side and in peace is highly unlikely, and that’s because Israel’s minimum demands for peace can’t possibly be met by the Palestinian side and the Palestinians’ minimum demands for peace are things that the Israelis can’t possibly—can’t possibly meet, and they’re essentially mirror images to each other. Israel wants Jerusalem to be its undivided, eternal capital. The Palestinians want Jerusalem to be their capital. The Palestinians want a return of Palestinian refugees who fled the country or were forced out of the country at Israel’s creation in 1948 to be able to come back to their ancestral homes, even though many of them don’t exist—even a—even a token number of them to come back in. The Israelis will not permit that. The Palestinians want a contiguous, fully sovereign state. The Israelis will not accept a fully sovereign, territorially contiguous Palestinian state; they say from their perspective this is a security problem for them. So those—on the basis of those terms, it seems very, very unlikely that American diplomacy towards a two-state solution will be successful even if we may embark upon diplomacy towards that end. It seems likely that in the aftermath Israel will occupy some parts of the Gaza Strip for some time being. Of course, in that they risk getting sucked into a long and grinding insurgency, which is something that they want to avoid. Which is why they say that they will achieve their military objectives, which is to kill as many Hamas operatives and leaders that they can in order to make it so that Hamas cannot threaten Israel’s security again, and then they will leave and impose a security regime over the Gaza Strip while not administering it. That, to me, sounds a lot like what the situation was on October 6, the day before this conflict began. So that’s where we are in diplomacy. That’s where we are on the ground as far as the fighting goes. As I said, I have absolutely no good news for you. But I will share one piece of good news from the Middle East. And I read in an Emirati newspaper today that in 2023 seven Arabian leopards—very, very rare animals; there’s only two hundred of them left in the world—seven of them have been born and released into the wild in Saudi Arabia. That’s really good news. That’s the best news coming out of the Middle East that I’ve heard in the last almost five weeks. Thank you very much. I’m glad I can impart just a little bit of good news to you. I look forward to your questions. Thanks. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Steven, for that sobering overview of where we are. Let’s open it up to all of you for your questions. As a reminder, we are on the record. (Gives queuing instructions.) And we look forward to hearing from you. Let me see. We already have several raised hands. So the first question we will take from Utah Representative Jay Cobb. And if you could unmute yourself. I think you just muted yourself back. Still muted. OK. Let’s go next to Paul Melser. Q: Yes. Thank you. So, you know, looking historically, the two-state solution that was offered in ’47 was rejected by the—by the Arab parties, led to the war in ’48. Two-state solution was nearly—sort of nearly achieved, I think it was—when was the Oslo Accords? I don’t remember the year, but again, rejected by the Arab side. And let me tee up a couple of other points to get to my question. Before ’67, Gaza was Egypt, the West Bank was Jordan. Is there—is there any possibility that in the end it would revert to status quo ante and just have it go back to Gaza being part of Egypt, Jordan—West Bank being part of Jordan? COOK: Well, let me just clarify a number of historical points here. First, you’re quite right that the Arab side rejected the U.N.’s partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. That’s U.N. Resolution 181 of 1947. And there are, you know, a variety of reasons which on principle the Arab states rejected and Arabs who lived in the area rejected it. And then, of course, that led to the 1948 war that led to the establishment of Israel. The Oslo Accords was not a two-state solution. It was a commitment to, one, set up the Palestinian Authority; and, two, there was a long-term ten-year transition period that we hoped might lead to a two-state solution. Wasn’t necessarily rejected, but over that nine- to ten-year period the number of settlers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip doubled while extremists like Hamas sought to undermine it through the use of terrorism in Israeli streets. There was a horrific spate of bus bombings that went on in the mid-1990s over this. So it’s not specifically that the Palestinian side rejected the Oslo Accords; it’s that those Oslo Accords came to naught because of a variety of political and security—political and security problems. Now, Egypt did occupy the Gaza Strip for most of the period between 1948 and 1967. There was a brief period after 1956 when France, Great Britain, and Israel invaded Egypt in a brief war where Israel occupied it. Then the Israelis withdrew and it once again was occupied by Egypt. But it was never part of Egyptian territory. The Gaza Strip has never, ever, ever been part of sovereign Egyptian territory. And the Egyptians on principle believe that Israel, as the occupying power—and there’s a lot of debate over whether Israel remains the occupying power, since it withdrew its settlers and its military from the Gaza Strip in 2005 but continues to blockade the Gaza Strip along with the Egyptians—but nevertheless, the Egyptian position is that Israel as the occupying power is responsible for what happens in the Gaza Strip. And the Egyptians do not want Israel to foist the Gaza Strip and all of its problems, including security problems, on Egypt. So that is where it stands. So there is no chance that Egypt will accept the Gaza Strip; in fact, have signaled that there is an effort on the part of the Israelis either to empty out the Gaza Strip of its—of its population into the Sinai Peninsula or to try to dump the Gaza Strip and its issues onto Egypt, it would be a threat to the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next written question from Alexander McCoy, who’s a senior advisor at the New York State Senate: How is the military operation in Gaza being perceived by different elements of the Israeli political system—right, center, left? COOK: Well, I’ve spent a lot of time on the phone with folks in Israel, and I think right, center, and left there’s been a rally around the flag if not the government. And there is broad public support for the goal that the War Cabinet has set for the Israel Defense Forces, which is to destroy Hamas and make it unable to threaten Israeli security. Now, a lot of analysts have questioned whether that’s at all possible, given the difficulties that the United States had in battling al-Qaida, the Islamic State over many, many years. The Israelis, quite obviously—now, of course, those organizations are quite different from Hamas. The Israelis have not done—taken on this military operation heedlessly, although vengeance is certainly part of it. And they believe that they can do this and can exit. I think only time will tell. But getting back to your question, there’s been, as far as I know, very, very little political opposition to the way in which the IDF is carrying out its operations among—within the Israeli public. FASKIANOS: Thank you. We’re going to take the next question from Delaware Representative Cyndie Romer. Q: Hi. Thank you. I was just wondering, in your opinion, what coalition of countries do you think have the best chance of engaging with Israel and Palestine in peace discussions? And are you hearing anything about us getting to a point where even these discussions are happening? COOK: Yeah. Unfortunately, there is—there is very little in the way of discussions of peace or an end to the historic—an end to the historic conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and there is very little discussion of how to—there have been demands for a ceasefire. There has been—although the United States does not support a ceasefire, it supports humanitarian pauses. So there isn’t really discussion about how hostilities come to an end, other than allowing the Israelis to continue to battle Hamas until they achieve their military goals. But there has been a lot of diplomacy around how to get humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. Countries like Egypt, countries like Greece, Cyprus have been deeply involved in these discussions. Turkey has offered its—somehow that it would play a leading role here, although geographically that would be extremely difficult. Obviously, on a geographic level, the most important country here is Egypt. And from almost the very beginning, the Egyptian government has been gathering supplies for Hamas—not for Hamas; I’m sorry—for the Palestinians through the Rafah border there. The problem has been getting the material into the Gaza Strip. First, there is a very delicate diplomatic agreement that has to be struck in order to do that. Hamas does have a say over what is coming and, obviously, wants it to come in. The Israelis, though, insist on inspecting this material, because part of the way in which Hamas has built out its infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, these tunnels that you keep hearing about and other things that have aided their military effort, has been by diverting humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. So the Israelis are insisting that any truck that comes into the Gaza Strip has to make this roundabout, hundred-kilometer drive in order to get to a place where the Israelis can inspect it before it is approved to go in and provide humanitarian assistance. And of course, you know, eighty trucks at a time, a hundred trucks at a time is really a drop in the bucket. So the Greeks, the Cypriots, the Egyptians, the French, they’re all talking about perhaps using shipping to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, except for the fact that the ports in the Gaza Strip are heavily, heavily damaged at this point and the Israelis insist they will not allow their border crossings to be used for humanitarian aid. So, really, the only game in town here is Egypt, and that’s where the diplomacy lies. But it remains extraordinarily, extraordinarily difficult. FASKIANOS: We have a question from Erin Bromaghim, deputy mayor of international affairs in the office of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. And she asks: Do you see any way forward for the Abraham Accords? COOK: Well, the Abraham Accords are a separate set of agreements between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan that were signed in 2020. The core countries of the Abraham Accords—Sudan was brought on a bit later—Morocco, the UAE, and Bahrain, and thus far none of those countries have broken diplomatic relations with Israel. The speaker of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Emirati Federal National Council, which is their parliament, has said the Abraham Accords are here to stay. The Bahraini—the lower house of the Bahraini parliament issued a statement suspending economic ties and demanding that the Bahraini ambassador not go back to Israel, but the royal court said that that was nonbinding and that relations remain. So the Abraham Accords remain intact. Morocco and Israel moved very quickly, as well as Israel and the UAE have moved very quickly to establish ties in all spheres. Those are, quite obviously, under strain. There have been recalls of ambassadors. Jordan, which is not an Abraham Accords country but signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1994, has recalled its ambassador. But no country has actually broken their relations with Israel. Saudi Arabia, which up until this conflict the Biden administration was engaged in intensive diplomacy about normalizing relations with Israel, the defense minister was in Washington last week and he is reported to have said that Saudi Arabia remains interested in normalizing relations. On what terms, however, remains an open question. One, though, does have to wonder that, as Israel’s military operations continue to unfold, and more and more innocent civilians are caught in the crossfire and Palestinians are killed in the process, how long it will be before Israel loses its friends in the Arab world. And I think, once again, they have been counseling the Israelis privately that they have to do more to protect Palestinian lives, even if, you know, there is a nod, nod, wink, wink. They have—you know, they don’t look upon Hamas positively either. The problem, it seems, is, you know, similar problems that the United States confronted when it was battling in Fallujah in Iraq or in counterterrorism operations in Mosul; is that when you have built-up areas with lots of civilians, people are killed. And the Israelis have done a lot of damage with their aerial bombardment, but I just—I also want to emphasize that, you know, Hamas operates within these areas as well, which is by design to make it as difficult as possible for the Israelis. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to a raised hand from John Jaszewski, who is a council member in Mason City, Iowa. If you can unmute yourself. Q: How’s that? Are we good? FASKIANOS: That’s great. Thank you. Q: OK. My question is simple. We live here in the center of the United States, here in Iowa. It is so far away from us, the conflict, we have little effect. But what worries me is the kinds of conflicts that are erupting in this country between Palestinian backers and Israeli backers. Is there anything we on a local level could do to ease that tension? COOK: Well, John, thanks for the question. I generally do policy, not politics. But because, you know, I think the images and the things that we’re hearing and seeing have been so upsetting for many, many people, I think just the—I think part of what’s happening is that this conflict is focusing partisans on each side, but the battles here really are about other things, about the terms of debate in the United States about what values and norms that we all share. And what I have counseled people is that if they look at how these debates and fights are unfolding, it is terribly dehumanizing for both sides. I mean, I think—it sounds crazy, but there is a debate right now over, you know—you know, which way to kill children is less immoral. I mean, this is—this is crazy, and it shows that we’ve become unmoored in our understanding of what we agree on and what our common values and norms are. So I think that the—for someone like yourself and others at the local level who are confronting this kind of thing, I think it’s important to remind people to recognize that what we’re talking about is humans and human suffering, and not to dehumanize the others, and that an emphasis on civility no matter how—you can be a passionate partisan for Israel or the Palestinians without dehumanizing the other side. And I think it’s very important and it’s very, very unfortunate that over many, many years Palestinians have been dehumanized in this debate and in everyday life under occupation, and that Israelis and Jews have been dehumanized in a lot of debates in other places, including on university campuses, and that’s how we get to this. And my plea to everybody is to recognize that there is human suffering and to do everybody’s level best to be as civil as possible. You’re quite right; you yourself and you folks out there in the middle of the country aren’t directly affected by it. But the United States has an important role to play in the Middle East, and Israel—and helping to ensure Israeli security as well as helping to ensure the free flow of energy resources out of the region have been longtime important interests of the United States. In time, those things may change. But for the moment, that is what our primary goals are. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Great. Thank you, Steven. I’m sorry if you froze for me. I apologize for— COOK: No, that’s all right. FASKIANOS: —stepping on your continuing. COOK: That’s OK. You didn’t step on me. COOK: I was—I was finishing up there. FASKIANOS: OK. Great. There are a couple written questions about Iran, so I’m going to take Yasamin Salari, an aide in the California State Assembly: If you could expand upon the Iranian government’s role in this conflict and, you know, their part in all of this. COOK: Right. It’s a really good question. And I think that what should be clear by now is that Iran is a patron of Hamas. The Hamas leadership, after October 7, publicly thanked Iran for its support—financial support, for weapons. We now know that some of the tactics that were carried out in the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians were—Hamas operatives were trained in Iran to do those—to use paragliders and other means to get into—to get into Israel. What Iran has done in the region is set up or co-opt or support different groups that it calls the Axis of Resistance—resistance to Israel, but also resistance to the United States. Hamas is part of that. So is another group, called Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which has also fired rockets at Israel, also holds hostages, also did participate in the terrorist attacks on October 7; and Hezbollah, which is an Iranian—I’m sorry, a Lebanese organization; as well as you might have heard recently about the Houthis in Yemen, who have fired drones and missiles in Israel’s direction. They’re all proxies of Iran, and they have varying degrees of autonomy from Iran. Hamas has more autonomy from Iran than, for example, Hezbollah or the Houthis or Islamic Jihad. And that’s why there is some debate about Iran’s complicity. It may very well be that Iran did not know that on October—on the morning of October 7 Hamas was going to undertake this major terrorist operation within Israeli territory, but they’re certainly complicit in the fact that they—in that they have, by Hamas’ own admission, armed and provided financial support for and training for Hamas. It's important that these—to recognize that these proxies are used by the Iranians to sow chaos around the region because the Iranians don’t like the current regional political order, which is dominated by the United States and its partners in the region, and would like to push the United States out of the region. In the short run—in the short run, it seems like that has backfired, right? The United States has surged forces back into the region. There’s two aircraft carrier battle groups, one operating in the Mediterranean, one operating in the Persian Gulf. About two thousand Marines have been moved closer to the region and air forces been moved closer to the region. But I think that the Iranian leadership thinks more in longer terms, and that if they could drag the United States back into the region and potentially into the conflict, over time the American people will demand that the United States leave the region, which would be a victory. In the meantime, their aim is for Israel to get sucked into a long and grinding conflict in the Gaza Strip that would sow political division in Israel, weaken the IDF, and in a longer period of time contribute to the weakening of Israel that it could ultimately be destroyed. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question, a raised hand from Texas Representative Jon Rosenthal. Q: OK. Am I unmuted? COOK: You are unmuted. FASKIANOS: You are. Q: Very good. Thank you so much. So I want to first thank you for having this. And I want to touch on when you were talking about earlier how the rest of the world is viewing this, especially as civilian casualties and deaths rise by the day in the—in Palestine, in the Gaza Strip. And my concern is at some point, you know, this plan to turn world sentiment against Israel will work. And so my question is, you know, can’t—since Israel relies very, very heavily on the United States and our U.N. coalition partners for the assistance that allows them to operate militarily the way that they do, is it not possible in any way for us to kind of urge them or even strongarm them to take extraordinary measures to spare civilian life there? Because, clearly, they are out in the public, in the media, you know, the Israeli officials saying that they’re taking measures to spare Palestinian lives, and it’s just not working when day after day we see the thousands of children and innocents are being killed. So I guess the question is, why can’t we more forcefully urge them to take more extraordinary measures? And I know that it makes their task more difficult, but I think if they were to show the world what kind of measures they are taking to preserve life while, in contrast, the other side doing their best to—for the opposite goal of seeing not just Israelis, but Palestinians—they put their own people in harm’s way for the purpose of this kind of propaganda? So that’s my question, can we do that? COOK: Yeah, I think it’s a—it’s an important point. And I think that first, in terms of Israel losing support globally, I think that that’s already happened. I think that there was an outpouring of sympathy for Israel in the first week or so after the attacks revealed both the number of Israelis who were killed and the brutality with which some of them had been murdered. But it was, I mean, I think a foregone conclusion a foregone conclusion—and I think Israelis understood this—that once they undertook their military operations, that support would drain away. And that’s precisely what has happened. I think the—I think the United States faces a number of challenges. First of all, I think, the administration has counseled the Israelis on doing everything that they can to protect civilian life, recognizing the challenges of what this battlefield looks like. I think that this has been done in a private way. So that’s—but the Israelis are determined to, as they have said from almost the very start, to change the rules of the game. And part of the previous rules of the game was that they would bend to international pressure and reestablish some sort of wild and wary kind of deterrence with Hamas. But after so many Israelis were killed, they seem determined not to bend to international pressure. And while front—and, once again, let me underline, this is not my perspective. I’m trying to articulate to you what is coming out of Jerusalem. Is that the Israelis believe that they are doing everything they can. When they conduct airstrikes on parts of Jabalia refugee camp, they are calculating that their military target is so important that the, quote/unquote, “collateral damage” is worth that risk. Once again, others may have other risk factors, and they make a different decision. But that’s what the Israelis are doing. And the United States has said: We do not want to tell the Israelis how to conduct their operations. This is their security. So the other challenge that the United States has is, what if the United States were to tell them? What if they were to put the pressure on them, and it didn’t work? It would put the president in an extraordinarily weak position. And I think our leverage is sort of—yes, Israel has enjoyed a significant amount of support and military aid from the United States. But I don’t think—I think the word “dependent” is too strong. Israel is an industrialized country that has its own, rather well-developed, defense industrial base. The Iron Dome system that has been used to protect Israeli population centers was completely developed on its own—on Israel’s own. The United States became involved in it after it was deployed by Israel because the U.S. Army wanted to use it. And so there was an agreement that was struck that an American contractor would produce the interceptors for it. So I don’t think that they are as dependent—and they never wanted to be—as dependent upon the United States, for precisely this reason. So it’s extremely, extremely difficult, especially as the Israelis define this conflict in existential terms. As important as the United States is to Israel, when they define—when any country defines something in existential terms, whatever external actors can bring to bear, whatever pressure they can bring to bear, or incentives they can offer, are not as—or, are not as powerful as we’d like to think that they are. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next written question from Josh Stump, legislative director in the Office of State Representative Dale Zorn in Michigan: How much support is there for Hamas in Gaza? Is that level of support consistent with all Palestinians? COOK: Yeah, it’s a—it’s a great question. And what is the astonishing irony of this conflict, as well as other conflicts between Israel and Hamas, you know, going back to 2008 and 2009. And then it was one in 2012, and then in 2014, and then another one in 2021. There might have been one in between 2014 and 2021, I can’t keep them all straight. Is that prior to this outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hamas, Hamas’ public support has been not great. In fact, there was a poll recently released by very reputable polling out of Princeton University called the Arab Barometer, which demonstrated that Hamas’ public support in Gaza Strip was—prior to this conflict—was something like 23 percent. But after the hostilities, it seems to have—of course, it’s hard to poll in the middle of hostilities—but it seems that support for Hamas has increased. And that’s the stunning irony of this, that Hamas left to govern in the Gaza Strip has a hard time maintaining broad public support. But when the Israelis really start taking—dismantling the Gaza Strip, support for Hamas and its resistance is important. And this stands in contrast to the Palestinian Authority, which has said negotiation is the best way to achieve Palestinian goals of justice and statehood, but really have gotten nothing in return from negotiations that haven’t really happened in a long time, and that didn’t achieve much to begin with. And Hamas’ actual resistance, which Hamas says will achieve justice and ultimately statehood by destroying Israel. And so in these moments of crisis, there seems to be support—more support for Hamas. But it’s above, I think, it’s ceiling. And I think it’s a function of this war, and other outbreaks of violence. FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to go next to a written question from Christine Ead: How can real progress be made when the elephant in the room is Iran? Through the funding, training, and encouragement from Iran, through the proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—the terrorism will continue. It is as, you know, in Iran’s best interest to have conflict in the region. So we’re barely responding to the multiple attacks on our military in the region. Is this a sign of weakness to the leaders of Iran and others? COOK: Well, that is—that is really one of the fundamental foreign policy debates that has been going on in Washington for quite some time. Which is, how to deal with Iran. Because Iran pursues this strategy where its proxies sow chaos around the region to advance its and their agendas, their local—the proxies’ local agendas as well as Iran’s broader regional agendas. Yet, there is reluctance to take on Iran directly from both parties, by the way. From, you know, foreign policy officials in both parties we’ve seen this. Because of concerns that it would lead to a wider regional conflict. And I think everybody understands that Iran is behind a good portion of the chaos in the region, but were—at least up until October 7, we’ll see what happens going forward—were willing to live with that because the cost of going after Iran was higher than managing these periodic outbursts of local violence. And I’ll give you an example. If you think that Hamas has a lot of rockets, and in its opening salvo against Israel it fired between two thousand to five thousand—Hamas has more than a hundred thousand rockets in its arsenal. So that in a conflict, it could fire that many rockets as the Hamas opening salvo for many hours in a row, which would overwhelm Israel’s defense systems. So it is a carefully—people have talked about this over and over again. You’ve seen political leaders, members of the Senate, talk about exactly this issue. My pleading is that we need to have a realistic view of what Iran is doing. And that the idea that a number of administrations have pursued is that with enough diplomacy and enough incentives Iran wants to have a new relationship with the United States. I think it should be clear by now that Iran does not want to have a new relationship with the United States. It wants to push the United States out of the Middle East. And one of the ways of doing that is by keeping these proxies—you know, keeping these proxies in a position to do harm to America’s partners and, as I said before, sow chaos in the region. But I think American policymakers are also stymied by not wanting to trip the region into a wider regional conflict. FASKIANOS: Great. The next written question from Selectmen Gus Murby, in Medfield, Mass.: Taking into consideration the comments that have been made around wavering international support for Israel’s military course of action, do you see any realistic alternative military courses of action Israel could pursue that would allow them still to accomplish their objectives, or incapacitate Hamas, that would be considered to be more acceptable to the international community? COOK: Well, you know, let me—let me just start out with a—with a caveat that I am not a military analyst or, you know, a defense guy. I’m not a guns and trucks analyst. And I defer to those experts. I suspect that when see senior U.S. military officials were in Israel prior to the beginning of the ground operations, they were making the case for a smaller ground operation that was quite targeted. I think the Israelis took some of their advice about handling this, but, you know, it doesn’t seem that the Israelis are undertaking more limited directed strikes. I think their view is they can’t do that without taking down buildings and finding the entrances to tunnels. Again, that’s my reading into what Israeli thinking is on this. I also think, to be completely honest with you, that there is, from the Israeli perspective, a rationale for the way in which they have unleashed the kind of violence that they have unleashed on the Gaza Strip. Keep in mind that, you know, the legend of the IDF is that it is this vaunted, efficient, fighting force. And on the morning of October 7, a bunch of dudes in paragliders and others broke through their very sophisticated defensive systems and killed 1,400 people. That has had an impact on their deterrence and their reputation. And I think that part of the unleashing of violence that the Israelis have done is to reestablish that deterrence by convincing people that the Israelis are just as crazy as they think they might be. This is on the record. Maybe I should have—maybe I should have said that in a different kind of way, but you get the point of what I’m saying. That there is an imperative here from the Israeli perspective to reestablish deterrence. And the way to do that is to unleash withering attacks on Hamas. And, unfortunately, that means that civilians—and a significant number of civilians—are going to get killed in the—in the process. FASKIANOS: There is a question from John Dugan, vice mayor of San Carlos in California: Assuming Israel imposes order in Gaza after the conflict, as they said they will, are you at all optimistic they can sponsor legitimate elections, seat a government that can be accepted by most Gazans? I mean, what is the— COOK: That is not the Israeli plan. Not the Israeli plant at all. FASKIANOS: OK, what is it? COOK: They’ve been very—they’ve been very, very clear that their plan is to destroy Hamas and leave, and that they will not be responsible for administering government in the Gaza Strip. There is a—there is a civilian affairs part of the Ministry of Defense that administers—that previously administered the Gaza Strip when the Israelis were on the ground there, when they occupied the Gaza Strip—physically occupied the Gaza Strip—that administers the West Bank as well. But they have no intention of doing that. Whether they can carry through on that threat or not remains an open question. But their goal is to destroy Hamas and leave, and then establish a security regime over the Gaza Strip. Which is not to organize elections and administer it, but is to, once again, create basically a cordon sanitaire around the Gaza Strip so that no one from the Gaza Strip can get anywhere near Israel and threaten the security of Israelis within the country. FASKIANOS: Right. There are several questions in the Q&A about— COOK: Anything about the leopards? Anything about the Arabian leopards? FASKIANOS: Nothing about the leopards. About the military—the weapons and some international law. And those are not necessarily in your—in your lane. But maybe you could talk a little bit about the rise of antisemitism. And, you know, we’ve seen a lot of conflict on college campuses and, frankly, in cities and communities on both sides, right? What would you advise state and local officials to be doing to lower the temperature? And, of course, there’s a social media element of this and the misinformation that’s happening on social media, which is—you know, spreads like wildfire. And what’s true, what’s not true and, you know. So maybe you could just talk a little bit about that. COOK: Look, there’s undoubtedly been a rise in antisemitism around this conflict. FBI Director Wray, in rather startling testimony a week or so ago, made it clear that, you know, while Americans Jews make up about 2 ½ percent of the population, they are subject to 60 percent of the hate crimes in this country. And that there has been a very significant uptick in in antisemitism. This isn’t—this isn’t—this isn’t pro-Palestinian activism. This is actual antisemitism. I mean, you know, swastikas being—you know, defacing, you know, homes, dorm rooms, things like that, that don’t have anything to do with Palestinian activism. I think that antisemites are taking advantage of the conflict. There is a raging debate whether there is a difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. I think that many anti-Zionists would make the argument that their criticism of Israel has nothing to do with Jews. American Jews would say that’s not necessarily the case. And we’re not going to solve that. We’re not going to solve that problem. What I think for—you know, local officials are in a really terrible position, because everybody’s asking them to make statements about a conflict that is thousands upon thousands of miles away. I think at the Council on Foreign Relations, we are—we have the luxury of never having ever made a statement on anything, that the Council on Foreign Relations itself, as an institution, doesn’t make—doesn’t take an institutional position on something. And, you know, if I was a local elected leader, a county councilman, and a selectman, a board of supervisors, I would immediately table legislation saying, the county, the town, the borough, the whatever, doesn’t take an institutional position on something, although individual leaders may, at their discretion, take a position on something. That would be my recommendation. But as I recommended to the gentleman from Iowa before, I think—when involved in this, I think the thing to do is to remind people of their humanity. We’re talking about people who are suffering gravely. And that it is easy for us to talk about this conflict from where we are. And as a result, we tend to slide into this slippery slope of dehumanizing and not recognizing that people are suffering. I have the privilege of knowing people on all sides of this conflict. And those people that I speak to all sound the same way, distraught. People who haven’t—who are worried about family, who are worried about their people, those kinds of things. And I think we have to be cognizant of that and try to lower the temperature. Certainly, social media is not going to lower the temperature. There’s a ton of mis and disinformation out there that is not going to lower the temperature. So we should, when confronted with this, do everything possible to remain logical and maintain—and ensure that we approach these issues with our humanity forward, and recognizing how much suffering is happening in this part of the world right now. FASKIANOS: Steven Cook, thank you very much for this hour. And to all of you. There are a lot of questions we didn’t get to, but of course, we will have more webinars and dig into some of the questions that were raised on the military aspect or the international law perspective. COOK: My pleasure, Irina. I do invite everybody who’s listening in to take a look at what my colleague David Scheffer has written on international law. He’ll be doing more on that. And I know you’re going to say it, but, you know, my colleagues and I have been, you know, very busy at this, trying to provide insight and analysis. And it’s all on CFR.org. My apologies. I’m not a military guy and I’m not an international law guy, so I can’t pronounce on those issues. But there are resources available that will help you understand these issues better. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. COOK: Check out those Arabian leopards, though. FASKIANOS: The Arabian leopards. Maybe we should include that in the link that we’re going to send out to the webinar recording and transcript. COOK: I mean, I’m looking for anything at this point. I’m looking for anything. FASKIANOS: Anything to bring a smile and to have some hope. You can follow Steven Cook on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @StevenACook. And, again, to reiterate what Steven did say, you can visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for the latest developments and analysis on this situation, as well as international trends and how they’re affecting the United States. And, of course, we do welcome you to send your suggestions and feedback for future webinars. You can email us at [email protected]. So, again, thank you all for being with us today. Enjoy the rest of the day. COOK: Thank you. (END)

Experts from the Council on Foreign Relations discuss the ongoing Israel-Hamas war and the implications it has for Gaza and the Middle East region.

After the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched attacks from Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared today that Israel is “at war.” Experts from the Council on Foreign Relations will discuss the implications of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for Israeli-Arab normalization and U.S. policy and interest in the Middle East. Please note the video and transcript of this meeting will be posted on the CFR website.