Discussion on the Israel-Palestinian conflict often focuses more on the politics of the conflict than on the terrible human cost. The Carnegie Endowment hosted a Werner Kaspar and Kathleen Newland to discuss the humanitarian consequences of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War have fundamentally changed the strategic balance in the Middle East and have had a profound impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Carnegie's Shlomo Avineri argues that four facets can be discerned from current Russian attitudes toward the Arab-Israeli conflict that inform Russian policy.
The way out of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse may be two sets of unilateral steps: a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from most of the Palestinian territories still under its control, coupled with both consolidation to most of the larger and contiguous Israeli settlements and abandonment of the smaller and isolated ones–and, on the Palestinian side, a unilateral declaration of independence.
Senior Associates Anatol Lieven and Martha Brill Olcott and Visiting Scholar Shlomo Avineri discuss Russia and the security challenges from the south.
In light of the failed Oslo Peace Accords and other events that have transpired since, Edward Said's support for an Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Palestinian territories, rather than reaching a Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement, was not only pragmatic, but it was right.