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Rayburn House Office Building Room 2168 Washington, D.C.
Lunch to be provided. All dietary laws observed. For those of you who are unable to attend, please watch LIVE on EMET’s Facebook page!
Various reports have cited the involvement of the United Nations and Egypt, a temporary ceasefire (a “Hudna”) and not a sustainable peace between Hamas and Israel, a reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas with Fatah taking control of Gaza, the opening to Gaza of the Rafa Crossing in Egypt and the Keren Shalom in Israel, and (most dangerously), the buildup of Gaza’s infrastructure with a port for Gaza.
To shed some light on this issue, we have three of the world’s most distinguished experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in particular, and on the region, as a whole: Dr. Daniel Pipes, Amb. Yoram Ettinger, and Dr. Jonathan Schanzer.
Dr. Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum. His bi-weekly column appears regularly in the Washington Times and in newspapers around the globe. CBS Sunday Morning says Dr. Pipes was “years ahead of the curve in identifying the threat of radical Islam.” “Unnoticed by most Westerners,” he wrote, for example, in 1995, “war has been unilaterally declared on Europe and the United States.” The Boston Globe states that “If Pipes’s admonitions had been heeded, there might never have been a 9/11.” The Wall Street Journal calls Mr. Pipes “an authoritative commentator on the Middle East” and the Washington Post deems him both “a prominent conservative intellectual” and “perhaps the most prominent U.S. scholar on radical Islam.” The Huffington Post recognizes him as “a renowned scholar on matters of extremist Islam.”
Dr. Pipes received his A.B. (1971) and Ph.D. (1978) from Harvard University, both in history, and spent six years studying abroad, including three years in Egypt. Mr. Pipes speaks French, and reads Arabic and German. He has taught at Harvard, Pepperdine, the U.S. Naval War College, and the University of Chicago. He has been affiliated with Princeton and Stanford universities. He served in various capacities in the U.S. government, including two presidentially-appointed positions, vice chairman of the Fulbright Board of Foreign Scholarships and board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace. He was director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in 1986-93.
Mr. Pipes discusses current issues on television on such U.S. programs as ABC World News, Crossfire, Good Morning America, News-Hour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, O’Reilly Factor, and The Today Show. He has appeared on leading television networks around the globe, including the BBC and Al-Jazeera, and has lectured in 25 countries. He has publicly debated leading figures, including Noam Chomsky and Ken Livingstone. More than 100 newspapers have carried his articles, including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Mr. Pipes has published in such magazines as the Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, National Review, New Republic, Time, and The Weekly Standard.
Mr. Pipes has has edited two collections of essays, and written twelve books. His writings, including 5 books and 10,000 articles, have been translated into 37 languages. He sits on several editorial boards, has testified before many congressional committees, and worked on five presidential campaigns. Universities in the United States and Switzerland have conferred honorary degrees on him. He has also been recognized as one of Harvard University’s 100 most influential living graduates and is listed in Marquis Who’s Who in the World.
Mr. Pipes founded the Middle East Forum (MEForum.org), an independent 501(c)3 organization, in 1994. Its mission is “promoting American interests” through publications, research, media outreach, and public education. It publishes the Middle East Quarterly and sponsors Campus Watch, Islamist Watch, the Legal Project, and the Washington Project.
Dr. Jonathan Schanzer is the Senior Vice President at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). He is part of the leadership team of FDD’s Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance, which provides policy and subject matter expertise on the use of financial and economic power to the global policy community. Previously, Dr. Schanzer worked as a terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where he played an integral role in the designation of numerous terrorist financiers. A former research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dr. Schanzer has studied Middle East history in four countries. He earned his Ph.D. from King’s College London, where he wrote his dissertation on the U.S. Congress and its efforts to combat terrorism in the 20th century.
Dr. Schanzer’s books have made unique contributions to the field. He most recently published State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Unmaking of the Palestinian State (Palgrave Macmillan), which argues the main roadblock to Palestinian statehood is not necessarily Israel’s intransigence, but the Palestinian Authority’s political dysfunction and mismanagement. His 2008 book, Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine (Palgrave Macmillan), is still the only book on the market that analyzes the internecine conflict between the two most powerful Palestinian factions.
Dr. Schanzer has testified before Congress and publishes widely in the American and international media. He has appeared on American television channels such as Fox News and CNN, and Arabic language television channels such as al-Arabiyya and al-Jazeera. Dr. Schanzer has traveled widely throughout the Middle East, including Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories. He speaks Arabic and Hebrew.
