Implications of the Gaza Conflict: What has been won, what has been lost?

A Conversation with Aaron David Miller, Hussein Ibish, and Jonathan Schanzer

Moderated by Eli Lake

Wednesday, August 13

After one month of bitter fighting, many questions remain about the results of the Gaza war. Did Israel re-establish deterrence? Did Hamas win by merely surviving? Has Egypt re-emerged as a regional power? Have Turkey and Qatar gone too far in promoting Hamas’s agenda? What diplomatic battles are ahead?

FDD was pleased to host an expert panel on these and related questions. The panel identified the lessons learned for Washington policy-makers and legislators in a volatile Middle East.

Eli Lake is the senior national-security correspondent for The Daily Beast. He previously covered national security and intelligence for The Washington Times. Lake has also been a contributing editor at The New Republic since 2008 and covered diplomacy, intelligence, and the military for the late New York Sun. He has lived in Cairo and traveled to war zones in Sudan, Iraq, and Gaza. He is one of the few journalists to report from all three members of President Bush’s axis of evil: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

Aaron David Miller is currently the Vice President for New Initiatives and a Distinguished Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. For two decades, he served at the Department of State as an advisor to Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State, where he helped formulate U.S. policy on the Middle East and the Arab-Israel peace process, most recently as the Senior Advisor for Arab-Israeli Negotiations. He also served as the Deputy Special Middle East Coordinator for Arab-Israeli Negotiations and Senior Member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. He has written four books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the most recent being The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (Bantam, 2008). His latest book, The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President (Palgrave, 2014), will be out in October. His articles have appeared in newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The International Herald Tribune.

Hussein Ibish is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP). He is a regular contributor to many American and Middle Eastern publications, including Foreign Policy and The Atlantic. He is a monthly contributor to Al Hayat and a weekly columnist for Now Lebanon. Mr. Ibish, a former Washington correspondent for the Daily Star (Beirut), is also a regular commentator on radio and television programs. His most recent book is What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda? Why Ending the Occupation and Peace with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal (ATFP, 2009). Mr. Ibish served as Executive Director of the Hala Salaam Maksoud Foundation for Arab-American Leadership from 2004-2009. From 1998-2004, Ibish served as Communications Director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Jonathan Schanzer is the vice president for research at FDD.  He is a former terrorism finance analyst the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Dr. Schanzer has authored three books about the Middle East: State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and the Unmaking of the Palestinian State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and Al-Qaeda’s Armies: Middle East Affiliate Groups and the Next Generation of Terror (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004). Dr. Schanzer testifies often before Congress and publishes regularly in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and others.