With the intensifying Israeli-Palestinian conflict, questions remain regarding whether Arab-Israeli peace can be improved. On Oct. 18, the Crown Center for Middle East Studies hosted a panel discussion in Rapaporte Treasure Hall addressing this theme. Profs. Shai Feldman (POL), Abdel Monem Said Aly, and Kahlil Shikaki were the three panelists. Feldman is the Raymond Frankel professor in Israeli Politics and Society and the founding director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies. Abdel Monem Said Aly is the chairman, chief executive officer, and director of the Regional Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo, chairman of the Egyptian daily newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, and a founding senior fellow at the Crown Center. Khalil Shikaki is the director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah and a founding senior fellow at the Crown Center.

The event began with the opening remarks of Marilyn Diamond, the honorary consul general for Morocco in Illinois and chair of the Crown Center’s advisory board, and Prof. Gary Samore (POL), the Crown family director and professor of the practice of politics department at Brandeis University.

Following the opening remarks, the discussion’s moderator, Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Legal Studies at Suffolk University and a former senior fellow at the Crown Center, initiated the discussion by acknowledging both Palestinian and Israeli victims of the latest attacks and the escalating violence that ensued. She also stated that the purpose of the discussion is only to explain but not to justify any aspect of the event. 

The discussion primarily addressed three aspects of the conflict: causes of the eruption of violence, short-term and long-term ramifications of the events, and prospects of Israeli-Palestinian or Arab-Israeli political settlement.

Prof. Feldman explained that in order to understand the history of conflicts, it is crucial to evaluate the context on the international, regional, domestic, and individual levels. 

When analyzing international and regional aspects of the conflict, Prof. Said Aly emphasized the other Arab nations’ influence on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Said Aly commented that, for instance, despite the U.S.’ denial of Iranian relevance in the conflict, Iran is the main reason for the latest conflict. “Hamas could not and will not do anything without Iran involved. Iran saw that the geopolitical order of the Middle East is about to change, and it will change fundamentally. So that is regional change that you see, leading to where we are now in this crisis,” he said.

Shikaki agreed with Said Aly’s remark on the systemic and regional factors, but he believed that those factors were only relevant with the timing of the conflict. “The most important driving forces were domestic,” Khalil Shikaki said. “What protects [President] Abbas and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank but does not protect Hamas in Gaza is the fact that economic conditions are much better than — not great — but much better than they are in the Gaza Strip,” Shikaki explained. 

For instance, unemployment in the West Bank is 15% and its per capita income is $4,000 whereas the unemployment rate in the Gaza Strip is 45% with a per capita income of $1,000, according to Shikaki. 

Although Hamas is more popular in Gaza than it is in the West Bank, according to Shikaki, that does not mean that the Palestinians in Gaza are favorable towards Hamas. In fact, according to Shikaki, 62% of Gaza rejects Hamas who governs Gaza as of now, and as a result, “just four months ago, demonstrations by young people in Gaza took place,” Shikaki said; the demonstrations were the result of unhappy living conditions in the Gaza Strip and targeted Hamas. 

Despite the Palestinian majority rejection against Hamas, Hamas still governs Gaza, which could be advantageous to Israeli propaganda. “This would be the ugly face of the Palestinians,” Shikaki said. “Israel can use it at any given moment. Even the most extreme Israeli right wing minister today in the Israeli government — [Bezalel] Smotrich — in 2015 said, ‘Hamas is a great asset for Israel. As long as it controls Gaza, this is the face we will present the international community with, so it serves our interests,’” he explained. 

Feldman identified another domestic factor, the undermined democracy in Israel, when elaborating on the factors that led Hamas to launch their attack this month. “Israel created a window of vulnerability,” he explained. One of the windows was “an internal turmoil, which resulted from the most recent Israeli government that tried to limit Israeli democracy by changing the balance of power between the various arms of the governing system but in favor of the executive and the Knesset and against the judiciary.”

When discussing the ramifications of the events, Shikaki prompted the question of who wants control of Gaza. “My answer is Hamas,” he said. Excluding any other outside forces, such as Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shia Muslim political party and militant group backed by Iran but only regarding the bilateral Israeli-Hamas war, “the immediate consequence is the ending of Hamas’s rule, and the beginning, in my view, of another Hamas rule,” Shikaki explained. “There is a zero chance that Egypt will be willing to do that. Abbas is not going to be able to do that, even if he's interested, and he's not interested; he will not be able to do that. No one in Gaza is going to be willing to do that. Israel is not going to be willing and able to do that in the long term. It might be able to stay there for six months, but it's not going to want to govern Gaza or control it in a much longer term,” he predicted.  Assuming there is no wider regional conflict, six months down the road, only Hamas would be willing to go back to Gaza, according to Prof. Shikaki.

“You cannot move forward on the Arab Israeli dimension, as if there is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” Shikaki concluded when discussing the prospect of Arab-Israeli conflicts. “If you want peace in the region, [the] Israeli-Palestinian issue has to be addressed,” he said. “If you do not get it, the bloodshed that we have seen in the last few days is just a reminder of the horrible things that could happen if we leave this conflict as it is and just focus on the Arab-Israeli dimension,” he warned. 

“There is something that has to be done in terms of statecraft and political issues,” Said Aly emphasized. On the Arab side, he believed in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestinian Authority (PA). PLO and PA are the “original representatives of the Palestinian people” that “actually take care of the crossing points,” Said Aly stated.  

“My call in Egypt and my call in the Arab world is, those countries who got peace with Israel, got to sit together, make something reasonable on how to do that, and also highlight that nation building issue,” Said Aly said. Regardless of the different perspectives when approaching conflicts in the Middle East, the three scholars agreed that Hamas and other extreme groups cannot represent the Palestinian people and should not be settling conflicts in the Middle East.