On May 14, The New America Foundation welcomed Susan Glasser, Executive Editor of Foreign Policy Magazine and Marc Lynch, Director of the Project on Middle East Political Science for the official launch of the Middle East Channel, ForeignPolicy.com’s site for examining issues in the Middle East.

The launch of the Middle East Channel was followed by a panel discussion, with Daniel Levy, Director of the Middle East Task Force; Rob Malley, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Program; and Aaron David Miller, a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

The panel discussed Miller’s article “The False Religion of Middle East Peace,” largely agreeing that the peace process should not be given up on, but rather that new tactics, including rethinking old assumptions and paradigms, should be tried instead. Each panelist expressed the idea that the United States must play an integral role in resolving the conflict if Israel and Palestine are ever to reach a peace agreement. According to Aaron David Miller, what is most needed now is idealism without illusion.