Event Summary
After voters split over who should lead Israel following parliamentary elections, Benjamin Netanyahu and Tzipi Livni continue to woo smaller parties to build a coalition government. On February 19, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy hosted a discussion analyzing the results of the elections. Senior Fellow Martin Indyk, director of the Saban Center, discussed the players in the newly elected government and their likely approach to war and peace in the Middle East. Stanley Greenberg, former polling advisor to President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak, discussed the shifts in Israeli public opinion that led to the election results.
Event Information
When
Thursday, February 19, 2009
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Where
Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC
Map
Indyk is author of Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East (Simon & Schuster, 2009), in which he chronicles his dealings with five Israeli prime ministers and the Middle East’s Arab leaders. He drew on these experiences, as well as his close personal and professional relationships with the current Israeli and Palestinian leadership, to provide a window into the strategies likely to be pursued by the new ruling coalition. Greenberg’s newly released book, Dispatches from the War Room (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), outlines his experience as a pollster and consultant for five pivotal world leaders, including Ehud Barak during his successful campaign to become Israeli prime minister in 1999. Greenberg discussed the many factors that influence and shape Israeli public opinion and how they led to the February 10 election results.
Transcript
TAMARA WITTES: The apparent power broker in the coalition negotiations that are now underway in Israel, Avigdor Lieberman, met with President Shimon Peres and told him that he would support Netanyahu as Prime Minister but only if Netanyahu formed a National Unity Government with the Kadima Party. This almost certainly means that Netanyahu will be the next Prime Minister of Israel; whether or not that is the final outcome, we may not know for some weeks. But we can say that this Israeli election and the government that is ultimately formed will have very large implications for our new government here in Washington as it seeks to revitalize Middle East peacemaking.
The Obama administration and President Obama himself have set a clear priority on renewing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. They are seeking to move from crisis management coming out of the events of the last 2 months into a new diplomatic initiative. Senator George Mitchell, the Special Envoy for the Middle East Peace Process, will be going back out to the region very shortly to continue to work on those efforts. And there is also the pending question of Syrian-Israeli peace talks which were ongoing indirectly with Turkish mediation until the Gaza crisis and have now been suspended. The Obama administration then has to be concerned about how to pursue this diplomatic initiative facing the possibility of a center-right or even a right-wing coalition government in Israel and, as we might discuss later, disunity on the Palestinian side as well.
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