Middle East experts recently shared their views on peace in the region with the local community.
During the Simon Wiesenthal Center Southern Region's Spirit of Courage Benefit at Jungle Island in Miami, Elliot Abrams, a top White House advisor on Middle East issues, Daniel Kurtzer, a professor of Middle East Policy Studies at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Bret Stephens, the Wall Street Journal's deputy editorial page editor, participated in the panel discussion, "Arab Spring or Arab Winter — Is there a possibility for peace in the Middle East." The discussion was moderated by Michael Putney, Local 10's senior reporter on politics and government.
Abrams stressed the difficult challenge of getting the Palestinians to agree to peace with the Israelis. During the panel discussion, he said it's hard to get the Palestinians to the table and negotiate and that even if they did show up, they wouldn't be able to do anything mainly due to the division between Hamas and Fatah.
"The Palestinians are divided and are literally fighting," Abrams said in a press conference before the event. "That's not a situation in which they're really able to have negotiations and make hard choices that they wouldn't have to make."
Kurtzer suggested that a challenge to think about is whether Israel is better off by maintaining a status quo that's only going to get worse while confronting the challenge of Iran or if its better off once again trying, without prospects of success, to see if an accommodation can be reached with the Palestinians.
"I would suggest that the risks of inaction, in this case, are exceedingly more dangerous for an Israel that confronts an existential threat in Iran than the risks of action [trying to reach peace with Palestinians]," Kurtzer said during the discussion.
Stephens said that Israel today faces a situation in which American power appears to be in retreat and when Islamism appears to be on the rise. During the press conference, Stephens said when looking at historic moments where peace treaties were either signed or approached, they happened for a few reasons that he doesn't see happening today. During the panel discussion, he remarked that the United States Navy has a remarkable vulnerable small fleet and when the Iranians look at the trajectory of the U.S. military, they look at one in retreat.
"They retreated from Iraq fully, they are desperate to get out of Afghanistan, which the [Obama] administration makes very clear, and its ability to provide the kind of insurance it used to provide for little countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and also Israel is again not what it once was," Stephens remarked.
Tamar Kohn Marks, SWC's Southern Region director, said regarding the panel discussion, "The speakers were outstanding and I think it was a good beginning for a new way of how we're going to do our events because it was stimulating and interesting."