Shany Mor on What Makes America's Peace Processors Tick

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The peace process between Israel and the Palestinians has in the last several decades sucked up more American attention, time, and resources than nearly any other conflict in the world. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, national-security officials, and diplomats have poured themselves into solving the problem. These resources have been expended not only because of how Americans perceived the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s strategic importance to the United States, but perhaps more so because it is a conflict that engages and symbolizes the way Americans see themselves acting in the world.

Despite that huge effort, Americans haven’t succeeded in bringing the Israelis and the Palestinians to any kind of settled arrangement. Furthermore, as the Israeli researcher Shany Mor wrote in this month's essay in Mosaic, American policymakers seem insistent on returning to the same frameworks of analysis and strategy that have failed systematically time and again. Now Mor joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to explain what’s gone wrong, and to talk about why so many American peace processors think the way they do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When you think about the amount of time that American government officials at the highest levels have spent on the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.
0:18.0	And I don't just mean the days and weeks on end of staffers in the White
0:22.6	House and National Security Council, or the State Department, or the Department of Defense,
0:27.9	but also on Capitol Hill, and even days on end of the president himself, whoever it is,
0:33.4	President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, President Trump, you have a conflict that has commanded an enormous amount of attention and resources, and more than that.
0:42.8	It's a conflict that has engaged and symbolizes the way that we Americans see ourselves acting in the world.
0:49.1	Our capacities, our purposes are all bound up in this.
0:53.4	So what does it mean that compared to the time and energy
0:56.5	and psychic weight of the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, that Americans have
1:02.1	not succeeded in bringing the parties to some kind of settled arrangement? And why, moreover,
1:07.2	do the Americans seem to return to the same frameworks and similar strategies for
1:13.1	peacemaking that haven't just turned out to be wrong once or twice, but have systematically
1:17.7	failed time and again. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. This week,
1:23.1	I'm joined by Shanee Moore, a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, and fellow at the University of Haifa.
1:29.3	We discuss his February 2021 essay in Mosaic, The Return of the Peace Processors.
1:34.3	If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe to the Tikva podcast on Apple Podcasts,
1:39.3	Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.
1:41.3	I hope you'll leave us a five-star review to help us grow this community
1:45.1	of ideas. I welcome your feedback on this or any of our other podcast episodes at podcast
1:50.3	at TikvaFund.org. And of course, if you want to learn more about our work at Tikva, you can
1:55.7	visit our website, TikvaFunds.org, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Here now is my conversation with Shani Moore.
2:03.7	Shanee Moore, welcome to the Tikva podcast.
	...

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