Fed Event: US Policy in the Middle East: Tues., 4/27 at UMD

MODERATORS

• Kenneth Pollack is an expert on national security, military affairs and the Persian Gulf. He was Director for Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council. He also spent seven years in the CIA as a Persian Gulf military analyst. He is the author of A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East.
  
• Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, College Park, and non-resident senior fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. Before coming to the University of Maryland, he taught at several universities, including Cornell University, the Ohio State University, the University of Southern California, Princeton University, Columbia University, Swarthmore College, and the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in political science

PANELISTS

• Ghaith al-Omari is Advocacy Director at the American Task Force in Palestine (ATFP). Prior to that, he served in various positions within the Palestinian Authority, including Director of the International Relations Department in the Office of the Palestinian President, and advisor to former Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. In these capacities, he provided advice on foreign policy -- especially vis-à-vis the United States and Israel -- and security. He has extensive experience in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, having been an advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team throughout the permanent status negotiations (1999–2001). In that capacity, he participated in various negotiating rounds, most notably the Camp David summit and the Taba talks. After the breakdown of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, he was the lead Palestinian drafter of the Geneva Initiative, an unofficial model peace agreement negotiated between leading Palestinian and Israeli public figures. Mr. al-Omari is a lawyer by training and a graduate of Georgetown and Oxford universities. Prior to his involvement in the Middle East peace process, he taught international law in Jordan and was active in human rights advocacy.
• Yossi Alpher is coeditor of the bitterlemons family of internet publications. He has served as Director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University; as Director of the American Jewish Committee's Israel/Middle East Office in Jerusalem; and as a senior official in the Mossad. While at the Jaffee Center, he coordinated and coedited the JCSS research project on options for a Palestinian settlement, and produced "The Alpher Plan" for an Israeli-Palestinian final settlement. Since 1992, he has coordinated several Track II dialogues between Israelis and Arabs. In July 2000, he served as Senior Adviser to the Prime Minister of Israel, concentrating on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In late 2001, he published (in Hebrew), And the Wolf Shall Dwell with the Wolf: the Settlers and the Palestinians.
• Amjad Atallah is the Co-Director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation. He is also a Senior Affiliated Expert with the Public International Law and Policy Group. Prior to working at the New America Foundation, Mr. Atallah headed Strategic Assessments Initiative, a not-for-profit organization committed to providing legal and policy assistance to parties involved in negotiations in conflict and post-conflict situations. Mr. Atallah’s efforts included running the international policy and advocacy efforts of the Save Darfur Coalition, advising the Kosovar constitutional process, and preparing scenario planning exercises for the Palestinians and Israelis. Prior to that, Mr. Atallah advised the Palestinian negotiating team in peace negotiations with Israel on the issues of international borders, security, and constitutional issues. He was also responsible for liaising with U.S. government officials in Washington, D.C. on these issues. Mr. Atallah received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Virginia and received his J.D. from American University’s Washington College of Law.
• Yoram Peri is the Abraham S. and Jack Kay Chair in Israel Studies, and Director of the new Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies, the University of Maryland at College Park. A former political advisor to the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, founder and former head of Chaim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics and Society and professor of Political Sociology and Communication in the department of communication at Tel Aviv University, and former Editor-in-chief of the Israeli daily, Davar. Born in Jerusalem, he earned his B.A. and M.A. in Political Science and Sociology at the Hebrew University and his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics.In 2002 he was a senior fellow at the US Institute of Peace in Washington DC. A year before he was a Fulbright scholar at the American University’s School of International Service. Earlier he was a visiting professor at Harvard University and Dartmouth College.

STERN PROFESSOR OF CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

• I.M. Destler is a scholar who specializes in the politics and processes of U.S. foreign policymaking. He is co-author, with Ivo H. Daalder, of In the Shadow of the Oval Office (Simon and Schuster, 2009), which analyzes the role of the President's national security adviser from the Kennedy through the George W. Bush administration. His American Trade Politics (Institute for International Economics, 4th edition, 2005) won the Gladys M. Kammerer Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book on U.S. national policy. Over 100,000 copies of this book are now in print, including Japanese and Chinese translations. Other recent Destler works include Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism (Brookings Institution Press, 1999, with Steven Kull), and Protecting the American Homeland, (Brookings Institution, 2002 and 2003, with co-authors).