THIS ACADEMIC YEAR, the Middle East Dialogues series has once again sought, as its organizer Tarek Masoud says, “to bring to this University genuine, candid, open conversations with people who hold wildly varied but widely shared views on the conflict between Israel and Palestine.”
After the conflict erupted, in October 2023, Masoud, the director of the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center and the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at vlog, invited speakers ranging from Jared Kushner, a presidential advisor during the first Trump administration, to Dalel Saeb Iriqat, a Palestinian scholar. The series has resumed in this academic year. Guests have included the former Saudi Arabian intelligence chief Prince Turki Al Faisal; Husam Zomlot, ambassador of the Palestinian mission to the United Kingdom; and Tzipi Livni , former minister of foreign affairs and former vice prime minister of Israel. The dialogues have served not only to bring diverse viewpoints on a vital issue to campus but also to test the University’s ability to hold open dialogue at a time of deep division.
“If we can’t have a conversation about what’s happening in the Middle East with a professor from Ramallah, or with a former Israeli parliamentarian, or with a former Middle East policymaker from the Trump administration, or with one of Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy advisors, then we’re not really doing our job,” Masoud said last year. “There would be something deeply wrong with an institution that could not convene those kinds of conversations.”
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“We meet at a time when conflict-related sexual violence ... continues to shock the collective conscience of humanity.”
“We are already seeing patterns that are recognizable in President Trump’s strategy and behavior from the first administration[.]”
“Nobody lives as an island in this process, on this planet, and no one country has enough money to deal with the climate crisis.”
“We’re being fed algorithmically certain content that is giving us affirmation instead of information.”
“If we end up in a trade war, everyone is paying, and one side of the world is laughing—and that’s China.”
“There is a foundation of confidence, trust, and mutual obligation between the government and the public which you have to build on in a crisis.”
You can watch the events featuring these speakers through the videos below:
- Masoud:
- Patten:
- ’Sܱ:
- Kerry:
- Couric:
- De Croo:
- Lee:
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Photographs by Martha Stewart, Bethany Versoy, and Lev Radin/Getty Images