A day-long conference co-sponsored by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA), Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies (SIWPS), School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

This conference is made possible by the generous support of the Greenwalt Foundation

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Monday, March 28, 2011
Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs
Kellogg Center, 15th Floor, Room 1501
420 West 118th Street
New York City

Program

9:00-9:15    Welcome and Introductions

9:15-10:45    Panel I:    U. S. Policy on the Arab-Israel Conflict

Eytan Gilboa, Bar-Ilan University
William Quandt, University of Virginia
Jonathan Rynhold, Bar-Ilan University

10:45-11:00    Break

11:00-12:30    Panel II:   U.S. Strategy in the Persian Gulf

Hillel Frisch, Bar-Ilan University
Efraim Inbar, Bar-Ilan University
Austin Long, Columbia University
Gary Sick, Columbia University

12:30-1:45    Lunch Break

1:45-3:15    Panel III:  Domestic Politics and Middle East Issues

Shai Feldman, Brandeis University
Amaney Jamal, Princeton University
Shmuel Sandler, Bar-Ilan University
Robert Shapiro, Columbia University

3:15-3:30    Break

3:30-5:00    Panel IV:  Policymakers’ Roundtable

Richard Murphy, former Assistant Secretary of State
for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs
Meghan O’Sullivan, Harvard University
Steven Simon, Council on Foreign Relations

5:00-5:15    Farewell

Eytan Gilboa
is the Director of the Center for International Communication, Chair of the Communication Program and faculty member of the Program on Conflict Management and Negotiation at Bar-Ilan University, Israel and Senior Research Associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He is a prominent expert on international communication and U.S. Policy in the Middle East. He has published several books and numerous articles and has won several significant awards. In 2002 he won the Shorenstein Fellowship and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Jonthan Rynhold
recently joined the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and is a lecturer in Political Science at Bar-Ilan University. His areas of focus include Middle East-Asia relations; the relationship between identity and values and foreign policy; and in U.S.-Israel relations in the context of the peace process.  Dr. Rynhold holds a Ph.D. from London School of Economics and has published several articles, such as “The View from Jerusalem: Israeli-American Relations and the Peace Process since Camp David” in MERIA Journal, 4/2 (May 2000) and “Labour, Likud, the Special Relationship & the Peace Process,” Israel Affairs, 3/3-4 (1997).

William Quandt
is the Edward R. Stettinius chair in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia where he teaches courses on the Middle East and American Foreign Policy.  From 2000 to 2003, he also served as Vice Provost for International Affairs at the University. Prior to this appointment, he was a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, where he conducted research on the Middle East, American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, and energy policy.  Before going to Brookings in 1979, Dr.Quandt served as a staff member on the National Security Council where he was actively involved in the negotiations that led to the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty.  Dr.Quandt was also an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and worked at the Rand Corporation in the Department of Social Science from 1968-1972.

Efraim Inbar
is a Professor in Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University and the Director of its Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.  Dr. Inbar served in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) as a paratrooper and was a member of the Political Strategic Committee of the National Planning Council and the Chair of the Committee for the National Security Curriculum at the Ministry of Education. He serves on the Academic Committee of the History Department of the IDF and as the President of the Israel Association of International Studies.  His area of specialization is Middle Eastern strategic issues with a special interest in the politics and strategy of Israeli national security. He has written over 60 articles in professional journals and has authored five books.

Hillel Frisch
is an expert on Palestinian and Islamic politics, institutions and military strategies and holds a Ph.D. from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Currently a professor at the Bar-Ilan University, Dr. Frisch has written many articles on Arab and Palestinian politics, Arabs in Israel, military and security affairs in the Arab world and regional economic issues.

Gary Sick
is a senior research scholar at SIPA’s Middle East Institute, and an adjunct professor of International and Public Affairs. Dr. Sick served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan and he was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. Sick is a captain (ret.) in the U.S. Navy, with service in the Persian Gulf, North Africa, and the Mediterranean. He was the deputy director for International Affairs at the Ford Foundation from 1982 to 1987, where he was responsible for programs relating to U.S. foreign policy.  He is a member (emeritus) of the board of Human Rights Watch in New York and founding chair of its advisory committee on the Middle East and North Africa. He is the executive director of Gulf/2000, an international online research project on political, economic and security developments in the Persian Gulf, being conducted at Columbia University since 1993 with support from a number of major foundations.

Austin Long
is an assistant professor in the International Security policy concentration at SIPA. Long previously worked as an associate political scientist for the RAND Corporation, serving in Iraq as an analyst and advisor to the Multinational Force Iraq and the U.S. military. He also worked as a consultant to MIT Lincoln Laboratory, on a study of technology and urban operations in counterinsurgency. Long is the author of Deterrence – From Cold War to Long War: Lessons from Six Decades of RAND Research and On “Other War”: Lessons from Five Decades of RAND Counterinsurgency Research. Long was co-founder of the Working Group on Insurgency and Irregular Warfare at the MIT Center for International Studies and is a participant in the RAND Counterinsurgency Board of Experts. He has also taught on international security at Clark University.

Shmuel Sandler
is a Senior Research Associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA). He is a faculty member at the Department of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University, and the Sara and Simha Lainer Professor in Democracy and Civility at Bar-Ilan University. He has been a Visiting Professor at Concordia, British Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities. Dr. Sandler holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and is a prominent analyst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as religion, party and electoral politics in Israel, and U.S.-Israel relations.

Robert Y. Shapiro
is a former chair of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, and he served as acting director of Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) during 2008-2009.  He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was a 2006-2007 Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.  He specializes in American politics with research and teaching interests in public opinion, policymaking, political leadership, the mass media, and applications of statistical methods. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1982, he taught at Columbia and served as a study director at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.   His current research examines partisan polarization and ideological politics in the United States, as well as other topics concerned with public opinion and policymaking.

Amaney Jamal
is an associate professor of politics at Princeton University. Her current research focuses on democratization and the politics of civic engagement in the Middle East. She extends her research to the study of Muslim and Arab Americans, examining the pathways that structure their patterns of political and civic engagement in the US. After receiving her Ph.D. from University of Michigan in 2003, she was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005 and has written several books on the role of civic associations in promoting democratic effects in the Middle East and the patterns and influences of Arab and Muslim American racialization processes. Jamal is principal investigator of “Mosques and Civic Incorporation of Muslim Americans,” funded by the Muslims in New York Project at Columbia University; co-PI of the “Detroit Arab American Study,” a sister survey to the Detroit Area Study, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation; co-PI of the Arab Barometer Project, and Senior Advisor on the Pew Research Center Project on Islam in America, 2006.

Shai Feldman
is the Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University and an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.  In 2001-2003, he served as a member of the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. Dr. Feldman served as Head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University from 1997-2005. He was a Senior Research Associate at the Jaffee Center since its establishment in late 1977 and from 1984-87, he was director of the Jaffee Center’s Project on U.S. Foreign and Defense Policies in the Middle East and, in 1989-94, he directed the Center’s Project on Regional Security and Arms Control in the Middle East. Educated at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Feldman was awarded the Ph.D. by the University of California at Berkeley in 1980.

Richard William Murphy
served as the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs from 1983 to 1989. From 1993 to 2004, he served as Director of the Middle East Roundtable at the Council on Foreign Relations. After serving in the U.S. Army, he started his career in the United States Foreign Service as Vice Consul in Salisbury, Rhodesia then worked for the Middle Eastern Bureau at the State Department. He was the United States ambassador to Mauritania (1971–74), Syria (1974–78), the Philippines (1978–81), and Saudi Arabia (1981–83).  After graduating from The Roxbury Latin School in 1947, he received BAs from Harvard University in 1951 and from Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge in 1953.

Meghan L. O’Sullivan
is the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University.  Her areas of research include nation-building, counterinsurgency, the geopolitics of energy, decision making in foreign policy, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.  From July 2004 to September 2007, she was Special Assistant to President George W. Bush and also held the position of Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan where she led a team of military and diplomatic personnel, lawyers, economists, and political appointees in the Iraq and Afghan directorates at the National Security Council.  Prior to being named Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, Dr. O’Sullivan was with the NSC staff as Senior Director for Strategic Planning and Southwest Asia.  Before joining the NSC, Dr. O’Sullivan was political advisor to the Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Deputy Director for Governance in Baghdad, Iraq from April 2003 to June 2004.  There she was a key negotiator of the agreement for the early transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis.  From November 2001 to March 2003, Dr. O’Sullivan worked at the Office of Policy Planning at the Department of State, where she was the chief advisor to the presidential envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process and helped advance efforts to promote reform in the Muslim world.  From 1998-2001, Dr. O’Sullivan was a Fellow at the Brookings Institution and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and published several books and articles on American foreign policy. Dr. O’Sullivan is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.  She has been awarded the Defense Department’s highest honor for civilians, the Distinguished Public Service Medal, and three times been awarded the State Department’s Superior Honor Award.  In October 2008, Esquire magazine named her one of the most influential people of the century.  Dr. O’Sullivan received a B.A. from Georgetown University; she received a master’s of science in Economics and doctorate in Politics from Oxford University.

Steven Simon
is adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Goldman Sachs visiting professor in public policy at Princeton University. Prior to joining CFR, Mr. Simon specialized in Middle Eastern affairs at the RAND Corporation. He came to RAND from London, where he was the deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and Carol Deane senior fellow in U.S. security studies. Before moving to Britain in 1999, Mr. Simon served at the White House for over five years as director for global issues and senior director for transnational threats. During this period, he was involved in U.S. counterterrorism policy and operations as well as security policy in the Near East and South Asia. These assignments followed a fifteen year career at the U.S. Department of State. Mr. Simon has a BA from Columbia University in classics and Near Eastern languages, an MTS from the Harvard Divinity School, and an MPA from Princeton University. He was a university fellow at Brown University and an international affairs fellow at Oxford University.