i think to some extent feel free to disagree. i ll tell you where i did disagree minorly. i think overall your analysis is correct. the incentive structure that s been created does certainly encourage palestinians to think that negotiations, dipsy, cooperations with israel is a dead end and all that the p.a. has to show is not being able to pay the salaries of public employees in west bank and gaza, except from two months back. and israeli settlement activity continues in all of that. they have little to show for their general approach of trying to reach a negotiated agreement. i m not sure that hamas has achieved much. that s a good point. they claim they do. we should distinguish those two. i want to say the agreements with israel regarding the easing of the blockade and with egypt, are very vague. they re being negotiated today. i mean they re an agreement to,
and the army is, look, you let us do your thing and we ll let you do your thing, as long as the situation doesn t get out of hand. the situation got out of hand and the army came and said we re protecting the revolution. no reason something like that couldn t happen again. as long as it doesn t jeopardize the funding. one of the many reasons we shouldn t exaggerate to much what this decree is going to do is because of the conversation i had with a revolutionary very early on in this process. i said look, are you afraid that with the military still in charge that we re going to go right back to the same kind of dictatorial process that egypt had for 40 years? she said i m not afraid of that, because we know the way back to tahrir square. it was only a year ago that egypt was an oppressive dictatorship. the competing interests in the post revolutionary egypt that
customer erin swensoniving bought so, i m happy. today. sales go up. i m happy. it went out today. i m happy. what if she s not home? (together) she won t be happy. use ups! she can get a text alert, reroute. even reschedule her package. it s ups my choice. are you happy? i m happy. i m happy. i m happy. i m happy. i m happy. happy. happy. happy. happy. (together) happy. i love logistics. we ve been talking about the role the u.s. can and ought to play in the changing middle east. for decades, the main arab conduit through which the u.s. has conducted policy in the middle east has been egypt. for most of the time leaders could rely on an unshakeable l
been cynically exploited by virtually ever arab government. but that doesn t mean that it isn t the issue that arabs across the board. across generations, across jenders, religions, across geographic space, across class lines care about the most it s the prism of pain through which they view international relations, it is true that the arab spring has focused attention on egypt and libya and on syria and the palestinian issue hasn t been sort of dominatele the front pages of the arab newspapers the way that it has. but that doesn t mean that it isn t the great back story. that it isn t the fundamental prism that arabs view their relationship with the rest of the world with the west, the united states with the global order. it s still is. so while it recedes sometimes as the most urgent issue, it never goes away as the most important one. in the arab mentality. heather, if you could wave a
time. you had eight years of an administration that really gave up on trying to play the arbiter role, at which point the figure leaf kind of came away. the administration did a great job actually tactically, playing both of those roles in a way that they hadn t done at all during the first term, sending the secretary of state out to be the arbiter while the president could give the defender of israel speeches like that that s a tactical solution that doesn t get anywhere near the long-term structural problem that it isn t the same middle east that it was five years ago. what do you do instead? how do you serve the long-term interests of israel, especially when maybe many americans don t see israel s long-term interests the way and the u.s. long-term interests of having better relationships with egypt. we re not talking about the hundreds of people who died in syria over the time of gaza. so we ve got a long the administration did a great job on the short-term, but we ve got a long-t