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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May-June 2009, page 72 Waging Peace Robert Malley Speaks in Des Moines
ROBERT MALLEY, a former special assistant to President Bill Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs (1998-2001), spoke at the Des Moines Public Library during the noon hour on March 12. The event was co-sponsored by the Iowa Council on International Understanding, Drake University Center for Global Citizenship, and Harry and Pam Bookey. Malley, a member of the American team at the 2000 Camp David summit at which Clinton hosted Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, is perhaps best known for publicly rejecting assertions that Arafat and the Palestinian delegation deserved all the blame for the failure of the peace talks. He delivered a presentation titled “Exploring the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Obama, Israel and the Palestinian Question” before a standing-room-only crowd. “Just as the Israelis saw the Oslo agreement as a con game where they gave and didn’t receive,” Malley said, “the Palestinians see it, equally, as an illusory and harmful deal where they gave up what they thought was their God-given right to resist foreign occupation in exchange for continued practices that despoiled them of their land. “To try to make peace when you have two entities, two peoples who view things so differently isn’t impossible,” he noted, “but it means bridging the psychological gap, which may be more important and deeper and harder to bridge than resolving the territorial issue or even dividing Jerusalem. “In order for it to work, you need to overcome the conflicting narratives. And that’s the challenge for the Obama administration…to find a way to reconcile those two narratives and find a solution that addresses those aspirations and grievances on both sides,” said Malley. Now director of the Middle East and North Africa Program for the International Crisis Group, a leading independent, non-partisan organization providing analysis and advice to governments and intergovernmental organizations, Malley was an informal adviser to then-Sen. Barack Obama during the 2007-2008 presidential campaign. The campaign severed its relations with Malley after the Times of London reported in early May 2008 that he had been involved in discussions with Hamas. Commenting on the 45-minute question-and-answer period following Malley’s presentation, Prof. David Skidmore, director of the Center for Global Citizenship at Drake University, noted that he was once again impressed by the quality of the questions from the audience. That evening, Malley discussed U.S.-Iranian relations at the university’s Sheslow Auditorium. —Michael Gillespie
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