Midcoast Forum on Foreign Relations

Yossi Alpher

Monday, October 3, 2011: Samoset Ballroom

Topic: A Win-Win Formula for Palestinian Statehood

Yossi Alpher is a writer and consultant on regional strategic issues, and director of the Political Security Domain (PSD), an independent NGO. He is coeditor of bitterlemons.org and bitterlemons-international.org together with Ghassan Khatib, former Minister of Planning in the Palestinian Authority. Bitterlemons.org is a web-based Israeli-Palestinian political dialogue magazine; Bitterlemons International is a web-based “Middle East roundtable”. Alpher also serves on the executive committee of the Council for Peace and Security.

Mr. Alpher has served as director and acting head 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 special 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.

“The Obama administration’s problems with Israel go beyond the construction of another few hundred housing units in East Jerusalem. More ominously, the ruling coalition in Israel reflects a reshaping of Israeli society that has fortified right-wing designs on the West Bank and strengthened resistance to a peace agreement. To be sure, this is not the first time Israel is dealing with a right-religious-settler-Russian coalition pushing a reactionary agenda. The difference is that this political alignment could be dominant in Israel for some time to come.

“The political left has virtually disappeared, discredited by failed peace gambits. At the same time, the conservative, ultra-orthodox sector is growing rapidly in numbers. So is the Israeli Arab population, which, in the shadow of a failed peace process, is becoming increasingly hostile to the idea of being a minority in a Jewish state — thereby stiffening the reaction of the Jewish majority.”

— Yossi Alpher writing in The New York Times