“There’s light at the end of the tunnel, we just need to build a tunnel first.”
In this week’s News Roundtable episode, Chris Wright is joined by:
- Founder and Director of the Israeli Disarmament Movement, and the Middle East Treaty Organization, Sharon Dolev. Sharon was also the Israeli representative of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize laureate International Campaign for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)
- Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at UCL, Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, and author of ‘The Palestinian Prisoners Movement: Disobedience and Resistance’, Dr Julie Norman – she is currently writing a book on the political history of Gaza.
- Geopolitical and financial crime researcher and consultant, Middle East Research Fellow at ITSS (The International Team for the Study of Security) Verona – an apolitical non-profit organisation focused on the study of International Security Omri Brinner. He specialises in Middle Eastern geopolitics and terror financing, namely Hamas’ financing.
The panel provide the historical context for the beginnings of the current crisis in the Middle East, looking beyond the 7th October attack back to the Israeli disengagement of 2005 and The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002. They paint the picture of the political misopportunities on the behalf of the Israeli and Palestinian leadership that led to the last six months’ vast acceleration in violence. They discuss the relations between all the countries in the region including Egypt, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.
They move onto what’s happening on the ground in Gaza, the military capabilities of Israel, analysing the reality of their proclaimed aim to eliminate Hamas. They turn their focus to Iran’s attack on Israel over the weekend. Whether it was a mistake, and whether is was a true display of Iran’s full military capabilities. Led by Sharon, they turn to the reality of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and set out a vision for how peace can truly be achieved in the whole region of the Middle East.
Many thanks,
WOTN Team
In this episode we discuss:
-The Middle East
-Israel-Gaza
-Iran