Thanks very much for coming out tonight. I'm Tyler Bug. I run New America NYC. We're so glad that you're here for what will be a lively conversation on achieving the potential for achieving a just peace in Israel Palestine. Here at New America NYC, we like to say that we're just about big ideas and lively conversations. So in that spirit, I am proud to introduce these three participants for tonight's event. All the way here to my left is Yusuf Muneir. He is a Palestinian American writer and political analyst and is the executive director of the US campaign to end Israeli occupation. To his left is Peter Beinart. Peter Beinart is a professor of journalism and political science at CUNY. He's a contributing editor for the Atlantic National Journal. He's a columnist at Heretz. And most importantly, he's a senior fellow at New America. And to Peter's left is Segal Samuel, who's serving as tonight's moderator. Segal is right now a deputy editor for the Jewish Daily Forward. She just came out with a new novel that's going to be coming out in the US later this year, The Mystics of Mile End, and she's also a New America alum. So please join me in welcoming these three. Okay, hi everyone. I'm so glad you're here. We're here at a good moment to talk about how we can help achieve a just peace in Israel-Palestine. We're just about almost one year on from the war in Gaza last summer. Still with no clear idea of how to prevent another such war. We've got a new Israeli government that's formed after elections in March. And it's increasingly right-wing, so making it more and more difficult to figure out how we can achieve a two-state solution. Meanwhile, we've got the Vatican formally recognizing the state of Palestine as a Palestinians move for international recognition without waiting for Israel's green light. And the sense over here in the US is generally that the tone of the debate, the Israel-Palestine debate is shifting because people are asking, you know, if we're not going to have a two-state solution, then what? And so questions about a one-state solution, about BDS, and about the fundamental nature of Zionism are really gaining traction. So we're lucky tonight to have two writers and thinkers here with us that I've had the pleasure of working with before, Peter Bynart and Yusuf Munair, who are going to debate these questions. And just to let you know the structure of the debate, Peter and Yusuf will each have 10 minutes for some opening remarks. And then they'll each deliver a five-minute rebuttal. And after that, we'll sort of enter into a bit of a more free-flowing conversation up here. And then we'll have plenty of time for questions from the audience at the end. So think of your questions and save them for the end. We will get to them. And with that, I'll turn it over to Peter. Oh, Tyler, are we mic'd? Thanks. Better? Not better? Hold it close to your mouth. How about now? All right. Well, we're going to we're going to figure it out. We're going to project. We're going to we're going to do great. Turn it over to Peter. How about me? Can you hear me? Okay. Okay. Good. Okay. Well, I'd like to thank Tyler and Sigal for making this possible and Yusuf for doing it with me. Yusuf and I, as you'll see, have our disagreements, but he's someone who I admire, someone I've learned from, and some of whom I expect to learn from tonight. And I want to start with something that I've heard Yusuf say, which I think is exactly right, which is that before we can talk constructively about solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we must first define the problems we're trying to solve. And I think those problems are basically two. The first is that millions of individual Palestinians lack basic rights. In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinians are not citizens of the state that controls their lives. Even inside Israel proper, Palestinian citizens suffer structural discrimination. This is the unjust, immoral, one-state reality that exists today. On this, I think Yusuf and I probably agree. Where we may not is that I see a second problem, which must also be addressed to solve the first. And that is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not merely a clash of individual, deracinated human beings. It is also a clash of rival nationalism. Most Israeli Jews and most Palestinians do not only want individual rights. They also want national rights. They want a Jewish or Palestinian state. Individuals and activists may find this primitive, parochial, antiquated. But intellectuals and activists, no matter how well-meaning, get themselves in trouble when they craft political arrangements that sound lovely in seminar rooms, but don't take account of the actual identities of the people on the ground. Modern history is replete with countries with beautiful-sounding constitutions that descended into civil war. In 1937, the Peel Commission proposed partitioning Israel-Palestine after concluding that, quote, neither of the two national ideals permits of combination in the service of a single state, unquote. Almost 80 years later, that remains true. The basic concept of a Jewish and Palestinian state side by side, which was legitimized by the world in 1947, remains the only legitimate solution in the eyes of both peoples. This March, the Palestinian poster Khalil Shikaki asked Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza whether they supported, quote, a solution based on the establishment of one state in all Palestinian areas in Israel, one in which Arabs and Jews enjoy equality. In other words, he asked them whether they supported the solution increasingly advocated by left-leaning intellectuals and activists around the world. Almost 70% said no. In 2012, the Arab-American poster Jim Zogby surveyed not only Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, but also Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon, and Israeli Jews. He concluded that, quote, a two-state solution remains the only viable option that is acceptable, albeit with differences, to both sides. The one-state solution is rejected by all parties, including Palestinian refugees, unquote. Why is this the case? First, as I said, because most Israeli Jews and Palestinians remain deeply committed to their separate national identities. I'm sure we'll talk tonight about the tension between Zionism and liberalism. There is absolutely such a tension. I acknowledge it in my book. The kind of Zionism I support would reduce that tension dramatically by stripping away many aspects of Jewish privilege inside Israel proper. And of course, it would require Israel to end its undemocratic control of the West Bank and Gaza. But it would still allow a preferential immigration policy for Jews and some Jewish public symbols. And even this thin Zionism would privilege Jews. But if there's a tension between Zionism and liberalism, there is also a tension between Palestinian nationalism and liberalism. If Zionism privileges Jews, who are both an ethnic group and a religion, then Palestinian nationalism privileges both an ethnic group, Arabs, and a religion, Islam. Article 1 of the Palestinian Constitution declares that, quote, the Palestinian people are part of the Arab nation, unquote. Article 4 says that, quote, Islam is the official religion in Palestine. The principles of Islamic Sharia shall be the main source of legislation. This is from the PLO. I haven't even mentioned Hamas. I'm not saying this to demonize Palestinians. The Palestinian Constitution also contains lots of terrific language about individual rights. I'm simply arguing that when people reject two states in favor of one binational state, which is the main proposed alternative, I wonder where exactly they see the appetite for this binationalism on either side. Binational states are exceedingly hard to keep together. Binationalism barely works in Belgium. The Czechs and Slovaks couldn't make it work. Scotland is seriously considering seceding from the UK as is Catalonia from Spain. And these are all far, far more placid environments than the land between the river and the sea. What would we call this Israeli-Palestinian binational state? In post-apartheid South Africa, the answer was obvious, because whites and blacks both considered themselves South Africans. In this Israel-Palestine, by contrast, this imagined binational state, we have no name because no national identity undergirds it. Let's imagine that someone did create Isra Stein. What is this army going to look like? It will be an army operating under conditions of unbelievable stress. In Isra Stein, a judge will have to rule that the Moroccan Jews, who have lived on the ruins of a Palestinian village since 1951, must be evicted to make way for Palestinian refugees. Or that judge must tell those refugees that the deeds to which they have clung all these years are no longer valid. And then the joint Jewish and Palestinian brigade of the Isra Stein army will have to carry out that eviction notice, or non-eviction notice, jailing or shooting members of their own side in the process because of their common allegiance to Isra Stein. This is not progressivism, it's the great temptation of progressives, utopianism. Is my view shaped by the fact that, as a Jew, I am attached to the idea that in a post-Holocaust world, there should be one state on Earth devoted to Jewish self-protection and Jewish self-expression? Yes, I plead guilty. I'm not a pure universalist, either. But I'm not trying to convince you to care about Israel in the way I do. I'm simply arguing that the two-state solution, as problematic as it is, is better than any one-state alternative. And you don't have to be a Zionist to believe that. Listen to Marwan Bargoudi, probably the most popular Palestinian politician alive, who told Almonider in 2013 that, quote, if the two-state solution fails, the substitute will not be a binational one-state solution, but a persistent conflict that extends based on an existential crisis, one that does not know any middle ground, unquote. Is the two-state solution hard to achieve? Absolutely. But it's easier than the alternative. We know what the rough outline of such a partition would look like. It was agreed to by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in Geneva in 2003. Ehud and Mahmoud Abbas were converging on something similar in 2008, and both men are on record as believing they could have reached a deal had they negotiated for a few more months. 85% of settlers live in 6% of the West Bank, much, though not all, of which can be a next to Israel and traded for an equal amount of land inside the Green Line. In fact, Abbas reportedly agreed to let 75% of the settlers stay as part of land swaps. Will some of the rest resist? Sure, but Israel evacuated the radical settlers of Gaza in one week without a single death, and the minute a settler shoots an IDF soldier, their support will collapse, even on the mainstream Israeli right. So how do we move towards achieving the two-state solution? Not through the kind of peace process that John Kerry oversaw last year, at least not right now. It requires pressure. Some of that pressure must be on Hamas to publicly agree to respect the will of the Palestinian people as expressed in a referendum on a final deal. Israel has the right to know that if it signs a deal with a Palestinian leader and the Palestinian people endorse it, Hamas will not stand in the way. But most of the pressure must be on Israel, which is the party that is creating the facts on the ground that make the two-state solution harder. As I have written, I am open to any pressure on Israel that is nonviolent and affirms the two-state solution. I support a resolution this fall at the United Nations that puts teeth behind the principles of a two-state deal, including a timeline and a mechanism for ensuring that both parties negotiate in good faith. I support labeling and boycotting products from Jewish settlements. I support the proposal recently offered by professors Gidon Shafir and Michael Walzer to deny visas to Israeli politicians like Naftali Bennett, who advocate holding West Bank Palestinians as permanent noncitizens. What I cannot support is pressure that does not distinguish between Israel inside and beyond the Green Line. Pressure that does not respect the distinction between the part of Israel where Palestinians enjoy citizenship and the right to vote and the part where they do not. Pressure aimed with a wink and a nod at a one-state solution that I oppose. The two-state solution is not a utopia. It does not represent perfect justice. It is, in fact, for both Palestinians and Jews in important ways, a tragedy. Like democracy, it is the worst outcome except all the others, but it at least offers both Palestinians and Jews what they most want, the dignity that comes from citizenship in a state of their own. And in the Middle East that today flows with blood, it will be an achievement in which our generation of Palestinians and Jews could take enormous pride. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. We're going to hear from Youssef now. Thanks, Peter. Thank you, Sigal and Tyler and New America for hosting this and for all of you for indulging us this evening. My opening comments are not going to respond to Peter's comments just now. We'll leave that for the rebuttals later. But before I begin, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about when we began talking about setting up this event and we talked about framing it. One of the suggestions that were made was to frame this as a debate between a one-state solution and a two-state solution, and it was a suggestion that I rejected. And I did not reject this because I'm not familiar with these debates. No, actually quite the contrary, I'm very familiar with these debates and have been involved with them in them for some time. But it's because I'm familiar with them and the direction that they go in that I realize that they're very unproductive. And because, as Peter said, quoting me, you can't have a productive debate about solutions if we don't agree on the problem. Solutions are like tools that are applied for accomplishing very specific tasks. Think about a carpenter's analogy, for example. Two carpenters can sit up at a table all day debating the merits of using a screwdriver or a hammer, if they don't agree on whether what they're trying to do is apply a screw or a nail, it's a fruitless conversation. So I believe I see the problem we're trying to solve very differently than Peter and most liberal Zionists do in general. So how do liberal Zionists see the problem? Well, as Zionists, they see the problem first and foremost through the prism of Israeli interests, not through the prism of justice for those being denied basic rights. So for liberal Zionists, the primary problem is Israel's identity crisis. And by this, I mean liberal Zionists look at the situation and they see a state that claims the mantra of being Jewish and democratic. But at the same time they see a reality on the ground that belies this claim because you have millions of Palestinians being ruled by a state that does not allow them any voice in government. So for liberal Zionists, that's the challenge, Israel's identity crisis. For me, I see things very differently. But let's just examine that analysis of the problem first. To conclude, as liberal Zionists do, that Israel's identity crisis is the primary problem. You have to do some very problematic things. One of them is to ignore or extremely deemphasize the neck bit, which is of course the singular most important and significant event in the Palestinian narrative, historical narrative and experience. And ignore or deemphasize those directly affected by it, like the refugees. And we heard from Peter earlier about Palestinian citizens of Israel to some extent and also Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But we heard less about refugees and we'll get to that later on in the rebuttal. But because of this, liberal Zionists tend to begin their historical narrative at 1967. Adding to the problems with the liberal Zionist analysis of the situation is that they have to promote this false dichotomy. And we heard it from Peter, between the state of Israel and the territory that it occupies and began occupying in 1967. This was explained by Peter in a piece that he wrote for the New York Times, making a distinction between a democratic Israel and a non-democratic Israel. Of course, this false dichotomy leads to a series of different problems. Ignoring the Israeli state's history with Palestinian citizens of Israel and its lasting legacy. This sort of romanticism of the pre-1967 Israel that exists in the liberal Zionist narrative, but did not exist in reality, certainly not for Palestinian citizens of Israel. This false dichotomy leads again to downplaying the incompatibility of Zionism and liberalism, even inside Israel. The facts that the so-called democratic Israel refers to non-Jewish citizens like myself as demographic threats, prevents them from living with their Palestinian spouses to prevent what they call demographic spillover, and passes various discriminatory laws against them are considered tolerable evils by liberal Zionists. Some liberal Zionists not only downplay this incompatibility between Zionism and liberalism inside Israel, they've accepted it, as Peter seemingly has. He told Jeffrey Goldberg in 2010, and I quote, I'm not even asking Israel to allow full equal citizenship to Arab Israelis. Since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state, I'm actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel's security and for its status as a Jewish state. And so I want to take this opportunity, and Peter I'm sure can respond to this in the rebuttal, to ask whether or not Peter still stands by this statement and how he can justify such a thing with the concept of liberalism. And if he does, and if others do as well, these are questions for him and other liberal Zionists as well.  What percentage of people like me, Palestinian citizens of Israel, is too many for you? How many can you not handle? Is it 20%? 30%? 40%? 45%? Please draw the line and then explain to us which illiberal policies are you willing to support to prevent the Palestinian citizen of Israel population from growing to that point or beyond it. We deserve to know these answers now. Also, this false dichotomy leads to accepting BDS, albeit begrudgingly, against settlement products only, while opposing BDS targeting the Israeli state, which is actually the entity that drives settlement policy along with other laws and rights violations. This false dichotomy also leads to yet another conundrum for liberal Zionists, which is the idea that the window for a two-state solution is always closing, but it can never really close. If it's not closing, there's no urgency. But if it closes, they must answer the question that they dread. What happens next? This argumentation is, of course, susceptible to the boy cries wolf syndrome and quickly loses credibility. Time's been running out for a two-state solution for nearly three decades now, after all. So, if the liberal Zionist analysis of the problem is flawed for the reasons that I mentioned, what really is the problem? I believe that the problem is that to achieve its aims in Palestine, the Zionist movement set up a system of injustice, which it had to perpetuate to maintain itself. This system of injustice has manifested itself in multiple ways over time, and the main instrument upholding this system has been the state of Israel. These manifestations of injustice, to name a few, include the depopulation of Palestine and the denial of return for refugees through law to ensure a Jewish majority at the expense of the native inhabitants of the land, the adoption of colonial-era British emergency regulations as martial law to govern Palestinian citizens of Israel until 1966, regulations which a person named Manachem Begin, who, if you're familiar with him, is no lily-white dove, likened to the laws of the Nazis, adoption and then adaptation of those laws, those same laws to govern Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem since then, and, of course, another manifestation is the harsh repression of any dissent against this system through the use of overwhelming state-level force against the stateless people. These manifestations exist on a direct historical trajectory which goes back to 1948 and not 1967, and they represent an evolving yet, very importantly, singular system. Maintaining this system of injustice has required the routine use of force, which over the years has led to countless casualties, most of which are Palestinian, but include Israelis as well. The most recent and severe example of this was, of course, the war on Gaza last year which left over 2200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, dead. So how do we solve it? Now that I've defined what I believe is the problem, how do we solve it? I believe there's only one way. This system of injustice must be dismantled, not part of it, but all of it, and we must work toward something more just. I think there are a number of steps we can take in this direction. One of them, hopefully, we can begin tonight by expanding the number of people who actually agree on what the real problem is that we are trying to solve. Step number two, which I hope can happen concurrently with step number three, is working together to bring the necessary pressure on the state of Israel until these changes happen. And to this end, I support full BDS, not partial BDS, because if you want to get Israeli state behavior to change, you must target the state, not parts of the state or little hilltop settlements, but the state itself. Until decision makers in Israel come to a different conclusion than the conclusion that they have today, which is the status quo is sustainable. And the third step is engaging in serious conversation about what the practical implementation of a new system would look like. So many of the questions that Peter threw out to scare us all away from an alternative situation can be answered in a serious and rigorous way. This is not a call for the destruction of Israel any more than the anti-apartheid movement was calling for the destruction of South Africa. But I realize some pro-Israel-minded listeners will not accept this, and so I ask them, and I will end with this. What sort of state faces an existential threat by merely respecting the human rights of those whose lives it governs? How did it come to find itself in such a predicament? And is that really the kind of state that you want to support? Thank you very much, Yusuf. Peter will now have five minutes for a rebuttal. So I felt like Yusuf was responding to a mythical liberal Zionist that he had created in his mind. There may be such people, but I didn't feel he was responding to me. I didn't say that Israeli interests were the primary prism through which I saw the issue. That's not in fact the way I discussed the issue. And I didn't ignore 1948 to the contrary. I started with the 1930s and 40s and the reason for the idea of partition. I think that the Nakba is an enormous historical tragedy, momentous historical tragedy that hangs over this conflict. Obviously, that's true. The question is, what does one do about it now? I think, and Yusuf and I might want to do about it may not be the same. What I would want to do about it is different than the vast majority of Israeli Jews. I believe that Israel needs to take public responsibility for the trauma that it created, that played a very, very large role in creating. I believe that there should be a Nakba museum inside Israel, and I believe in some right of return. What we know from the Omer at Abbas negotiations where the Omer was talking about maybe 10 or 20,000, Abbas was talking about maybe 150,000, I would be happy to split that number. I'd be willing to go closer to Abbas's number. I'd be willing to go to 100,000. What I do not think Israel has the right to do, nor what I ask a Palestinian state to do, would be to abandon control of its immigration policy entirely. On this Jeff Goldberg quote, which I had this feeling was going to come up, I said in my initial remarks, and I've said many times before, what exactly I meant by that. I support Israel being able to have a preferential immigration policy for Jews. I don't support the current immigration policy that Israel has in all its ways, but I do believe that if a Palestinian state has the right to a preferential immigration policy for Palestinians and many, many, many countries around the world, literally dozens of countries around the world, have preferential immigration policies for members of a particular ethnic group, then in a post Holocaust world, a Jewish state has that right as well. And I believe that Israel has the right to some public symbols, Jewish holidays for instance. I do believe that that privileges Jews. It is a far cry from many of the kinds of discrimination that exist in Israel today, but I am honest enough to say that simply the existence of the current Israeli flag or the current Israeli national anthem privileges Jews over Palestinians. As indeed, I think it's pretty clear from the Palestinian Constitution and other documents that Palestinian public symbols will privilege Arabs and Muslims over other members of a future Palestinian state. I also did not romanticize pre-1967 Israel to the contrary. I'm fully aware that Palestinian citizens lived under military law until 1966. To me, but I also reject the idea that there is no meaningful distinction between Israel inside the Green Line, where Palestinians have the right to vote, serve in the Knesset, serve on the Supreme Court, live under the same legal system, and Palestinians in the West Bank who are not citizens of the country in which they live do not have the right to vote for the government that controls their lives and live under a different legal system. Are dramatic changes needed inside the Green Line? Absolutely they are. I think it's very, very important that Israel, that we get to the point where Palestinian political parties in Israel are serving as important members of Israeli political coalitions. But I believe that it will be much easier to get to those kind of changes inside the Green Line. If the festering wound, the bloody festering wound of Israel's control of the West Bank and Gaza is ended, because it is Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza which poisons relationships between Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens inside the Green Line and makes it harder to make the changes inside the Green Line that Israel, I think, desperately needs to make. You know, Yusef said that he doesn't like to talk about one state and two states. That's perfectly his right, but it doesn't seem to me illogical to talk when one's talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict about what outcome one wants. One can talk about political principles, that's very important, but in the real world political principles have to be implemented. And part of what I was talking about is the very, very difficult conditions under which political principles would need to be implemented, which is why I believe that the two-state solution, as flaws as it is, is better than the other main alternative. I don't think it's good enough to simply say we can have a serious conversation about that. That's the conversation I think we need to be having right now. Great. Thanks, Peter. Yusef, you have five minutes. Well, while I appreciate the notion that a Nekba museum could one day be built in Israel, it does very little for the refugee who can never come back to his land to see it. And frankly, just because there is a museum built, it does nothing to rectify in any way the experience of refugees who have been, for decades now, removed and prevented from returning to their land, nor does it do anything to fix the reality of squalor that they've been living in because of that experience. And it's not an immigration policy. It is a refugee policy. It is an anti-refugee policy and specifically an anti-Palestinian refugee policy. This isn't about immigration. The laws that were set up to deny the return of Palestinians from returning into Israel were set up right after the inception of the state and designed very specifically to prevent specific people from returning. It is a discriminatory refugee policy. That's what it is, because there are refugees that are permitted to enter into Israel as long as they're Jewish. But Palestinian refugees are not allowed to return, even if they have legitimate residency claims in the land, were made refugees after even the creation of the state. So I absolutely do not see this as an immigration policy in any way, nor do I think the comparison, making the comparison of Israel's refusal to allow refugees to return to immigration policies of other states, I don't think that's valid at all. On the one state to state question, it's not that I don't want to talk about one state to state. We can talk about that. But the reason I don't want to talk about one solution versus another solution is first we have to agree on what the problem is. As I said, we have very different views about what the problem is, and you had stated in your opening comments, and this is really an example of how different we see this issue when it comes to understanding the problem. Polls of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. There's a number of problems with these polls, primarily that they only capture public opinion in the West Bank and Gaza, people who are predisposed to favoring a particular solution because it happens to benefit them more than it does refugees who are living in refugee camps, whose opinions never get reflected in any of these polls. And even within those polls, if you dig through them and look at the nuances, what you see are answers that are not compatible with a two state solution in the sense that Peter wants them to be, because if you ask and you can look at Chicago's polls and these numbers are reaffirmed poll after poll, if you ask Palestinians, what are your primary national objectives? These are Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Number one is an end to the occupation. Number two is the right to return. If you ask them, other than your primary, what is your number one? It is the right to return. And these are Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, not even taking into consideration that these are not refugees or primarily not refugees. So the notion that public opinion polling in some way reflects what Palestinian sentiment is when there are all of these problems with it, I think is a really unfair statement to make. And I'll just, I know we're running out of time here in the rebuttal part, but I would just say, what is it going to look like? Well, one of the reasons why Peter is able to say, look, the two state solution is better than one state because of all of these different boogeyman scenarios about one state is precisely because Peter can make the statement, we know what it would look like in terms of a two state solution. I'm not really even sure that's true, because I don't think we really know what it would look like. But we have a better idea of what the parameters of two state are than exactly how one state would work. But the reason that that's the case is because so much of the conversation has been dominated by the two state discourse, that there hasn't been the necessary work done on thinking about how the practical implementation of things like repatriation could work, how constitutionalism can be applied to this system, how you can have a fair dividing of land and resources between people that includes also incoming refugees. All of these things I agree with you are issues that need to be worked out and there's no crystal clear answers to them, but that's because the work simply has not been done in the kind of way at the policy level that work on the two state solution has. And it's very easy to say, look, we shouldn't even bother doing that work because we don't know what it's going to look like, but then that just defeats the purpose. So that's why I said that the steps that we have to take include, as well as pressure on Israel now, also include having a rigorous conversation about what implementation would actually look like in practical terms. I guess I'll stop there. Great. Thanks. So Peter, I wonder if you want to just respond to Yusuf's point about the refugee problem as opposed to it being simply an immigration policy problem. Sure. Well, it's certainly not just an immigration policy problem, but the truth is that especially in conditions of partition, refugees around the world do not have the right to return simply at will. People in Pakistan who were born in India do not have the right to return at will, let alone their children, grandchildren. My grandmother who was born in Alexandria, Egypt does not have the right to return to Egypt. If you look at the partition plan that Kofi Annan came up with for Cyprus, when it dealt with the return of refugees, there were severe limits on the ability of refugees to return across the line that would have been drawn in Cyprus. Very, very few refugees have returned in the former Yugoslavia. I think that I am not against some, especially original refugees, returning. But the truth is that especially under conditions of partition, the idea that a country sees completely its right to control its borders is not, in fact, the normative practice I think around the world. I guess the question that I had was, I don't think the problem with the one state solution is that not enough work has been done on it. It's true that not as much work has been done on it, but in fact there has been some work that's been done in recent years. That wasn't my argument. My argument was that it breaks on the fundamental problem that this is not only a struggle of people desiring individual rights, it is a struggle of two nationalisms and those two nationalisms both desire a state and that a binational state is something that I think under these conditions would be impossible to make function in a way that would serve people well. Somebody once said, if you will it, it is no dream. So I think the first step is saying, well, is this something that we would like to see? You want to describe it as utopian, that's fine. I actually think both a one state outcome and a two state outcome are dystopian, highly problematic. Neither of them are going to be great for everybody down the line because in reality colonialism screwed both people in this land. One people certainly more than the other. But there's no way this is working out well for everybody in the near term. I do think that we can get a closer approximation to justice in a one state outcome than a two state outcome, especially if we're talking about a two state outcome that is conventionally discussed where there is limited or no right of return and that the Palestinian state that ends up being created as some truncated collection of Bantu stands. So there has not been enough work done. We need to have that conversation. We need to do that work. It needs to be done in a serious way and it can't just continue to be ignored as this pie in the sky thing. I agree with you that it's not an ideal outcome. I depart from that point. None of this is going to be ideal. For every problem there is with a one state outcome you could name as many and more with a two state outcome, certainly more for the Palestinians than for Israelis, which is one of the reasons why the two state outcome is so popular with Zionists because really it's the Palestinians that get screwed out of that situation more than the Israelis. And Yusuf, I just think here is to know how would you respond to Peter's point about the refugees coming in not being normative around the world? Well, look, I think the right of return is very clear in international law. There's not too much of an issue for debate here. In fact, if you look at the UN Declaration of Human Rights, it's very clear in terms of the rights of people to leave and enter a country. I think what is very interesting about that is if you look at the actual article which is mentioned in there, there are two clauses in that article. One that says people have the right to move freely within any given state. And the second is people have a right to enter and exit their country. And the distinction between state and country is very important and it exists within the same article of the UN Declaration of Human Rights precisely because there are times when refugees leave their country and that country then becomes under the control of a different state. But that doesn't negate their right to return to that country just because a particular state decides to declare itself over that space. If today where we have a massive refugee crisis happening in Syria, if Bashar al-Assad decided to declare Syria an Alawite state and not permit any Sunni refugees from returning, would anyone stand for that as acceptable? Even if he declared this is the one and only Alawite state in the world surrounded by a sea of Sunni states? I mean this is just not how it works. Refugees have a right to return to the country where they are from regardless to what flag is flying over it. I think it's, I wanted to say that it's, you know, Yusef mentioned that only when people look at these opinion about these opinion polls and what people's preferences are, they only look at Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. That's specifically why I talked about the Zogby poll which looks at Israel's Palestinian citizens. Is Palestinian citizens of Israel even more in favor of the two state solution in fact than our Palestinians in the West Bank? And there's a significant amount of support from Palestinians in refugee camps as well. The, we are talking about, we're not, Yusef also didn't mention that he's not just talking about original Palestinian refugees. He's presumably talking about their children and grandchildren at this point. I don't, as I said, there is no expectation in international discourse that I am aware whatsoever that the millions and millions of Jews who like my family come from the Arab world and our children and grandchildren and great-children have the right to return to those countries. It's simply, it's not even really publicly discussed. Now again, I'm not saying that that means that Israel should shut down the conversation on refugees. I don't believe that. I think the conversation on refugees is very important. But I don't believe that, I don't believe that Israel has to say. I do believe that the bulk of the Palestinian refugees as in the Clinton parameter should be given a menu of different options. Some will return to Israel proper original refugees. But I don't think Israel has the responsibility to say that they see all, they see all, they see any role in determining who is going to enter Israel's borders. And Peter, I'd be curious to hear how you'd respond to Yusuf's point about this distinction between Israel proper and outside the green line. His point about BDS needing to target the state itself if that's where these policies are initially coming from. I mean, it's certainly true that the Israeli state created the Israeli settlement enterprise. No question about that. But that doesn't mean that there is no important distinction between Israel inside the green line and Israel in the West Bank and Gaza. There is a very, very important distinction, a very fundamental distinction. And the problem I have with not recognizing that distinction is, first of all, that I think is unfair. And second of all, that I think it essentially gestures towards the one state outcome that I oppose. If you want a two-state solution, then you should be targeting the area that you consider no longer has a right to be part of Israel. There are a whole method of different forms of pressure that I think are possible while still affirming the two-state solution. I happen to think that potentially the most important one right now may be what happens at the UN in the fall with the idea of not simply putting the UN stamp behind a two-state solution, but in fact actually trying to create a mechanism with the backing of the UN Security Council for how that process would play itself out. So you could not have endless negotiations that got nowhere, which is I think what the Israeli government has wanted in the past. But in fact, there would be a specific timeline towards moving towards the kind of parameters that were discussed by Omer and Abbas and that have been laid out in things like the Geneva Accord. So I think there are effective methods of pressure that do not erase the distinction between Israel inside and outside the Green Line and that are in support of the two-state solution, which I think the BDS movement per se is not. There are certain BDS actions that are adopted by some churches, for instance, that may affirm Israel's right to exist. But the BDS call as a whole does not. Yusuf, what would you say to that point about it being a matter of erasing the distinction between Israel proper and not? I think Israel has erased the distinction. You know, you could drive from Tel Aviv all the way to the most remote settlements in the West Bank. You won't see a Green Line. You won't see a demarcation there. You won't be as an Israeli. You won't be confronted at any checkpoints. There is no distinction for Israelis. This is part of the problem. But I think there is a different issue here. The question when it comes to pressure is what is it that you are trying to change? I mean, let's set aside for a second the reasons why I support BDS is not simply because of the settlements and the occupation, but also because of the other pillars of the BDS call which include equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel and a right of return for Palestinian refugees. But let's say you think that the problem is the settlements, that that's what has to change. If you think that's the case, what is it that needs to change? Is it the settlers need to pack up and go home? Are they the people who need to make that decision? Or is the government of Israel and the people who make the decisions at the state level the body that's supposed to change their decision making about financing and supporting these settlements economically, politically and militarily? That's the entity that has to change. When we talk about changing Iranian state behavior in relation to its nuclear program, nobody is arguing, listen we should only place sanctions on those little towns where the nuclear reactors happen to be or only on the schools that happen to produce the scientists for those nuclear reactors. We are saying we want to change policy at the state level. So that means putting pressure on actors at the state level to recalculate. And when we're talking about placing pressure on any state in any situation, that's what has to happen. That's how you change state behavior by making them recalculate their incentives. If people stop buying dead sea mineral mud, and I think you all should, any products that come from the settlements, but that alone is not enough to change Israeli state behavior. It helps put weight on that side of the scale, but if you're going to change the decision calculus in the state, there has to be a hell of a lot more pressure than just that. And there's nothing wrong with that, even if you just believe that the settlements are the problem, because the settlements don't sprout up on the hilltops by themselves. And if you look at how the settlements happen and how the settlements grow, it happens because they're given preferential treatment by the government. It's certainly not a process of natural growth in any way. It is a very distinct and calculated policy. So the kind of pressure that needs to be brought forth on the Israeli government is the kind that makes them recalculate. And the reality is just boycotting settlement products or sanctions just on the settlements is not enough to do that. Look, Peter said earlier, you know, they evacuated the settlers in Gaza in a week. You know, I think it really minimizes the extent of entrenchment of the settlement enterprise in the West Bank. There are, at minimum, in any conventional two-state conversation about withdrawal, 100,000 settlers that need to be withdrawn with an Israeli military that is increasingly made up of religious officers that would have to carry out these orders. And if you look at the amount of money that was actually spent by the state when you look at compensation as well, for the few thousand settlers that were removed by Gaza in Gaza and then extrapolate that over 100,000, we're talking about 10% of Israeli GDP. That's just the economic cost to Israel for withdrawal. Just the economic cost, not even mentioning the political cost that's involved with removing all of the constituents of Naftali Bennett's party and Benjamin Netanyahu's party that rely on the support of this 9% of the Israeli population to ensure that they get re-elected time and time again. So there are serious political and economic disincentives to withdraw on one side of the scale. Boycotting Dead Sea Mud on the other side of the scale is not going to tip it. There needs to be serious pressure. And while I appreciate all the efforts to boycott settlement products and they should continue, they need to be multiplied 10 and 100-fold for there to be change. I think the statistic about 10% of GDP is actually not correct. If you look at Israeli GDP now, I looked at that, I saw you had mentioned that comment before, and I think Israeli GDP I think is about 290 billion, so I think it would be more like 6% or 7%. But you have to balance, if you're talking about the difference, you have to balance the cost to Israel of withdrawing these settlements versus the cost of continuing to subsidize them, which is the use of acknowledge is massive. Israel is spending, nobody knows exactly what the number is, but Israel is subsidizing the settlements to a huge number, billions and billions of dollars. That money is not being spent inside the Green Line. I don't buy the idea that it's economically costly for Israel to do that. If you're saying that it's politically difficult, politically costly for Israel to withdraw 100,000 settlers, if you think there's not the political will to do that, or it would take a great deal to develop, to have enough political pressure on Israel to do that, then how do you think you're going to have the political will to dismantle the Israeli state altogether? That is a much, much, much greater hurdle than withdrawing 100,000 settlers from the West Bank. Yet people both on the one hand say that we need to do that, and on the other hand say that Israel can't even summon the political will to remove 100,000 settlers. I just wanted to say something more on the BDS part, on the BDS point. The first is that the problem with saying that you're going to support BDS, because you want to incentivize Israel to allow the creation of a Palestinian state, is that the BDS movement's most prominent voices do not support a two-state solution, and so you're making yourself complicit with a movement that is in large measure hostile to the two-state solution and hostile to the existence of any kind of Jewish state within any borders, and one has to take responsibility for whom one is aligned oneself with. The other point is I'm not in general a fan of double standards arguments, and I have made that point at length and in Jewish audiences where it's not very popular. But I do have to say there is a certain level of double standard at which things become absurd. If you're talking about boycotting Israeli behavior in the West Bank and Gaza because of the fundamental repression that exists there, but not boycotting anything else in the Arab Middle East, I'm with you. But if you're saying you're going to boycott Israel inside the Green Line, where Palestinians have the right to vote, are represented in the Knesset, live under the same legal system, are represented in the Supreme Court, you don't in fact think it, but you have no problem with a whole series of states where everyone has far fewer rights than that. That seems to be genuinely problematic. Okay, thanks. So we're going to go to audience questions in a moment, but I would just like to give Yusuf a quick chance to just say a last thought if you've got one. Yeah, I mean we hear this all the time about, oh, Palestinian citizens are in the Knesset and Palestinian judges and all that. Well, I'll have you know that during the time of Jim Crow, there were African-American members of Congress and there were also African-American judges. Certainly not much and we could talk about the percentages in Israel as well, but the reality is you can point to anecdotes within Israel, but that doesn't mean there's no systematic discrimination. That's number one. Number two, look, the reality is there is a double standard, but that double standard also exists for Israel. In many situations around the world where you have human rights abuses, you have an international state system which is actually attempting to do something about that to a far greater extent than they're attempting to do something when it comes to Israel. In many other cases, when you have human rights abuses, you have sanctions slapped on those regimes. You don't have that in Israel. The reason BDS is stepping up to the plate as a civil society movement to play this role is precisely because the state system has failed to do that. Instead, the state system at large, led, of course, by the United States through its influence over the United Nations, has only acted as a cover for Israel's actions in the occupied territories, has prevented any further action by the international community at the United Nations Security Council and continues to subsidize this to the single largest foreign military financing expense in the United States' budget. So if we want to talk about double standards, let's talk about those double standards. BDS exists to fill a void that the state system has created because of its inability to do what needs to be done when it comes to pressuring Israel. Can I just respond to that? I mean, there are certainly countries where there is some international effort at regressing human rights abuses, but there is absolutely no such effort going on in Saudi Arabia or in any of the Gulf states, for instance. So the idea that suggests that only in Israel is the state system turning a blind eye in many, many countries with, I would argue, even more profound human rights abuses, certainly more profound human rights abuses than Israel inside the Green Line. There is, in fact, no pressure whatsoever at all, neither from the United States nor from the international community. So what you're saying may be true in certain cases. It's not true in many, many other cases. Peter, if you want to start a Boycott Saudi Arabia movement, you're welcome to. I'm happy to sign up as your first member. I've got plenty of problems with the Saudi regime, but the Saudi regime isn't the one that doesn't permit me to live with my wife in the town where I was born. It's not the one that doesn't permit my family to return. This is a personal experience for many Palestinians. It's not just about what's right and what's wrong. It's about how do we gain justice for ourselves and dignity for ourselves. So, you know, start that movement. I'm happy to join you. Plenty of us, by the way, plenty of people within the BDS movement are very, very critical of these regimes and are active in a variety of different efforts for human rights across a number of different borders. So it's not as you would describe it. Right, but if you have the right to see this through the prism of your experience, Jews also have the right to see it through the prism of their experience, which is, if you're talking about Boycotting inside the Green Line, but there is no now, I've never seen a big protest about what's happening in Saudi Arabia, and Jews have the right to be concerned about that, seeing it through their prism of their experience of victimization by a world that has been very, very historically often not interested in Jewish welfare and in fact treated Jews by a different standard. You see it through your experience. Jews will also naturally see it through the prism of our own experience. Thank you. Alright, thank you both. We are going to take questions from the audience now, but I just want to say please do keep your questions really brief. Make them questions not comments, so we all know we've all been in those situations where we get a long nice spiel, right? So let's try to keep it moving. Thanks. This has been a debate about policy. I want to raise a different issue, issue of leadership. I talked to my son this morning. What he says, what's needed is an al-Semandele in Palestine. I said, there's been, there is such a person who's been jailed, Maram Raghoudi. So I want to ask you, as Peter mentioned, Maram Raghoudi, how do you feel Maram Raghoudi being the next president of Palestine? Do you think that's a step forward? I think there's a couple of different things going on in your question here. But I think before we can talk about Palestinian leadership, we need to talk about some of the problems that exist in the representative structures for Palestinians and exactly how the occupation and also US and Israeli policies exacerbate those problems in representative structures. I'm not going to get into a conversation about particular candidates. But when it comes to a Palestinian Mandela, I think you said, or a Palestinian Gandhi, I forgot which one it was now already. Palestinian Mandela. The reality is that they're, I see, they're sure. I mean, there's many, many other Palestinians that are political prisoners as well, many of them for nonviolent activity. And some of them were not even fortunate enough to be jailed. Many of them were killed in the process of protesting as well. So there's no shortage, actually, of nonviolent protest and organic leadership in Palestine. But the problems of representation are far greater than simply selecting a person in a jail cell. Thanks. The woman here. Hi, thanks. Just a question for Peter. I wanted to go back, actually, to your question that you so fast and, you know, ask your answer. I'm curious about the terms you were using, such as preferential treatment and political philosophies in both cases, in fact, which are talking about violations of human rights. So this is not about preferential immigration. It's about depriving Palestinians of human right to return. And this is not about, I'm sorry, what was the other term, you know, other deprivations of rights. And I guess the nugget of the question is, to what extent do you support or would tolerate violating Palestinians' human rights, even inside Israel, as Youssef was noting, such as depriving Palestinians of the right to marry whoever they want or, you know, giving them, you know, a variety of limited rights, or depriving Palestinians of their human rights beyond the Green Line in perpetuity until such time as a two-state may or may not happen.  I think I was pretty clear that I believe that Israel has to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. I also believe that Israel, as I said, even Israel inside the Green Line, there need to be profound changes. It is absolutely, absolutely unconscionable that Israel does not allow, for instance, Palestinian citizens of Israel who are married to Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza or from other Arab countries to live together in Israel and to have citizenship. I think that Israel's immigration policy today, which basically makes it almost impossible for non-Jews to immigrate to the State of Israel, is absolutely wrong and needs to be changed in very fundamental ways. I also think that Israel's not having a civil marriage needs to be changed. I think there are very profound changes inside the State of Israel that need to take place, even inside the Green Line, let alone ending Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza. But I do not believe that there is a universal norm that says that in a condition of partition, a country has to allow not only all the refugees who want to return, but their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I just don't see that around the world. I don't see it. I don't see it in the subcontinent. I don't see it in Yugoslavia. I don't see it in the proposals for Cyprus. So, no, there I disagree. But yes, what I support both inside and outside the Green Line is a profound change in the State of Israel. I've looked at the list of laws that Adela says are discriminatory against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Many, many of them I think absolutely need to be changed. There are some that I do not think need to be changed. I do not think that Israel having its calendar based on Jewish religious holidays, for instance, is a problem, even though that, yes, does that discriminate against Palestinians? Absolutely. But the Palestinian Constitution says that Islam will be the religion and Sharia will be the basis of legislation. So I think it's fair. So it seems to me that we have a Palestinian national movement that at least is invested in the representation of an ethnicity and a religion as is the Jewish state. Is discrimination in Israel okay? No, it means that there is a reality on the ground that we cannot ignore in which both peoples have a profound allegiance to their particular ethnicities and indeed to their religions. We can pretend that's not true. We can pretend we wish it didn't exist, but it exists on both sides. And when you create a political solution, you have to acknowledge the realities that exist on the ground. Otherwise you can become Lebanon where you have a beautiful constitution and on the ground you have disaster. Those realities are true in people's lived experience both for Palestinians and Jews and you see them as reflected in the Palestinian national movement. Question on that side of the room. We talk about the single state as opposed to a binational state. We talk about human rights. I'm wondering how a certain reality on the ground plays into that conversation. If you look at the Palestinian press, if you look at the Palestinian leaders' comments, if you look at the Palestinian textbooks, there is such virulent, anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic, kill all the Jews. And so how does that fit into the desire for human rights and any kind of discussion about a single or a binational state? I'm assuming that question is for me. Look, there's actually been a fantastic study on textbooks that looks at both Israeli and Palestinian textbooks that I would reference you to. And I think there was a lot of mischaracterizations in your statement. When you look at both textbooks on both sides, there's actually plenty of problematic things within both societies. But I think, look, there are no shortage of problems in Palestinian society in a number of different arenas and nobody is denying that. But you have to also remember that this is part of a context that includes depopulation, exile, occupation for decades on end. There are going to be a lot of problems within a society that is demoralized decade after decade after decade. So I like to say that it is really unbecoming of us to apply our standards of morality on a people that has been demoralized decade after decade with our complicity through our tax dollars. So I agree with you. There are many things that need to change. But to ignore the fact that this is happening in a context of brutalization, I think is really unfair. Thank you. Right beside you. Thank you very much.  And I recently returned from Israel as a group and we met with a senior foreign ministry official who said, who was part of negotiations, was in the recent Kerry negotiations, who said that still one of the biggest problems is that when you get to the negotiating table, both sides won't relinquish their own narrative or want to acknowledge the other side's narrative. So I wonder if the both of you, while you still see things through your own prism, your own narrative, if you can acknowledge each other's narrative. Do you want to go first? I mean, look, I think that obviously I acknowledge the Palestinian narrative. There is what Jews, Zionists certainly generally want from Palestinians is for them to acknowledge a kind of moral equivalence between Palestinian nationalism and Zionism. That's not going to happen. And I understand why it will not happen from the Palestinian point of view. From Palestinians, Zionism is a colonial imperial project. And so, and this is why I don't think that this insistence of Benjamin Netanyahu on Palestinians recognizing Israel as a Jewish state makes sense. Palestinians don't need to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. I do believe that both peoples would be better served for the reasons I laid out through a partition which recognizes the realities. We do not need to ask Palestinians to believe that it was good that the Zionist movement came to Palestine. Obviously, Palestinians are not going to believe that. I would not ask them of it. What I think you can say is that this was a country, Israel, that was created through blood and tremendous trauma. Most other countries were also created that way. The question today is what is the best solution that offers the least amount of pain and injustice for the people who live there given who they actually are. Not who we might want them to be, but who they actually are. And that is why I think the PLO was right to accept Israel's right to exist in 1988 and 1993. I have my critiques of the Oslo process, but I think the PLO was right to do that. I think Oslo affirms the Zionist narrative not because they think that Israel's creation was a good thing, but that they recognize that a two-state solution with a Palestinian state alongside Israel is in fact the best thing for the Palestinian national movement. Yusuf, do you want to quickly? Yeah, I actually think this entire clash of narrative things is really overrated. I think there are certain historical realities that we all have to understand and accept that are part of each group's historical narrative, if you will. But I certainly don't deny that there was a long-standing history of antisemitism that faced the Jewish people or that there was a Holocaust or that there was a yearning among many people within the Jewish community to form a way to defend themselves and fight that off and what they believed was the best way to do so through the Zionist movement, which was a state. Where I draw the line is that that yearning or that desire makes it okay to put an entire another set of people through a experience of exile and statelessness and depopulation. I don't have any problem acknowledging that narrative. I think it's just a matter of history and I think we should all acknowledge these historical realities. The question is, just because you have a historical narrative of series of events that you decide to highlight or emphasize for yourself, that does not necessarily lead you to be able to justify the crimes that take place to another set of people. So I don't see this as a clash of narratives. I see this as a situation where you have serious rights denial to a large group of people, which are the Palestinian people, and that this situation cannot be brought to a peaceful outcome until we approximate the greatest degree of justice for those whose rights are being denied. And we need to have a conversation how to do that, but ignoring the vast majority of Palestinian stakeholders who happen to be, by the way, Palestinian refugees and those in exile is not the way to do it. Thanks. I think we have time for one, why don't we go over here? One or two more questions? Mr. Bynard, I just wanted to ask about a couple of questions about the two-state solution that you've been talking about. You've been talking about a two-state solution sort of generally. And I wonder whether you see any sort of equality between these two states. What I've heard of what might be acceptable, the Palestinian state, for instance, would have no right to its own security forces. The Israelis would insist on controlling the border along the Jordan River. And a number of other things that do not really lead me to believe that what is being talked about now, maybe not in the future, but now, is not a real state in the sense that we all believe a state is. Thanks. I think you are right that certainly this Israeli government should agree that they would accept any kind of Palestinian state is not talking about something that would be a real state. And I think there are others who talk about the two-state solution who agree with that as well. I don't. I think the Palestinian state has to be, I think that there can be a transition period in the Jordan Valley, whether it's three to five years. But ultimately, ultimately, ultimately, there should be no Israeli soldiers in the Jordan Valley. This is Palestinian territory. Now, if the Palestinians decide that it's in their interest as part of an agreement to have an international force there for various reasons, that's fine. But I do not, I certainly do not support an indefinite Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley. And I think that, I think that a Palestinian state should be sovereign. Obviously, Israel has the right to be concerned about threats that might come from that Palestinian state, but it does not have the right to deny that Palestinian state sovereignty. Nor do I believe that the Palestinian state should be fragmented into cantons. I think that there is a very, there is a very small amount of territory near the outside the green line that can be traded for an equal amount of equal quality land inside the green line. I do think that Jews have the right to access to the western wall and holy sites that are very important to Jews. But the, when I think about a Palestinian state, I am not thinking about, I'm not thinking, when I'm thinking about a state that in fact I think, although maybe smaller in size than Israel, I think has the attributes of a state. Would Gaza and the West Bank be connected? Yeah, I think you need to have a mechanism for Gaza and the West Bank to be connected and there's been work that's been done on that. Great. Can I just say one thing on that? No government, not just this current Israeli government, but no Israeli government has been willing to accept a fully sovereign Palestinian state. At maximum the conversations have been about a demilitarized state, which would essentially be subservient to Israel, which Israel would be able to control the airspace of, the electromagnetic grid of, be able to enter whenever it deemed necessary for security purposes. I mean, this is the best case scenario we're talking about with the friendliest of governments at the rosiest of times. Great. Let's take one last question on this side of the room. Thank you. I wanted to ask Peter a question that Yusuf actually brought up in the very beginning of the conversation. Never mind the refugees, the Palestinians in the occupied territories, with the demographics changing as they are, how many Palestinian citizens in Israel are too many Palestinian citizens in Israel for Israel to maintain its character? There is no number for me. There is no number at all. There is, I do not support Israel trying to make its Palestinian population leave. I do not support Israel trying to, God forbid, incentivize Palestinians to have fewer babies inside the mainland, nothing like that. Would I prefer that Israel be a Jewish majority? Yes, but I do not support the Israeli government taking coercive actions to that extent. If the Israeli government wants to decide that it wants to encourage aliyah from the United States among Jews, that to me is fine. But I do not support any coercive behavior by the Israeli government inside the Green Line that is designed to keep its Palestinian population at a certain percentage and beyond that, even beyond Palestinians. I believe Israel needs an asylum policy and a refugee policy in which it admits people based on the norms of asylum and refugee status around the world, whether those people are coming from Eritrea or Sudan or wherever. Great. All right. Well, thank you very much, everyone. First of all, good job on keeping those questions nice and short. Thanks to you all for coming to New America for having us and to our panelists, Yusuf Minayar and Peter Bynart. Stick around for a couple minutes, have a drink and chat with us. We'd be happy to talk to you. Thank you.


Welcome to DDRC members, staff and guest. We ask for your patience during this meeting. Multiple staff members are present to make sure that the meeting runs smoothly and all applicants and citizens are able to communicate with the commission at the appropriate time. The public will be able to participate using multiple methods. When participating, please provide your name for documentation purposes. So the public may watch, email, phone or log into a web session. If you're watching, you may stream the meetings at City TV, accessed at www.youtube.com, backslash user, backslash Columbia SC government. You may submit letters and statements via email to COC board meeting at columbiasc.gov, leading up to and or during the meeting as this account will be monitored throughout the proceedings. Emails and letters will be read into the record. If you're phoning in, you can call<PHONE_NUMBER>. And when prompted, please enter the meeting code 1859. If you're participating by phone, you'll have three options. Star 1 will allow you to listen, Star 2 will allow you to record a voicemail message that will be read into the record and Star 3 will allow a participant to be placed in a queue so that you may speak live when prompted. If you're calling in, please make sure your computer audio is muted, it's muted via, sorry. Please make sure your computer audio is muted if calling in live via your phone so we don't get feedback. You can stream the proceedings at publicinput.com backslash COC, ddrc-jun, jun2022. And I will call the roll and we have a few new members. I'd like to introduce Bruce Greenberg and Phillip McGuire. We're very, very happy to have them here today. So thank you for being willing to serve and joining us. So Miss Brannum. Here. Mr. Dinkins. Here. Mr. Greenberg. Miss Jacob. Here. Mr. McGuire. And we have Quorum. In order to avoid ex parte communications, DDRC members are under strict instructions not to discuss cases under consideration with the public or with each other outside of the public forum. The meeting typically starts with staff calling the case, giving a summary of the project and then calling on the applicant to present if they wish. Decisions are typically made in one evening. Decisions may be appealed within 30 days to a court of competent jurisdiction. Oaves will be administered individually as we hear either from applicants or from live speakers. Applicants with requests before the DDRC are allotted a presentation time of 10 minutes. This time should include but is not limited to an overview of the project, case history, and any pertinent meetings held regarding the request. This time also includes all persons presenting information on behalf of the applicant such as attorneys, engineers, and architects. This time does not include any questions asked by the DDRC or staff regarding request. Members of the general public are given the opportunity to address their concerns in intervals of two minutes. Applicants may have five minutes to respond. Staff has a timer and will make presenters aware of when their time has expired. Are there any changes to the agenda? We do have two changes to the agenda. Under the consent agenda item number four, 2201 Lincoln Street, a request for design approval for exterior changes and preliminary certification of the Bailey Bill in the Elmwood Park architectural conservation district has been deferred. And under the regular agenda, case number one, our only case on the regular agenda, 2805 Lincoln Street, which is a request for design approval for an accessory building in Earlwood Protection Area A has been moved to consent since the property owner has agreed to staff recommendations. Those are all of the changes. The DDRC uses the consent agenda to approve non-controversial or routine matters by single motion and vote. If a member of the DDRC or the general public wants to discuss an item on the consent agenda, that item is removed from the consent agenda and considered during the meeting. The DDRC then approves the remaining consent agenda items. Will staff please read the consent agenda? Certainly. Our first item is 1907 Pendleton Street, a request for preliminary certification of the Bailey Bill in the University Hill Architectural Conservation District. 1917 College Street, request for preliminary certification of the Bailey Bill again in the University Hill Architectural Conservation District. 2229 Park Street, request for preliminary certification of the Bailey Bill in the Elmwood Park Architectural Conservation District. 1240 Heights Street, request for a preliminary certification of the Bailey bill in the Waverly protection area. 121 through 123 Williams Street request for a preliminary certification of the Bailey bill in the Granby architectural conservation district. 1808 Cattaba Street request for design approval for new construction of an accessory structure in the Wales Garden architectural conservation district 720 Olive Street request for preliminary certification of the Bailey bill in the Oakwood court architectural conservation district and 729 Olive Street request for a certificate of design approval for new construction of an accessory structure in the Oakwood court architectural conservation district and last is 2805 Lincoln Street a request for a certificate of design approval for an accessory building in Earlwood protection area A. Is there anyone from the DDRC that would like any item removed from the consent agenda? No, I do have a question though. I'm about the 28th of Lincoln. Does that mean the the new accessory structure was less than 240 square feet? It was coming here because it was larger than that. They've cut it back. No, they didn't. The size was okay. It just has to be heard by the DDRC if it's over a certain square footage, but staff had made some recommendations in terms of garage door style and window fenestration where they can be seen from the public right of way and the property owner was good with those recommendations. So that's why it moved to the consent agenda. And I assume you have that all in writing and you're okay. Yes, indeed. Anyone else? Good. All right. Is there anyone from the public that would like to have an item removed from the consent agenda? I don't see any emails coming through emails. Any phone calls? Please communicate by sending an email to COC board meeting at columbiasc.gov or please communicate via phone by pressing star two to leave a voicemail or star three to speak in person. Pause to see if we've received any communication. So do I have a motion and a second to accept the consent agenda and also the May minutes? Oh, I'll be happy to do it. Boom. I moved to accept the May 19th EDRC minutes, including all staff recommendations and the consent agenda items, including 2805 Lincoln Street with all staff recommendations. Second. Miss Branham. Yes. Mr. Dinkins. Yes. Mr. Greenberg. Yes. Miss Jaco. Yes. And Mr. McGuire. Motion passes. Is there any items under other business? The only item we have under other businesses, we were going to try to do some internal training for the board as a whole next month, just for maybe 45 minutes before the next meeting. If that's doable. We thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about some projects that have come through DDRC. So we're talking about maybe meeting here at three or something on the day of the meeting. Okay. Right. How's that format? How's that format going to be? Like a training session or more of a, okay. Oh, just a training session. Right. So. Great idea. We'll talk at you. Oh, great. We need that. That's good. All right. Any other business? No. I don't have any items at this moment. So I think we're good. Look for a motion, a second to adjourn the meeting. Motion to adjourn. Thank you. Good job guys. It's all right.


14-year-old Grant Thompson was the first to find the bird pretty stung that week. So at 9.37 it's Colorado. Made it to Red Rocks. Made it to Red Rocks. All right. I was going to actually go do a 14er today, a 14,000-foot mountain, but I just ran out of time with work and with getting ready for the live stream tonight. And so I called an audible every now and then and running. You've got to call an audible. I'm here at Red Rocks. There you go. Red Rocks is a very famous music venue here in Colorado. And basically there's a mountain. Oh yeah, Johnny Cash played here. You know, Neil Young. Who else? Well, more recently, like a Mumford and Sons, and anyway, a lot of good music comes through Red Rocks every single year. But what I love about Red Rocks is that behind the music venue is a nice mountain called Mount Morrison, and it's very steep. It doesn't... There's no... It's not really switchbacks. It goes up the mountain, straight up the mountain. I don't know if you can see it there. So anyway, we're going to get some vertical gain, even though I'm not quite as high up as I would have liked to be for the day. And the big question is, do we go with the Speed Cross Fours or the Speed Cross Fies? Hmm, options options. About three quarters of the way up. Let's see. Let's see. I've been going for 30 minutes and it was like 49 degrees at the base. Up here, it's probably closer to 35, so time for a little jacket action. Oh man, Speed Cross Fours. Doing pretty well. Doing pretty well. All right. Let's see where we're at. Top of Mount Morrison in 36 minutes. Whoo! We'll take it. I... Let's see. Hold on. It's less than two miles of distance to get up here. But the vertical gain is just amazing. In fact, I think this is just a little higher than Mount Falcon, which all of you have seen me run at, which is just across the valley there. That's Mount Falcon over that way. So anyway, feeling good to do that in the snow. I think in the summertime, I can usually do that around 30 minutes. So we will take it, man. For January, we will take it. All right, back down, and we're going to get the Speed Cross Fives on. Whoo! Speed Cross Fours. I'm excited to talk about them in the second video publishing today, compare them to the Speed Cross Fives. All right, let's do this. This lap was three and a half miles, so a little over 5K. I don't know what the vert was exactly. I'll get that to you back at the house. Yes, switching in the Speed Cross Fives, and I'm going to change my socks as quick as possible. I don't want to be at the car too long. It's going to be four minute change. All right, come on. Am I putting sunscreen on in late January? Yes I am. Yes I am. It's a little... I'm telling you, man.  I should have put it on an hour ago, but that's okay. We're putting it on now. Holy smokes. By the way, I'm going to put my hat forward for the second lap, so you will see footage. Basically, you'll know if I'm wearing the hat backward in the video, that means I'm in the Speed Cross Fours. If I'm wearing my hat forward, it means I was in the Speed Cross Fives. All right. This is... I didn't think I'd be doing this today. Holy smokes. Everyone in the Polar Vortex, stay strong. Gosh, you're always welcome in Colorado. Holy smokes. Stay safe. It's ridiculous out there. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, everywhere over there, man. It's nice. Stay safe. Okay. Sunscreen in January. Oh, ladies and gentlemen. Okay. I'm almost to the top for the second round in the Speed Cross Fives. They're doing well, doing well. But tonight's back at the studio. I want to talk about volume of running, volume of training. So how many miles or kilometers are you running? Versus effort versus effort. I'll just say right now, I've been running for an hour and a half, an hour and a half. But my volume for the day is what? It's five miles, five miles. So it's insane. We're going to talk more about what the thought process is behind effort and volume, how they correlate, how they feed off of each other. All right. One last pitch of the mountain. Let's go. Seven miles. I've got a lot of thoughts, and I think you're going to enjoy the question of the day. I'm really interested to hear how you guys answer the question of the day. Oh, man. A little, yes, I know, a little afternoon coffee. I know. And I've got my Lunabar here, Lunabar here, little post recovery run snack. This is saving me right now because I was getting a little loopy up there. Oh, man. All right. We didn't quite nail it. We did not quite nail it tonight in the live stream. If you were there, thank you for your patience. We will overcome. We will defeat the live streaming technical difficulties. I don't know how long it's going to take, but it worked tonight, but we didn't quite get my brother in down from the mountains to all of you on YouTube. It's going to work. Stay with us. It's just going to work. That's all I can say. And if you haven't seen, if you haven't watched the replay and go watch it upper right hand corner, we covered a ton. We covered a ton effort versus volume, effort versus volume. And there's a lot. I'm not going to try and be as concise as possible, but I got, there's a lot to share. All right. Today I did seven miles, seven miles in like two hours. One of the slowest runs I've done in a long, long time. And I was running probably 90% of it, speed hiking 10% when it got really steep at the end. It was 3,900 feet of vertical gain and loss, 3,900 feet, which is basically 1,100 meters, 1,100 meters. And it felt at the end after seven miles of distance. It felt in my legs more like 14 miles or 15 miles, fighting the mud, fighting the snow, fighting the elevation gain on, yeah, and just fighting the, you know, the overall uphill battle of going up that mountain. So that was my run today. All right. Now I want to talk about Jason Schlarb and the East African runners. So Jason Schlarb is a hundred, he's an ultra runner. He in 2018, he won, I think 300 mile races outright. Just like he's the, he's the real deal. And he lives in Colorado. I just like, I really like his style of racing and he's just, he's the real deal. But he was running 100 to 140 miles a week up until last year. And basically he, he sought out a coach for some help and guidance. And basically it's from what I understand listening to him on podcasts. It sounds like they almost cut his mileage in half, not quite, but he went from a hundred to 140 miles a week depending on what, you know, the range was for that given section of his training block down to like 60 to 90 or 60 to 100. So really reduced the volume. Now the big question is how much of vertical gain is he doing in some of those miles because he lives up in the mountains. I'm guessing it's quite a bit. I'm guessing it's quite a bit. Okay. And then you have the East Africans, you know, Ethiopia and Kenya. Let's just hone in on those two countries from again, the research I've done, the watching YouTube videos, they, and I'm focusing more so on the marathon when I give these examples. It appears, and you know, you've got Kipchoge, who is the world record holder in the marathon. It appears that they're dialed into, and again, this is just rough research, but that 120 to let's say 145, 120 miles to 145 miles per week, and maybe even a little more for some of the guys that are really trying to make it. So what is that in kilometers? Oh my goodness. We're talking like 180 kilometers and to 220, roughly, roughly 180 to 220. So my question, okay, this is not the question of the day, but the question that I'm asking myself is as I prepare for my first marathon, and as I, you know, eventually pikes peak in August, how much mileage, so that volume, that kind of that generic volume term. Oh, and that's okay. Volume. If you're measuring volume in miles, in kilometers, in minutes, in vertical gain and loss, maybe you're not measuring your volume at all. And guess what? I have a lot of respect for you, and I'm just going to say it right now. Question of the day. How do you measure your volume of running? If you don't measure, that's okay. After college, I tell you what, I was not measuring my volume. I wasn't measuring, first of all, Strava wasn't around yet. I didn't have a GPS watch. I just went by feel, totally by feel, after college. In college, we had old, like, Timex watches. This is, I'm dating myself, but GPS watches were around, but they were pretty expensive. So nobody had them. And basically, we had, we just went, we went by miles that, like, that Mark Wetmore kind of marked off for us, and that we knew, okay, this is an eight mile run, and then we just looked at our watch, okay, and then we did the math on our heads afterward, okay, well, we must have been going 745 pace for that eight mile run because we ran, I don't know, 59 minutes. Just do, I don't know, off the top of my head. And so again, I am trying to discern how to measure the overall effort of my training, even though today was only seven miles. But again, I got back to the car and it felt like I had run 14 miles. Now it's a balance. And this is where I'm just going to come down and kind of wrap it up because I could talk all night about this. I think it's a balance. I love miles. I love running long distances. I did a 40 mile training run last spring, getting ready for a 50 mile race. Why did I do that? A, I love running. So do what you love, right? As I do what you love, like, let's not overthink it too much, but guess what? I DNF'd the 50 miler. And so why did I do the 40 mile training run? I was basically kind of doing a little bit of a mental game, trying to figure out it was my first 50 miler. Can I finish a 50 miler? Now I DNF'd a little bit because of an injury. And anyway, there's a lot of, a lot of issues happen, but I rolled my ankle and bottom line, it got ugly quick. You've got like, if there's two different runners, one is running 70 miles a week and the other is running 70 miles a week. This gentleman lives in Orlando, Florida, which is pancake flat at sea level. And this gentleman is or lady is lives in Leadville, Colorado. And they're both running 70 miles that week, but she is doing 5,000 feet of vertical gain and he did 100 feet because he lives in Florida. There's different efforts happening here. Obviously there's workouts to consider. And, and so I just want to point out that it's not just about volume. It's also about the overall effort that you're putting into each mile, whether it's hilly, whether it's at an altitude, whether it's a hard workout at sea level on a track and you're just, you're ripping mile repeats on a track. Like there's just differences in volume. And so as we begin, yes, the Strava group, it's live, it's live. I'm going to announce it tomorrow, though. I got to do a few tweaks. I got to do a few tweaks. Come back tomorrow for the Strava group. I will reveal it to you. This is more of a conversation starter down in the comments because I, I'm not sure I just made sense. I'm just trying to figure out volume effort. The East Africans, Jason Schlarb cutting his mileage almost in half. My vertical gain and how much I love running uphill. And we're just riffing here. We're riffing here, trying to figure it out. Again, the keyword is effort and I love you. And yes, that second video will be publishing at 3 p.m. Mountain Time, comparing the Speedcross five to the Speedcross four. Seek beauty, work hard and love each other. Thank you for being here.