The State of Two States - Briefing call with Dan Shapiro, former US Ambassador to Israel

On September 14th 2017, APN hosted Ambassador Daniel Shapiro, America’s former ambassador to Israel, for a briefing call on prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Like APN, Ambassador Daniel Shapiro has supported the two-state solution since the late 1980s, long before it became a tenet of America’s Middle East policy. As President Obama’s ambassador to Israel, Shapiro was a key member of the past administration’s team working to advance the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Now, with the Trump administration refusing to commit itself to this basic US policy position and with the situation on the ground turning increasingly less hospitable to this solution, Shapiro is examining other scenarios and trying to assess their likelihood and their potential implications. Read Shapiro’s recent Tablet article on this topic.

Daniel Shapiro served as United States ambassador to Israel (July 2011-January 2017). In that role, he participated in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, U.S.-Israel discussions on the Iran nuclear agreement, and negotiations on the $38 billion Memorandum of Understanding for U.S. military assistance to Israel. Prior to that he was Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Security Council at the White House, where he served as a member of Special Envoy George Mitchell's team, led U.S. diplomatic efforts in Syria and Lebanon, and advised President Obama through the early months of the upheavals in Arab states in 2011. He is now a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, a leading Tel Aviv-based think tank.