Ken Stein, President, Center for Israel Education, May 19, 2025 Introduction Since 1937, the idea of geopolitically separating Jewish and Arab populations west of the Jordan River has been a recommended solution to mitigate violence between…
Professor Ken Stein spent decades working with and researching the presidency and post-presidency of Jimmy Carter and shared many of his insights with the media and fellow scholars after the 39th U.S. president died Dec….
By Ken Stein, October 28, 2024 When Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter became the 39th President of the United States in 1977, he had little foreign policy experience, particularly regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Despite this, he…
September 2024 By Kenneth Stein Kenneth Stein is Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History, Political Science and Israel Studies at Emory University and President of the Atlanta-based Center for Israel Education. He is the author…
It is now apparent that distances between the Carter administration and Israel did not begin in earnest after Begin’s May 1977 election or over the settlements. Newly available materials show that from its outset, the Carter administration prioritized curbing Israeli influence in Washington.
Scott Abramson and Ken Stein, Center for Israel Education Common political, emotional and strategic threads are present in President Joe Biden’s speeches and comments about the brutal reality of the Hamas attacks on Israel and…
Note by the author: As a faculty member at Emory University, I wrote several articles per month for national and local newspapers. This article appeared in October 2002 in the Orlando Sentinel. The idea for a trusteeship to be possibly be considered to manage the Israeli-Palestinian relationship emerged from my decades of study of the Palestine Mandate, understanding the concept of separation of the two communities that was offered by the British on more than one occasion during the 1930s and 1940s, and the American suggestion in early 1948 to create a trusteeship for Palestine’s future. Martin Indyk, a US diplomat published an article about considering a trusteeship as a future political option in a Foreign Policy magazine article in July 2003.
The Jordanian, Israeli, Palestinian Triangle Ken Stein January 27, 2023 From the June 1967 War, when Israel captured lands on the West Bank of the Jordan River, portions of Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the…
Ken Stein explains in detail how Egyptian and Israeli leaders coached their generals into reaching an understanding on how their troops would be disengaged after the war. On that day, a German-born Egyptian career foreign service officer, Omar Sirry was told to pack his toothbrush and go to meet several Israelis along with other Egyptians at the 101 Kilometer marker for talks.
On a stormy evening on Sept. 17, 1978, with President Jimmy Carter as their witness, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin stepped to a table at the White House and signed the Camp David Accords, consisting of two framework agreements: an outline for the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty and a scaffold for planning self-rule for the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, held by Israel since the June 1967 war. Six months later, on March 26, 1979, the three men gathered again at the White House to sign the peace treaty. But their path to the ceremony 40 years ago was hardly smooth.
On January 1, 2022, I completed 43 years of teaching at Emory University. It was a great run and great fun. Along the way, I accumulated more pieces of paper than was necessary, among them…
March 26, 2025 By Ken Stein The ripe conditions that prefaced the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli treaty and might presage additional Arab-Israeli agreements are almost totally absent in 2025. Why? Today, there is an absence of political…
In August 2021, the U.S. withdrew its military from Afghanistan, ending America’s longest war. Correctly, we needed to prevent another 9/11 on our doorsteps. We still have that imperative. Our departure does not diminish America’s need for stable allies, like Israel and Arab states. The US should build an effective alliance system among them. We should have a small, substantive and selective US footprint in the region for support of friends and deterrence of foes, not for nation-building.
Nine pre-conditions that enabled Arab-Israeli negotiations to unfold successfully in the 1970s and 1990s are not present today. Egyptian-Israeli and Jordanian-Israeli agreements occurred because the respective sides wanted them and needed them.
November 25, 2020 By Ken Stein Leadership is about knowing your objectives and adjusting and implementing the tactics to accomplish them. Leadership is also about choices and consequences. It is about making political trade-offs. November…
Ambassador Bandar Bin Sultan served as Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2006. From 2005 to 2015 he led the country’s National Security Council. He offers a scathing attack on Yasser Arafat’s failure to embrace multiple negotiating overtures proposed by Presidents Carter and Reagan. Additionally, he expresses his anger at the present Palestinian leadership for criticizing the UAE’s recognition of Israel in the 2020 Abraham Accords.
On August 13, 2020, when the United Arab Emirates agreed to pursue full normal relations with Israel, without any Israeli withdrawal from lands it won in the June 1967 war, the sacred negotiating formula, “Land for Peace” that had dominated Arab-Israeli talks for half a century abruptly ended.
Given the turmoil in Syria, sectarian violence in Iraq, Lebanon’s economic woes, Turkish military adventurism, and Iran’s regional mischief-making, the October 2019, US bipartisan congressional delegation visit to Amman made great sense. It emphasized that for Washington, Jordan is a critical geographic and political asset for America and, for anyone else interested in preserving some measure of regional stability in at least part of the tumultuous Middle East.
March 25, 2019 Kenneth Stein, the founding president of the Center for Israel Education, has taught Middle Eastern history and politics at Emory for 43 years. He spent more than half that time serving as…
Forty years ago this month, President Jimmy Carter convened the Camp David summit between Israeli and Egyptian leaders to push Arab-Israeli negotiations forward in an unprecedented and intensive manner.
In January this year, the veteran Arab journalist Rami Khouri made this assessment of the Middle East as a region, “Never before has the Arab region been so fractured, violent, volatile and vulnerable to the…
The notion of a two-state solution remains front and center as the most often discussed and endorsed solution to the Palestinian-Israeli dimension of the conflict in the Middle East. So why has it not happened?
Coming up, fifty years after the June 1967 War. How many times have I taught the causes and effects, or written about the War? Hundreds of times in forty years.
In the aftermath of UNSC Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlement construction, Secretary of State John Kerry publicly blamed Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank for being the major barrier to a two-state solution to resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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