How Did We Get Here? A Conversation with Ghaith al-Omari and Dennis Ross on the Middle East Crisis

Reporter and lecturer Janine Zacharia moderates a conversation between two experts on the Middle East, Ghaith al-Omari and Ambassador Dennis Ross, to add context to the crisis in the Middle East and offer frameworks for how to think about current events. Ghaith al-Omari, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Senior Fellow in The Washington Institute's Irwin Levy Family Program on the U.S.-Israel Strategic Relationship, is the former executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine. He served as advisor to the negotiating team during the 1999–2001 permanent-status talks in addition to holding various other positions within the Palestinian Authority. Ambassador Dennis Ross is the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization. For more than twelve years, Ambassador Ross played a leading role in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process, dealing directly with the parties as the U.S. point man on the peace process in both the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. Janine Zacharia has reported on Israel, the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy for close to two decades including stints as Jerusalem Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, chief diplomatic correspondent for Bloomberg News, Washington bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post, and Jerusalem correspondent for Reuters. She appears regularly on cable news shows and radio programs as a Middle East analyst and is currently a visiting lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford.