Mideast talk gives another perspective

The recent slew of campus talks on the violence in the Middle East continued last night with Daniel Pipes, director of a Philadelphia-based think-tank, who spoke before a standing-room only crowd at Hillel Auditorium. Pipes is well-respected as an expert on Mideast politics, as he currently heads up the Middle East Forum. In the 1980s and early 1990s, he was best known for his position as the director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and his opinions are on the right wing of the Israeli political spectrum. The talk, which was titled "Is there peace at the end of the peace process?" was sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and organized by PennPAC, Penn's student branch of AIPAC. The talk was followed by a question-and-answer session with the audience. Pipes' 30-minute speech focused on whether or not the Israelis and Palestinians should continue forward with the existing peace process -- they shouldn't, he said -- and the role of American foreign policy in the process. Pipes said he believes that the current peace process, which has been in place since the Oslo Accords of 1993, has essentially been a failure and transformed Israel's policy of deterrence into a policy of acceptance. "The signal the Israelis wished to send, that of reaching out in a kind of friendship, went awry. Palestinians looked at what Israelis were doing and read this as weakness," said Pipes, who is also a Jerusalem Post columnist. Pipes added that he thinks the current surge of violence in Israel will continue, saying that "in the end, there will be one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and it's either going to be a Palestinian State or an Israeli state." Regarding the role of American foreign policy in the conflict, Pipes said that the continuing violence has "terrible implications" for the United States and that the U.S. must help to strengthen Israel -- a point that both American presidential candidates have been stressing in their debates. Later, when asked about the effect the Middle East violence will have on the upcoming presidential election, Pipes drew laughter when he said: "Al Gore does have extensive foreign policy experience and George Bush has none." He added that while both the parties were friendly to Israel, Republicans are more so. Wharton and Engineering sophomore David Bard, student liaison to AIPAC at Penn, said he chose to invite the Zionistic Pipes because "he represents a right-wing political stance that isn't necessarily that of PennPAC in particular but provides an interesting perspective for people to hear." Following the talk, students said they were happy to hear a pro-Israel view to the conflicts, especially given the fact that many felt that last night's forum on Middle East politics was decidedly less pro-Israel. "At some of the other forums here there have been a lot of strictly objective and left-wing opinions, but there have been few that have taken the Israel side," College freshman David Rendsburg said.