Forthcoming Events

The Forum sponsors lunches, webinars, live briefings, parlor meetings, and conference calls featuring its staff and fellows, former government officials, scholars, journalists, and others with insights into the Middle East and Islamism. Speakers delve deep into critical issues, surpassing what is found in mass media – always with an eye toward American interests. Most briefings occur along the New York-Philadelphia-Washington, D.C. corridor.

Audio recordings and written summaries of past lectures are available.

Hillel Frisch

Israel and Its Foes: The Need to Inflict Accumulative Pain

Date: Wednesday, June 26, 2019
City: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Cost: $250 per person

The Middle East Forum cordially invites you to lunch with Hillel Frisch.

Israel's greatest victory in June 1967 was succeeded by a war of attrition and the Yom Kippur war. By contrast, the far less conclusive outcome in 1973 set the stage for a period of 46 years in which Arab states have avoided direct war against Israel. Accumulative pain rather than decisive victory, peace dividends, or a change of perceptions regarding the Jewish state account for this large but obscure shift.

These lessons can be applied to confrontations between Israel and Hamas, which are also characterized by a hard border and professional militaries, thereby paralleling the inter-state confrontations of 1948-73.

Hillel Frisch argues that only a fourth massive round of fighting can possibly bring Hamas to understand what the Arab states reached after five rounds of wars with the Jewish state (1948-49, 1956, 1967, 1968-70 and 1973) – that the pain is so great and the possibility of victory so small, that it's time to cease making war.

Please join Hillel Frisch, MEF president Daniel Pipes, and other MidEast specialists take on Israeli policy toward Gaza before opening the discussion to all attendees.

Lunch and discussion will take place from 12:00 to 1:30pm, followed by a brief period of networking from 1:30 to 2pm.

Business attire. Limited capacity. Picture I.D. required to enter the building.