IGP Hosts Day Two of Workshop with Israeli and Palestinian Negotiators from Camp David Summit

On January 31, SIPA’s Institute of Global Politics (IGP) hosted the second part of a two-day, for-credit workshop on the permanent-status negotiations for Palestinian statehood held between Israeli and Palestinian representatives at the Camp David Summit in 2000. Workshop leaders Ghaith al-Omari and Gideon “Gidi” Grinstein, who respectively served as the secretaries of the Palestinian and Israeli delegations in 2000, returned to SIPA to complete the workshop they began at the end of last semester.

Al-Omari is currently the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Senior Fellow in The Washington Institute for Near East Policy's Irwin Levy Family Program on the US-Israel Strategic Relationship. Grinstein is the founder and president of the Reut Group, an Israeli nonprofit that specializes in strategy, development, and leadership.

The first part of the workshop, which took place on December 6, was attended by more than 30 students from across Columbia, including Columbia College, SIPA, the Business School, and the School of General Studies. The session covered the history of the two-state solution and gave attendees an inside perspective on the Camp David Summit from the room where it happened. Beyond the minutiae, al-Omari and Grinstein taught the students principles of successful diplomatic negotiations – such as structuring agreements so they can get domestic political support in the delegations’ respective countries.

Part two of the workshop focused on the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal agreed to on January 18. Al-Omari and Grinstein asked students to work in small groups to use the principles they learned in the previous session to prepare a five-minute brief analyzing the ceasefire deal’s implications for the prospect of creating a pathway to a Palestinian state.

Each group focused on one of the following topics: how to deal with borders and territory, creating a political process from the “day after” forward, organizing legitimate representation for a Palestinian delegation, supporting refugees, and addressing Palestinian and Israeli security.

The groups took turns presenting their briefs, which fellow students then workshopped. The ambiguity of the ceasefire deal, which originally helped negotiators reach an agreement but now creates challenges for its implementation, was a common thread across several groups’ analyses.

As the students reflected on their experience, al-Omari and Grinstein explained that they were motivated to organize the workshop to figure out how to scale constructive conversations on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In reflections of their own, both organizers concluded with an overarching message they took away from the two-day workshop: even in the most politically and emotionally fraught conflicts, opportunities for constructive diplomacy still exist.