An American Liberal Jewish Zionist Policymaker

What years of living and working the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Have Taught Me

Most of my posts will be about issues of the day, but today’s is a little different. I wanted to share with you more about my story. I think it matters and can be useful for a project like this. It’s also something I learned on the campaign trail after 20 years of working on policy. Wonkery only goes so far. To trust and understand you, people need to know where you are coming from (Also learning I should have taken a lot more professional pictures. Nothing to do about that now). So here goes.

Formative Experiences - Jerusalem, New Jersey, and Penn

I was born in Jerusalem at Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, almost literally on the Green-line separating Israel and the Palestinian Territories. My parents are American. They met at the Jewish summer camp Tel Yehuda, which is run by Young Judaea - a Zionist Youth Organization (I attended the camp in high school). In 1975, inspired by their experiences in this youth movement and their travels to Israel, they made Aliyah. My brother, sister, and I were all born in Jerusalem. When I return to Israel, the smells and tastes still remind me of childhood in a very visceral way, and I will always have a love for this land which is central to my identity.

Some of my earliest memories are from the Israel-Lebanon war in 1982. I remember going to shiva at the house of a friend of mine at the age of 4. His older brother had been killed in Lebanon. I saw his mother sobbing, and thought to myself “this is weird. Adults don’t cry like that. Only children do.” My nanny’s son was also gravely wounded and lost both his legs in the war, and the father of two girls in my neighborhood was also killed. I sang songs about death and told my parents that 23 is a bad age to die. I want to live until I’m 90.

We moved to the United States when I was eight, and I grew up in Livingston NJ, a pretty typical New Jersey suburb of New York with a large Jewish population. I attended Solomon Schechter Day School through eighth grade. I came of age during a time of great hope. In 1993 Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat stood on the White House lawn, shook hands, and launched the Oslo Accords. Inspired by this moment and by my early life experiences, I wrote my college essays in the fall of 1995, about my career goal to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians. That same fall Rabin was assassinated, and arguably the best opportunity for peace in the history of the conflict sadly went with him.

As part of my studies in college, I began learning Arabic, and spent a summer at the Arabic Language immersion program in Middlebury Vermont. I was 18 surrounded by graduate students focusing on Middle East studies and what I heard about the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israelis and Palestinians shocked me. After all, as far as I had understood, Israel was always the underdog. All of the Palestinians who fled in 1948 and 1967 did so of their own accord. Every Israeli war that had been fought had been entirely in self-defense. Israel was ready to make peace tomorrow if only the Arabs and Palestinians would. And Palestinians could all go to all of the other Arab countries in the Middle East anyway if they really needed to since there is no distinction between an Arab and a Palestinian.

What followed was an intense period of reading and exploring the history of the conflict - Tom Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem and his description of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres in particular stands out as a memory. I often describe this as the equivalent of a grieving process. First, denial that many of the narratives that I had been raised with were only half the story. Next came anger at my community, my family, my religion, and Israel (That phase wasn’t fun and lasted through a good bit of college). Eventually, I came to accept that there are multiple narratives and traumatized people on all sides of this conflict and instead of trying to sort out who is right or wrong about what, the best thing I could do was stick with my initial mission of trying to end the conflict.

I also learned that this experience of mine was not all that unique. Many of the American Jews who go into this field are the most passionate and most deeply inculcated in the Jewish narrative of Israel. They therefore face an even deeper shock when they start to learn the Palestinian narrative. It’s also why so many American Jewish kids turn against Israel in college. If I didn’t have the depth of experience and connection to Israel that I did, I may also have never turned back and not appreciated the importance of what Israel represented for the Jewish people, and how important it was that Israel continue to exist.

Obama Administration - Iran and Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations

After graduating college, a brief two year diversion into investment banking was interrupted when I walked out of the Chambers Street subway station in downtown Manhattan on September 11, 2001 to see the World Trade Center burning. Soon, I was back in graduate school motivated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also as someone who had spent his college years studying Arabic and studied abroad in the Middle East, by the need to positively influence U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and explain the region to Americans - a drive that only became more pressing after our disastrous decision to invade Iraq.

Eventually I moved to Washington and found my way into the Obama Administration working in the Defense Department in the Office of the Secretary of Defense where I worked on Iran. Much of my job involved preparing for the possibility of a war between the United States and Iran. Part of my job was to make sure we were ready if the day came while also developing strategies to use military tools to pressure and change Iran’s calculus with regards to its nuclear program and regional behavior. I started that job the week before the failed Green Revolution in Iran and spent the first weeks writing updates for senior leaders about the Iranian regime’s repression of its own people. While so much of what I had done professionally to that point had taught me to be an idealistic peacemaker, who believed dialogue and diplomacy could overcome all challenges, this job taught me some hard-nosed realism. As a colleague of mine used to say about members of the Iranian regime that were responsible for hundreds of U.S. deaths in Iraq and the repression of their own people - “they are not misunderstood people. They are assholes.” Still, sometimes you have to negotiate and cut deals with assholes.

Another opportunity the job at the Pentagon afforded me was to see the U.S-Israel relationship at its absolute best. The level of professionalism, trust, and cooperation between Israeli and American defense and military officials was remarkable. It worked because the IDF in terms of capability, tactical creativity, and technological innovation was one of the few partners who brought genuine capacity that the US military didn’t have and could learn from. Meanwhile, our Israeli counterparts appreciated the huge levels of support that the United States provided to Israel, and respected that as a global superpower there were things our military knew and saw that they could learn from. Of course, that didn’t stop genuine disagreements. But there was always mutual respect.

After a short time in the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I ended up on the small team supporting Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to conduct final status peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. This was the last time the parties sat down and tried to work out the hardest issues in the conflict - borders, security, Jerusalem, and refugees. For me this was a dream. I actually got to sit in the room with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators and work on what I had written my college essays on when I was 18 years old. Not many people get to do that.

I wrote a 20 page report about what I learned that I won’t repeat here, but some key thoughts. First, at the time my wife was working as a legal aid attorney and part of her job was to provide legal services to women in abusive relationships and help them with divorce cases. We talked about how similar our jobs were. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the world’s longest running divorce negotiation. The two sides aren’t looking to live together but to separate. Unfortunately they are stuck with each other for life - especially if there are kids involved. In the case of the conflict, the kid is Jerusalem - the most sensitive issue in the negotiation and one where any custody arrangement will be highly awkward and deeply unsatisfying to both sides. The two sides also know each other so much better than their lawyers (the American mediators). They know how to press each other's buttons, and they also know how to make a deal if they decide that is what they want. And oftentimes, the negative negotiation environment itself leads the sides to bicker about everything - even things they don’t actually really care about.

While the Pentagon experience showed me the best of the U.S-Israel relationship, this experience showed me the worst. Shouting, disagreements and distrust were not uncommon between American and Israeli officials (Also between American and Palestinian officials). The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about the most sensitive political issue in Israel. So instead of military professionalism isolated from politics, we were wading deep into every Israeli political sensitivity. And while defense cooperation is about working towards the same common objective, in this negotiation the U.S. and Israel have fundamentally different roles with the U.S. as mediator and Israel as one of the parties.

One other vivid memory I have from that experience was sitting with one of the Palestinian negotiators the night the talks fell apart. He was a grizzled man who’d spent years in Israeli jails early in his life and was a very proud security type. It was after midnight and we were in the beautiful old monastery that had been converted into the American consulate in Jerusalem. We kept arguing and haggling with him over some of the details of the latest Israeli proposal, which he insisted was insulting. Finally, he just looked at us and screamed “They do not see me. They do not see me.”

After that experience, I left government and spent a number of years writing about these issues as a think tanker. I want to set the record straight here, since some of my views became political pinatas during the 2024 Presidential campaign. I supported the Iran Nuclear Deal, but also helped write a long report about all the other things that the U.S. needed to do afterwards to make it work - especially in the region and with regards to sunset provisions - none of which happened before the Trump Administration pulled out of the deal. With former Israeli and American military officials we wrote the most comprehensive plan for what a security system that can ensure Israel’s security and guarantee freedom for Palestinians could look like. It was based on the work we did in the negotiations in 2013-14 and I believe is still the best security blueprint available for a two-state agreement. I also worked with colleagues on a proposal in 2018 for a fundamentally different approach to Gaza, arguing that the U.S needed to get more involved and the current situation was unsustainable. Unfortunately that one proved correct.

Biden and Harris - October 7th and the Presidential Campaign

I joined the Biden Administration in late 2021 and served first at the Pentagon and then moved over to the White House to work for Vice President Harris advising her on the Middle East, defense, and technology issues. The whole point was to diversify my expertise working on issues like Russia Ukraine and Artificial Intelligence, which is what I was doing in addition to Middle East work until October 7th, 2023 when the Middle East and Israeli-Palestinian conflict sucked me back in.

I’m still processing those experiences and how the Biden Administration responded. I will write more about that in the future. What I can say is that this was the hardest work I ever did, both in terms of the policy challenges but also the emotions, and I think that is true for a lot of people who were working on the response. It was an incredibly uncertain time. We were working with incomplete information in the middle of chaos with sometimes limited influence over the various actors and the situation on the ground. There were times where I wished our approach had been different. No one can look at the year and half since October 7th and consider it a smashing policy success. At the same time, there were also many moments where American policy made a real positive difference (e.g. the first hostage deal and ceasefire, the defense of Israel from multiple unprecedented missile attacks from Iran). What I do believe is that everyone I dealt with in the U.S. government was trying to do the right thing as they saw it - keep Israel secure, get the hostages out, protect civilians in Gaza and get more humanitarian aid in. Unfortunately we often failed to achieve those objectives and there were certainly sharp disagreements across the U.S. government about how to get there.

One thing that really has stuck with me was supporting Vice President Harris for her meetings and calls with people who were horribly affected by the war, whether it be a Palestinian-American family who made it out of Gaza or the families of American hostages who were being held by Hamas. Before her first meeting with American hostage families, I remember going in to brief the Vice President. It was two weeks after October 7th, and everyone was exhausted and shell-shocked. We started talking to her about who she would be meeting, the way you often prep a Principal. And she just stopped us and said “Stop. I need you to go back and get all the information you can about every one one of these people I’m meeting and even more importantly about every one of their family members who is in Gaza. Because when I meet with them, I need to know as much as I possibly can about them and their loved ones. That is what I owe to them.” For me that was a very important moment (Even if it did result in a bunch of extra staff work). It said a lot to me about who she is as a leader and made me proud to work for her. It also was a real reminder that when you are working on these large scale policy issues that affect thousands, sometimes millions, it’s still at the end oftentimes about reaching individual people and showing compassion and empathy, and trying to drive policy outcomes that make their lives better.

By the summer of 2024, I was burnt out and ready to leave government service. However, things didn’t go exactly as expected. In mid-July Vice President Harris became the Democratic Party nominee, and soon I got a call asking me to go over to the campaign to run Jewish outreach and also be a policy advisor on all things Gaza and Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

As someone who had spent 20 years mostly as a policy nerd, being thrown into hardcore politics was a shock to the system. What I quickly found was a Jewish community that felt under siege in the aftermath of October 7th and the spike in antisemitism in the United States from both the left and the right that had come afterwards. I spent most of my time reassuring American Jews that Kamala Harris had their backs. And I could do that with credibility because I had worked for her and because it was true. Ultimately, we didn’t win. But we did manage to hold the Jewish vote at levels similar to historic levels for Democrats, which I felt very good about given how challenging the cycle was and how much was spent by Republicans on trying to play on Jews’ fears to get them to vote for Trump.

There is a lot more to reflect on from this experience as well, and I’ll try to do that in my writing and have already started. And I do believe that being thrown into the deep end of Jewish American politics combined with my previous policy background, gives me some unique insights as we move forward that I’ll try to reflect in my writings.

Anyway, if you’ve read this long, I hope you’ve found this interesting and that perhaps it gives you a bit more of a sense of who I am and where I am coming from as I respond to current events and pontificate on issues impacting Israelis, Palestinians, the Middle East, and American Jews.