The Director holds meetings in Israel and Palestine, 20th - 25th July 2015

The Director spent six days in the Israel and Palestine, holding meetings in Jerusalem, Gaza, Tel Aviv and Ramallah.  Over the course of this visit he met with some of the Palestinian political leadership, Knesset members from the different parties, academics, and diplomats. The purpose of these meetings was to access and understand the current trends and challenges in the region.He found on both sides a growing frustration, at both the political and street level, at the lack of political vision and strategy. The leadership in the region, he was told, seems incapable or unwilling to break the current impasse and to move towards reaching a meaningful and durable settlement. Indeed, one senior political figure in Gaza said to him " there has been a major paradigm shift in the region with the rise of the ISIS but we're all still locked with the old agenda. We all, including the international community,  need to wake up to the changing reality, before the opportunity to make real change is taken from us by the growing regional uncertainty and chaos."