I REALLY wanted to speak with public opinion expert, political strategist, and writer Dahlia Scheindlin. The timing hardly could have been better: Dahlia has worked on 5.5 election campaigns in Israel and many more in countries across the world. Though a couple weeks before the latest wrinkle of Bibi's failure to form a coalition, triggering new elections, Dahlia's hard-earned, deeply observed insights about this moment of the Israel-Palestine Conflict -- especially around what kind of solution is possible and what is no longer possible -- pose constructive challenges to those on all sides of the issue. I was particularly struck by Dahlia's persistent optimism in the midst of so much geopolitical muck and her simple refusal (in large part based on her experiences with and study of Serbia, Cypress, and other conflict zones around the globe) to entertain any form of despair. She talked about the nature of Bibi's broad appeal, the power of political symbols to shape our material reality, and how the real dividing lines preventing progress are not Israelis and Palestinians, but interest groups internal to each weilding powerful symbolic narratives. Finally she gets into the decline of the 2-state solution, and what a viable replacement might look like. In short, we get INTO IT.

Link to some of Dahlia's articles: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/29/an-israeli-palestinian-confederation-can-work/