Insight with Professor Shai Feldman: Israel at Sixty – What Chance for Peace?

May 14th marks the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel. We talk to Professor Shai Feldman, one of the world’s leading experts on the Middle East, who talks about the political and ideological challenges that face Israel in its 60th year.

Professor Shai Feldman is Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University which analyses Middle East economic, political and cultural developments, generates policy ideas, and offers a forum for interaction between academia and the world of public policy.

From 1997-2005, he served as Head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.  He is a Member of the Board of Directors of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and from 2001-2003, he served as a member of the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. Feldman is also a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

Paul Adams is the BBC’s Chief Diplomatic Correspondent for BBC News 24, with a brief that covers a wide range of foreign and diplomatic stories. He has just come back from two weeks of travelling around Israel, making programmes for the World Tonight and will be chairing an hour-long debate on Israel at 60 which will be on World Service Radio on Saturday 10th May at 8pm.
 
In his previous role as the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent, his reports included Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, the Pope’s historic visit to Israel and the dawning of the year 2000 in Bethlehem. He returned to the Middle East for the first anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death and the tenth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination.