Amjad Atallah, Alastair Crooke, and Ron Pundak led a Century Foundation discussion on “Negotiating with the True Believers: Engaging with Political Islam and Navigating a Path to Mideast Peace.” Mr. Atallah, president of the Strategic Assessments Initiative, was a former official negotiator for the Palestinian Authority at the Camp David and Taba talks. Mr. Crooke, director of Conflicts Forum, was the European Union’s Middle East Security Envoy under Javier Solana and is engaged in an intensive ongoing dialogue with “political Islam” groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood; he is considered the foremost international expert on Hamas. Mr. Pundak is the director of the Peres Center for Peace, was a lead negotiator on the Oslo Accords, and continues to be a prominent political academic and activist in Israel. He emphasized that the views shared in this discussion were his own.

Read a summary of the discussion here.