Dr. Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development and Director of the Critical Issues Poll at the University of Maryland. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Before coming to the University of Maryland, he taught at several universities, including Cornell University, the Ohio State University, the University of Southern California, Princeton University, Columbia University, Swarthmore College, and the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in political science.

Professor Telhami has also been active in the foreign policy arena, advising every U.S. administration from George H. W. Bush to Barack Obama. He has contributed to The Washington Post, The New York Times, and regularly appears on national and international radio and television. Among his publications are his best-selling book, The Stakes: America and the Middle East (2003); Power and Leadership in International Bargaining: The Path to the Camp David Accords (1990); The Peace Puzzle: America’s Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, 1989-2011, co-authored with Dan Kurtzer, et al. (2013); and The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East (2013). He is the winner of a number of awards including being selected by the Carnegie Corporation of New York with The New York Times as one of the “Great Immigrants” for 2013 and being selected as a University of Maryland 2018-2019 Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.

Khaled Elgindy is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute where he also directs MEI’s Program on Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian Affairs. He is the author of the newly-released book, Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump, published by Brookings Institution Press in April 2019. Elgindy previously served as a fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution from 2010 through 2018. Prior to arriving at Brookings, he served as an adviser to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah on permanent status negotiations with Israel from 2004 to 2009, and was a key participant in the Annapolis negotiations of 2007-08. Elgindy is also an adjunct instructor in Arab Studies at Georgetown University.

Khaled’s writings have a appeared in wide range of publications, including The Christian Science Monitor, CNN.com, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Los Angeles Times, The National Interest, The Washington Quarterly, and others. He is frequently quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Hill, Politico, and other print media, and is a regular commentator on TV and radio, including Aljazeera, BBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NPR, PBS Newshour and others.

Said Arikat is a long time Washington based Palestinian journalist and analyst. He is an accomplished media and public affairs specialist who served for a number of years as the United Nations’ chief spokesman in Iraq. He holds an MS from California State University, in Long Beach, CA and is an adjunct professor at the American University in Washington where he teaches a course on role of media in society. He regularly appears on various media outlets both domestically and internationally.

About our Moderator: 

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is Executive Editor at The American Conservative magazine, where she has been writing and reporting for the last decade, focusing on national security, foreign policy, civil liberties and domestic politics. She served for 15 years as a Washington bureau reporter for FoxNews.com, and at WTOP News in Washington from 2013-2017 as a writer, digital editor and social media strategist. She has also worked as a beat reporter at Bridge News financial wire (now part of Reuters) and Homeland Security Today, and as a regular contributor at Antiwar.com.