The Middle East Dialogues leads unfiltered conversations on the region’s toughest issues

As emotions flared and heated protests grew at Harvard and on university campuses countrywide following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent attacks on Gaza, the Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative (MEI) immediately responded by organizing events to help educate students on the crisis. The first took place on October 13, less than a week later, in the Kennedy School’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, under the title “Hamas and Israel: What happened, what does it mean, and what’s next?”

Douglas Elmendorf, then dean of the Kennedy School, welcomed more than 500 students and other members of the Harvard community. He acknowledged the tensions on campus, saying, “It is the responsibility of universities, the responsibility of the Kennedy School at this time to take on hard issues and to do so with rigor, substance, evidence—but also with compassion for those for whom these issues are not abstract, not things one reads about from afar but things that are personal.” 

Tarek Masoud, Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance and faculty chair of the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, moderated the event, urging the panelists to share their views and analyses of the crisis, its causes, and how the situation might unfold. Students asked tough questions that panelists did their best to answer. In the following weeks, MEI and Masoud organized several other events around campus, including a panel discussion at Harvard Business School’s Klarman Hall that drew more than 700 students. Masoud thanked the panelists for a “vigorous debate about important issues that comes from a place of goodwill” and the audience for reminding the world that Harvard “is a place founded on reason and fearless inquiry.” 

Then, on November 6, a month after the initial attack, Masoud opened the Boston Globe to see an op-ed by a Kennedy School and Harvard Law School student, Zahra Saifi MPP/JD candidate 2027 (née Asghar), who argued that Harvard was not doing enough to educate students about the Israel-Gaza conflict and “how to engage with one another in even the most challenging circumstances.” 

“If we graduate and become policy leaders in our own right, how will we be prepared to engage on such challenges?” she asked. Surprised at first, Masoud soon realized that the student was “putting her finger on a bigger truth”: that the campus had in some ways been treating the Middle East crisis “fairly gingerly” because of the divisiveness of the situation. 

Masoud determined that he and others needed to find new ways for students to gain a deeper understanding of what was happening and how people in the Middle East, and on the Harvard campus, came to their strong, diverse perspectives on the crisis. Masoud said Saifi’s op-ed was instrumental in his decision to work with his Middle East Initiative team to create the Middle East Dialogues. The op-ed also spurred his creation of a new HKS course—“Arguing Israel and Palestine”—which launched this spring.

Bringing conflicting views into the open 

In January 2024, Masoud announced the Middle East Dialogues, noting that it was MEI’s mission to help the Harvard community “understand what is happening and expose them to the best thinking on how peace may be achieved.” 

Invited guests, Masoud said, “could not be more different from each other in terms of their beliefs, commitments, and analyses of the present situation and have been selected because they represent points of view that I believe anyone who cares about the region can ill afford to ignore.” 

The format for the series—one-on-one, in-depth, incisive conversations between Masoud and guests representing very different perspectives on the Israel-Gaza crisis, with time for audience questions—would provide time and space to dive deeply into each guest’s views. 

Since the first Middle East Dialogues session on February 15, 2024, MEI has hosted guests ranging from former prime ministers to professors, politicians, and journalists. Guests have included, among others: Ehud Olmert and Salam Fayyad, former prime ministers of Israel and the Palestinian Authority; Tzipi Livni, former deputy prime minister of Israel; Prince Turki Al-Faisal, former Saudi ambassador to the U.S.; Jared Kushner, former Middle East adviser to President Trump; Matt Duss, former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders; Palestinian academic Dalal Saeb Iriqat; and Harvard Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz. Choices of guests have at times been controversial, but Masoud argues that the perspectives provided are important to hear to understand the way people think about Middle East issues. Videos of all the dialogues can be found on the Belfer Center website. 

Additional Middle East Dialogues guests this spring include Dan Senor and Nasser al-Kidwa. Senor is a former political advisor to President George W. Bush who served as chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Nasser al-Kidwa, a nephew of Yasser Arafat, is a Palestinian politician, longtime activist in Fatah, and former minister of foreign affairs of the Palestinian Authority.

Campus response to the dialogues 

Since its launch, the series has earned significant praise for providing students with opportunities to learn about a real-world crisis and see difficult but civil conversations in action. “What Tarek has built with the Middle East Dialogues is exactly what the Kennedy School should be doing—bringing free and rigorous inquiry to bear on the hardest questions in the world and modeling what it looks like to have those conversations with honesty and respect,” says Dean Jeremy Weinstein. “This is a place where people who disagree deeply can still reason together—and that is not a small thing at a moment when so many have given up on that possibility.” 

Erica Chenoweth, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment and co-chair of the Kennedy School’s task force on Candid and Constructive Conversations to improve the ability to have conversations across differences, said after the first season of the Middle East Dialogues: “Professor Masoud’s series provided crucial learning opportunities and rigorous discussions about a challenging topic. I am grateful to him for convening these dialogues and for modeling how to do them well.” 

In recent interviews, several current and former Kennedy School students shared their thoughts as well. Zahra Saifi MPP/JD 2027, who wrote the op-ed that motivated Masoud to develop the Middle East Dialogues, said that the series was a “critical” addition to student learning about a crisis that so strongly impacted the campus community. When she wrote the op-ed, she says, she appreciated the early events Masoud had organized, but felt there should have been much more open discussion around campus. “We learn,” she says, “through the lens of the hardest things that are happening in our politics.” Since then, she thinks the Kennedy School and Harvard have done a much better job of “educating us well” on this issue. 

Matthew Frisch MC/MPA 2023, who has watched a number of the Middle East Dialogues via the School’s YouTube channel, says each left him “better informed about the Middle East and with a greater appreciation for the significant complexity and nuance involved across all stakeholders.” He was so inspired by the sessions as a model for tackling difficult topics that he invited Masoud to speak to an organization “that had been reluctant to have members engage in conversation about the Middle East because of how polarizing and contentious it can get.” 

“What distinguishes the series most, in my view, is Professor Masoud’s approach,” Björn Hoyme MC/MPA 2023 explains. A former student of Masoud’s who has watched many of the dialogues online, Hoyme added: “He does not shy away from the most difficult and contentious aspects of the Israel–Gaza crisis. Nor does he allow guests to rely on platitudes, evasions, or superficial arguments.” Hoyme believes Masoud uses the Socratic method effectively and that his scrutiny “is directed at arguments, not at individuals.” 

A first-year Kennedy School student, who asked not to be identified, watched two Dialogues sessions this fall, one with Harvard Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz and another with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. “It was valuable,” she says, “to learn others’ opinions and to see what people reacted to,” and also to get “a better understanding of Israeli politics.” She also appreciated Professor Masoud’s efforts to maintain a real back-and-forth dialogue with the guests.

Making the dialogues work 

Praise for the Middle East Dialogues has focused on its format of one-on-one, in-depth, candid but respectful discussions about highly controversial issues—but also on the way Masoud conducts the conversations.

Each session is naturally lively and dynamic due to the topical issues and Masoud’s interactions with the guests, but also because of his animated style, directness, courteous and careful listening, and obviously sincere curiosity about each guest’s views. 

“At the end of the day,” Masoud says, “I’m an Arab, and I’m very conscious that the person is in my house and is my guest. So, I do want to put them at ease. I’ll say something laudatory. I also try to be self-deprecating. If I’m about to make a contentious point, I will say, ‘Look, let me just get this point out and then you tell me where I’m wrong,’” he says. “Or, instead of my saying ‘I think this and you think that,’ I might say, ‘How would you respond to someone who says …?’ to create a little distance. Those kinds of things create space for the other person to pause and listen to what I have to say.” 

Masoud credits Harvard students with making the sessions more effective by asking important questions. “Even if students are coming from a position where it’s clear that they disagree with the speaker, they ask the question in a very constructive way that reflects very well on Harvard and on the Kennedy School. I’ve been very impressed with our students,” he says, “and very grateful to them for what they bring to these encounters.” 

Applying the dialogues model 

Masoud hopes the Middle East Dialogues will serve as a useful model for other difficult conversations at Harvard and elsewhere but says that not all the techniques he uses will work for everyone. 

“We should have difficult conversations,” Masoud says, “and we should expect them to be difficult.” However, he explains, when someone is heavily invested in an issue, or their identity is tied up in it, it’s much more difficult to have a tough conversation than for someone who has more emotional distance. 

For dialogues over divisive issues to work, Masoud believes it’s essential to establish and implement rules of discourse or norms that will help ensure a civil conversation. While not everyone can use techniques like humor to facilitate a candid conversation, he says: “You can have a conversation where people aren’t shunning others or labeling them. You don’t have to think that somebody who believes in a Palestinian state is right. But you do have to listen to them, engage them respectfully, and state your argument as forcefully as you can without insulting the other person, while allowing the other person the chance to respond to you.” 

Masoud makes these points in “Arguing Israel and Palestine,” the new class he co-teaches with Simon Greer, a specialist in building bridges between divided communities. The class concludes with a field trip to Palestine and Israel so students can speak with people in the region. Other faculty and programs across the Kennedy School are also examining important issues related to Israel and Palestine. For example, the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights has focused on the crisis in the region since the 2023 attack and ran a series this spring called “From Pain to Hope? Israel/Palestine.” Events included a discussion with a Palestinian American and an Israeli American exploring friendship across difference and an event with Omer Shem Tov, an Israeli who survived being taken hostage by Hamas. 

As an example of how people can get along despite their differences, Masoud points to the researchers and senior fellows at the Middle East Initiative: “Iranians, Israelis, Saudis, Emiratis, Turks, Palestinians. Everybody.” They share a workspace and get together every week for lunch around a long table where they chat and discuss critical Middle East issues. “They have very different views but are very collegial with each other because that’s the rule of this place,” he says. 

“The basic thing I want to communicate,” Masoud says, “is that most of those with whom we disagree came by their views the same way we came by our views. It doesn’t get us anywhere to demonize them or to attribute their views to some malevolence, or evil, or cynicism. We’re all products of a very complex array of influences.” 

Masoud sees MEI as a center for open and fearless inquiry, debate, and dialogue. “You can’t avoid all conflict; you can’t just say, ‘let’s keep things safe and tiptoe around it.’ The only way to have a difficult conversation is to have it and to not get agitated when it proves to be difficult. That has been my approach, and I think it’s becoming more widespread at the university.” 

“I’m very bullish on Harvard,” Masoud says. “One way it can continue contributing to society is by being a place where people can argue and debate with each other and arrive at a deeper understanding of what is true and what’s not true.” 

“I hope,” he says, “that the Middle East Initiative is just an example, a microcosm, of what the broader university aspires to be—and in many ways already is.”

—

Photographs by Martha Stewart, Bennett Craig, and Lydia Rosenberg