Johns Hopkins SAIS Europe debate on the EU-Middle East crisis

Of course I’m scared about the future. But do not tell me there is no hope.

Speaking at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) this week, I remembered I had been accepted there as a student 17 years ago – I ended up not going because I chose to work at the European Parliament instead – and I’ve learnt so much since.

Last month, when I got a call from the Swedish Dialogue Institute to speak at the Bologna Peace Forum with Italy’s Agency for Peacebuilding, I agreed with a condition that it not be a men-panel only. The swedish diplomat on the line laughed and told me: don’t worry you’ll probably be the only man on the panel.

Social inequality is rising, but gender equality has made so much progress in only 17 years!

This week the topic was hard and complex : how can the EU contribute to building peace in Syria and Ukraine ? I had to make clear many EU governments had lost credibility in the face of profound double-standards towards Palestinian lives, not to mention a lack of condemnation of the Israeli aggression against Syria -the topic at hand- including over 600 airstrikes, on top of Lebanon and Iran.

Not only did so many students and practitioners attending support my assessment, as seen in so many universities across all “Western democracies” on Palestine, but an elderly lady came to me at the end of the debate, and she made my day.

She was as elegant as my grandma, with white hair and a coloured scarf. She introduced herself as the oldest alumni of the SAIS campus, and deeply appreciated what I had said, as an American and as a jewish woman. She felt powerless with today’s world.

I told her she was a goldmine, and had to consider using social media – I rarely advise this usually! As her generation is highly underrepresented online, yet full of experience, perspectives and inspirations for younger generations. Perhaps by sharing some of her old photos and putting today’s debates in perspective with the world she’s known since the troubling 1940s? She liked the idea very much.

Hope and humanity are everywhere. NEVER stop dreaming of a better world. It is not Trump, Putin, Netanyahu or European populism that will kill Europe and our democratic aspirations: it is our self-inflicted cynicism.

Thank you, grazie and tak so muket for the invitation.

with Sawsan Abou Wainedin, Maria Chalhoub, Helena Sancho, Bernardo Venturi and Vyacheslav Likhachev