Maen Areikat, Head of the Palestinian Liberation Delegation in Washington DC: Palestinian Perspective on the Middle East

Maen Areikat, the head of the Palestinian Liberation Delegation in Washington DC, will address the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on April 20th about the on-again off-again Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He will talk about the Palestinian view of the conflict, the obstacles that need to be overcome and the potential for a two-state solution.

The latest round of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, sponsored by US Secretary of State John Kerry, collapsed in April of 2014. Rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza and the Israeli armed incursion into Gaza in the summer of 2014 only made relations more fraught, while the divide between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza has made it hard for the Palestinians to negotiate with one voice. At the same time a growing movement in Europe to recognize Palestine as a state is putting pressure on Israel.

Areikat started working for the PLO in 1993, and was part of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in Beit Hanoun/Erez and Taba in 1996, Jerusalem in 1997 and in Wye River in 1998. He then spent 11 years at the Negotiations Affairs Department of the PLO in Ramallah before being sent to Washington DC. He has a BS in Finance from Arizona State University, an MBA from Western International University, and received diplomatic training from the Ministry of External Affairs in Ottawa, Canada from 1993-94.

For more information: http://www.lawac.org/EventDetail/tabid/103/eventid/30284/Default.aspx