Scholars for Peace in the Middle East is pleased to announce that members of our SPME Network are exclusively invited to sign up for a Special Conference Call Academic Briefing on January 19, 2009 at 3:oo PM Eastern Time, with Prof. Michael Oren, currently serving in the IDF in Gaza.

Participation for the conference call will be limited to the first 125 of our SPME Network members who RSVP by emailing your name and home institution or town directly to Dr. Ed Beck at ScholarsforPeace@aol.com and asking for a spot on the conference call by January 19, 2009 at 12:o0 PM Eastern Time and are contributing network subscribers during the current academic year from July 1, 2008 through Present. Participants selected will be returned email with conference call call-in instructions. Participation will be on a first come, first served, space available basis to those who RSVP in time.

Michael Oren

There is still time to contribute to reserve a place. To contribute, click here . To see if your contributions are current for this academic year click here to check the SPME Honor Roll of Donors. If you don't see your name and thing you are current click here to make an inquiry.

Michael B. Oren is a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based research facility, where he specializes in the diplomatic and military history of the Middle East. He is the author of the New York Time's Best Seller List and both academically and critically acclaimed book Power, Faith, and Fantasy:America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present (Norton 2007)

He has written extensively for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, of which he is a contributing editor, and has been interviewed on CNN, Fox, The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show, and Today. He is the CBS Middle East expert.

A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Dr. Oren has received fellowships from the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and from the British and Canadian governments. He was a Lady Davis Fellow of Hebrew University and a Moshe Dayan Fellow at Tel-Aviv University. In 2006, he was a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, returning to Yale in 2007. He has testified before Congress on Middle Eastern affairs and briefed the White House.

Dr. Oren is the author of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East , published in 2002 by Oxford University Press. The book was a New York Times bestseller, and won the Los Angeles Times' History Book of the Year prize and the National Jewish Book Award. His most recent book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present , was eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won a Council for the Humanities Book Award.

Raised in New Jersey, where he was an activist in Zionist youth movements and a gold medal winning athlete in the Maccabia Games, Michael Oren moved to Israel in the 1970s. He served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces, in the paratroopers in the first Lebanon War, and as a liaison with the U.S. Sixth Fleet during the Gulf War, and an army spokesman in the second Lebanon War. He acted as a representative of the Prime Minister's Office to Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union, and as an advisor to Israel's delegation to the United Nations. He was the director of Inter-Religious Affairs in the government of Yitzhak Rabin. Michael Oren lives in Jerusalem with his wife and three children.

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Despite the disappointing outcome of the DRC, Israel expresses its satisfaction that accusations and incitement directed against it in the original drafts were omitted from the Concluding Statement. (Communicated by the Foreign Ministry Spokesman)

The State of Israel regrets that the Durban Review Conference, whose declared purpose was to address prejudice, a scourge afflicting millions around the world, was exploited to focus instead on a specific conflict that is exclusively political in nature. Not surprisingly, the only national leader who chose to participate in the Conference was Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, who stands out among Holocaust deniers in the world, and who delivered a vitriol and hate speech at the Conference. Already in the planning stages of the Durban Review Conference, statements were made by Iranian and Syrian representatives belittling the Holocaust. Iran, Syria, and Libya were the countries that played a prominent role during the preparations for the Durban Review Conference and during the deliberations at the Conference itself. In the preparatory documents for the Durban Review Conference, systematic attacks were made against Israel, libeling it with absurd charges of racism, apartheid, and genocide. No other country was singled out. This gross injustice was due to the preparatory committee's politicization and hijacking by the worst human rights offenders in the world.

During the deliberations at the Durban Review Conference itself, the Iranian delegate rudely and repeatedly interrupted the representatives of the Jewish organizations, attacked the Conference President for his moderation in conducting the deliberations, and demanded time and again that the Jewish organizations be punished when they spoke out against the massive human rights violations of the Iranian regime. This attitude at the Conference sadly reflected the Iranian regime's brutal silencing of its critics at home. Despite the disappointing outcome of the DRC, Israel expresses its satisfaction that accusations and incitement directed against it in the original drafts were omitted from the Concluding Statement. However, the Statement most regrettably reaffirms the flawed DDPA of 2001, which Israel and other countries firmly oppose. Not surprisingly, Iran, Syria, and Libya were the countries that insisted on including in the first paragraph of the DRC's Concluding Statement the reaffirmation of the 2001 DDPA, which had mentioned the Middle East conflict, twisting its political nature into an allegedly "racist" one by describing the Palestinians as victims of "foreign and racist occupation."

The flaws of the Durban Review Conference brought about the active opposition and the principled withdrawal of many countries. Prominent in safeguarding human rights in their territory, these countries understood that the DRC would become a platform for incitement, and they, therefore, chose not to be a part of it. Thus, they rejected the attempts of a number of extremist states to manipulate the conference and pervert its aims by dedicating it to the denigration of Israel. The withdrawal of many countries and the fear of additional withdrawals led the organizers of the Conference to close the Concluding Statement already at the beginning of the DRC. Israel's consistent and principled position that it would not participate in the Durban Review Conference, together with the withdrawal of many other democratic countries, contributed to the improvements that were made in the Concluding Statement. It has also made the UN consider downscaling Durban-related events in the future, and keeping inflammatory discourse away from the concrete work that needs to be done in genuinely fighting racism. It became clear, both at "Durban 1" and "Durban 2" that many of the issues that came to dominate the debate had essentially nothing to do with a bona fide discussion on racism.

While the DRC was a failure, Israel is hopeful that, by exposing its strident flaws, a drastic improvement of the Durban process will take place. The Jewish people has suffered for centuries from racism and xenophobia, persecution and genocide. Israel, as the state of the Jewish people, remains fully committed to the values of tolerance, democracy, and human rights. The necessary struggle against racism and xenophobia will always find in Israel a willing and ready partner.