Description:

During the 20th century, Israel's military and strategic posture was designed to cope with the existential threats posed by its neighbors, alongside an intermittent series of low-intensity campaigns against irregular guerilla forces. Today, this has been tested by the aftermath of the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. While Israel no longer faces an existential threat from conventional Arab state armies, it nevertheless must re-imagine its security posture in light of the rapid proliferation of sub-state entities, some who increasingly resemble conventional armies in every respect. And while current regional events seem to have marginalized the relative importance of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, and increased the possibilities of Israeli cooperation with other regional powers sharing similar interests and enemies, the current reality nevertheless requires Israel to make hard decisions, because the status quo is emphatically not on Israel's side.

About the speaker
Uzi Rabi is the director of Tel Aviv University's Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, one of the top-rated research centers in the region. He is regularly invited by the Israeli Knesset to deliver updates and briefs on current developments in the Middle East.

Rabi is the former chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History and is a senior researcher in the Center for Iranian Studies. His fields of specialization include: Middle Eastern geopolitics; the modern history of states and societies in the Persian Gulf; state building in the Middle East; oil and politics in the Middle East; Iranian-Arab relations; and Sunni-Shi'i tensions.

The author of numerous publications, academic articles, and book reviews, his most recent book is Back to the Future: The Middle East in the Shadow of the Arab Spring (Hebrew) and the edited volume titled "Tribes and States in a Changing Middle East" (London: Hurst Publishers, 2015).  His forthcoming books include the English version of Back to the Future and the edited volume "Lost in Translation: Forgotten Paradigms of the Arab Spring" (Sussex Academic Press).

Co-sponsored by: Office of International Relations, MENA, Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies