Middle East Conflict

Former President Jimmy Carter addresses the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in his new book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. Carter has founded a conflict resolution organization and won a Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation work.

The New Yorker's former Middle East correspondent has written a memoir: Prisoners: A Muslim & A Jew Across the Middle East Divide. Goldberg won the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2003 for his coverage of terrorism.

Middle East peace expert Sari Nusseibeh is the founder of the Palestinian Consultancy Group and the Israeli-Palestinian Science Organization, the president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem and a professor of Islamic philosophy. He co-wrote the People's Voice Initiative to build grassroots support for a two-state solution. Until December 2002, he was the representative of the Palestinian National Authority in Jerusalem.

Peace negotiator Yossi Beilin is a member of Israel's Knesset (Parliament) and chairman of the Meretz-Yachad party. Dr. Beilin has had posts in the governments of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak. Beilin held unofficial peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians in 2003, which led to the Geneva Initiative, and was one of the architects of the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993.

Anthony Shadid of The Washington Post has been reporting from Lebanon. Shadid won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for international reporting. His latest book, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War, has just come out in paperback. Shadid is of Lebanese descent and grew up in Oklahoma City, Okla.

Augustus Richard Norton is a professor of international relations and anthropology at Boston University and has been writing about Lebanon for 25 years. He is an expert on the Shiite political movements, including Hezbollah. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Norton's books include Amal and the Shi'a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon and Civil Society in the Middle East.

Syrian dissident Ammar Abdulhamid is a visiting fellow with the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He says that while growing up in Syria in the '70s and '80s, it wasn’t fears of an Israeli attack that kept him up at night. His concern was the dreaded Syrian security apparatus and certain government officials.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman just returned from a trip to Israel, Jordan and Syria. He talks with us about the war between Israel and Hezbollah, and where Syria fits in. Friedman's most recent book is The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century.

Christopher Dickey, Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor for Newsweek magazine, discusses the crisis in the Middle East.

Professor Daniel Byman talks about new book, Deadly Connections: States That Sponsor Terrorism. He explores the symbiotic relationship between terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. Byman is associate professor in Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and director of Georgetown's Security Studies Program and Center for Peace and Security Studies.

Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. His new book is called Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Ricks is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter. He talks about the possibility of U.S. involvement in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. This is the first of a two part interview.

Julia Choucair is an associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the deputy editor of the Carnegie's e-monthly, the Arab Reform Bulletin.

A few years ago, writer Jeffrey Goldberg spoke with Hezbollah leaders for a 2002 article in called "In the Party of God: Are Terrorists in Lebanon Preparing for a Larger War?" Goldberg will help us understand the background of the current unrest in Lebanon. Goldberg serves as Washington correspondent for The New Yorker.

Middle East expert Vali Nasr talks about the latest developments there, and about his book The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future.

New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins has been covering the war in Iraq and is back for a brief visit to the United States. Filkins updates us on the situation in the Middle East. Last year, he received the George Polk Award for War Reporting for his riveting, firsthand account of an eight-day attack on Iraqi insurgents in Falluja.

Steven Erlanger, New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem, joins us to talk about intensified fighting in the region. Erlanger has reported from all over the world, serving in Moscow, Bangkok, Prague and other cities. Prior to his tenure at the Times, he wrote for The Boston Globe.

Sandy Tolan talks about his book The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East. The account grew out of a 1998 NPR documentary in which Tolan reported on a friendship between a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman that served as an example of the region's fragile history.

The Six-Day War of 1967 left Israel with a dilemma: what to do with the land it had taken in the process of winning a conflict that also involved Egypt, Syria and Jordan. A new book, The Accidental Empire, looks at what came next.

A new Hamas-led government; protests against cartoons of Muhammad; a re-started nuclear program in Iran: It's a busy time for journalists specializing in the Middle East. Christopher Dickey is the regional editor for Newsweek.

A new tactic has emerged in the angry debate over cartoons depicting religious figures, as an Israeli artist launches a contest for the best anti-Semitic cartoon -- drawn by a Jew. Amitai Sandy says the Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest is a response to an Iranian newspaper's competition for cartoons on the Holocaust.