Do Palestine and Israel Have a Peaceful Future?

Discussion with Irena Kalhousová and Jakub Szántó

What are the chances of ending the conflict and starting a dialogue? How have the events of recent months changed Israeli and Palestinian society? And can the escalation of violence between Israelis and Palestinians lead to renewed negotiations for a peaceful solution, or is peace in the Middle East increasingly elusive? The topic will be discussed by Irena Kalhousová, director of the Herzl Centre for Israeli Studies at Charles University, and journalist and former foreign correspondent for Czech Television Jakub Szántó.

Irena Kalhousová has long specialized in Israel, the Arab-Israeli conflict and Middle East security. She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics & Political Science, an MA from the University of Cambridge, and a BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has worked as a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and as a senior analyst at the Institute for Security Studies in Prague. She is the author of a number of scholarly texts focusing on security and foreign policy in the Middle East and Central Europe. She regularly appears as an expert on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Czech and international media.

Jakub Szántó started working as a TV reporter in 1999. He originally started at TV Nova, but in 2006 he moved to Czech Television. Between 2013 and 2018, he served as its first permanent Middle East correspondent, which is the focus of his career. His long-term focus has been on the Middle East and Africa region, where he has covered much of the international crises since 1999: from the Second Palestinian Intifada, to the conflicts between Hamas and Israel, the US occupation of Iraq, the Arab Spring, the Syrian Civil War, and the conflicts in Iraq during and after the US occupation ended in 2010. He is the recipient of the 2014 Journalism Prize for his coverage of the Maidan revolution in Ukraine and, since 2017, the most prestigious journalism award, the Peroutka Prize. He received the 2019 Magnesia Litera Prize for his literary debut Behind the Curtain of War (Argo, 2018), which describes his experiences of wars, coups and revolutions.

duration: 90 min.