THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 11 Share your thoughts about this month’s issue. Submit letters to the editor: journal@afsa.org you all will reciprocate. We are stronger together, and a win for one can represent a win for the other. Emmalee Gruesen Charlottesville, Virginia Remembering Jim Dobbins I read with surprise and sadness the Appreciation and obituary of Ambassador Jim Dobbins in the November 2023 Foreign Service Journal. I remember Jim Dobbins and his wife, Toril, from my time at U.S. Embassy Bonn. He was deputy chief of mission (DCM) there from 1985 to 1989 with Richard Burt as ambassador. They were a formidable diplomatic team. Dobbins was an avid student of history. In his office, he had the complete set of Edward Gibbons’ History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on a shelf behind his desk. And he had a display of miniature uniformed tin soldiers representing a part of Napoleon’s army on a credenza. He often quoted from historians of German and European history in his meetings, especially when he met with American journalists at the embassy. Part of my job was to vet journalists’ requests to see Ambassador Burt or DCM Dobbins, especially during the time when the U.S. was deploying NATO missiles to counter the Soviet intermediaterange nuclear SS-20 missile threat. Having served in Kabul under Ambassador Adolph “Spike” Dubs from 1978 to 1979, I was surprised and pleased to learn that Jim Dobbins had been appointed envoy to the Afghan opposition during President George W. Bush’s administration, and then as integrate Arabs still living in Israel, with no intention of extending this process wholesale to all Palestinians living outside Israel’s borders. Both integrations have succeeded, and Palestinians sit in the Knesset, suffering no obvious apartheid consequences despite such warnings. The last successful search for peace agreed to at Oslo three decades ago ended with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist. Its goal was Israeli-Palestinian cooperation leading to two states, but it did not prematurely set that goal. Today, new Israeli and West Bank– Gaza governments might usefully follow the pre-1967 model until the Israeli public is convinced that a violent, hostile government will not take over a new Palestinian state, and Palestinians are convinced that Israeli governments will not continue to support West Bank settlers who pursue seizure of Palestine to the Jordan River. Over the years, however, Israeli governments have been moving steadily to more aggressive extreme right positions. Thus, it will take determined action by the U.S. and Western governments as well as neighboring Arab states to persuade and assist Israelis and Palestinians to make that effort. George Lambrakis Senior FSO, retired Paris, France n special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan during President Barack Obama’s second term. Amb. Dobbins became an expert on Afghanistan and the ongoing struggles to establish a stable, viable government there. Bruce K. Byers USIA FSO, retired Reston, Virginia A Two-State Solution Recent University of Chicago research agreed that killing civilians in Gaza along with Hamas just builds new future terrorists. It suggested that Israel could change that reality if it announced that it will work for a two-state solution by, say, 2030. Obviously, this requires a major transition from mutual enmity to cooperation. Neither the present extremist Israeli government suspected of aiming to conquer the rest of Palestine to the river Jordan nor the current old, unpopular, ex-Fatah terrorist West Bank government can deliver on such a pledge. Many Western pundits are beginning to look for a way forward after current hostilities, but with no clear plan. A forgotten model from before the 1967 Six-Day War can be helpful. As early as 1963-1966, when I worked in our Tel Aviv embassy, the Israeli government was busy integrating newly arrived Sephardic Jews into the dominant Ashkenazi society and government of European Jews that established the state of Israel. Similarly, an adviser in the prime minister’s office had begun a process to
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