Khaled Elgindy on his book: Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump

Hi, everyone. I'm Brene Brown, and this is Unlocking Us. This is part three of a three part series focusing on Israel and Palestine, and it's a follow-up to an essay I posted on renebrown.com. As I've mentioned in the first two podcasts, the discourse was really tough on the comment section of the website, but really smart, and some people agreed and some people were really disappointed and hurt and pissed off. I was held accountable in important ways. I just think it was the right discourse. You're going to see that on issues like this, I probably will not be having these conversations on social media. They'll be happening, I think, in a place where there's more room to expand the comments where such important debate and discourse, so thank y'all for that. My intention for sharing a new essay in these podcast episodes is to really share what I'm learning for the purpose of, for me personally, to be a better global citizen, and more importantly, I want to highlight the work of people that have really dedicated their lives to bringing justice, and peace, and equality to people who deserve it so much. All three of the episodes are dropping this week. I have talked to Palestinian Israeli activists on the ground. You've met folks from the Parents Circle Family Forum, from Tahir, that's Ali Abu Awad. We talked in the last podcast to the folks of Standing Together. And today I am talking to Khalid El Gendy. He is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute, where he also directs the Middle East Institute's program on Palestine and Israeli Palestinian affairs. He's the author of the book, America and the Palestinians from Balfour to Trump. He has served as a fellow in the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution. He did that from 2010 to 2018. Prior to being at Brookings, he served as an advisor to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah on permanent status negotiations with Israel from 2004 to 2009. He was also a key participant in the Annapolis negotiations of 2007, 2008. He is an adjunct instructor in Arab studies at Georgetown University. For those of you following a lot of this work, you'll probably have seen him. Khalid has been on CNN. He's got publications in the Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Quarterly. He is quoted everywhere for his expertise. He is an incredible scholar, and let's jump into the conversation. Before we do that real quick, I wanna thank Vox Media again, our new partner in podcasting, for agreeing to do this three part series in a non commercialized, non revenue, ad free way. I know that's not normal and I appreciate them agreeing to the importance in it. Let's meet Khalid Agindi and do some tough learning. And I'm going to say right now before we jump in, I am still challenged. I've read the book twice and I …