Israelis will go to the polls on Jan. 22 to elect a new parliament and, by extension, government -- an event that has so far attracted relatively little international attention. Understandably so: Benjamin Netanyahu just came closer than any Israeli prime minister in more than two decades to serving out a full parliamentary term, and nobody expects him to lose. His putative challengers from the center have been unable to find, coalesce around, or attract enough support for a credible alternative candidate.

The apparent political dead-end in the Middle East Peace Process combined with a deepening apartheid-like reality on the ground, has reached a degree where many Palestinians and Israelis are asking not can the two-state solution be salvaged but should it? And, perhaps more urgently, what may be the alternatives? Khaled Elgindy, Fellow at the Brookings Saban Center for Middle East Policy and Leila Hilal, Director of New America’s Middle East Task Force, moderated a discussion on this critical question with Omar Dajani at the New America Foundation.

I first visited Homs, Syria as a teenager. Until then, having grown up in a small homogenous town in northern Michigan, I had little contact with the Arab side of my identity. My father came to the United States from Homs as a medical resident in 1962. He traveled by passenger ship for 11 days from Naples to conduct his residency during a period when the U.S. was recruiting third-world doctors to fill delivery gaps in rural and underprivileged parts of the country.

On May 25, gangs of primarily government-affiliated gunmen killed more than 100 people – including 49 children- in the Syrian town of Houla, The massacre ignited global outrage: Diplomats this week have demanded that Syrian President Bashar al Assad halt the violence that has plagued the country since last spring, and pressed him to implement the U.N. Security Council cease-fire plan that was supposed to take effect on April 12.