Simple, but refreshingly optimistic

    It was a privilege to host the Right Honourable Tony Blair yesterday at Tufts. For many students and faculty members, the opportunity to hear Britain's former prime minister speak was surely a memorable one — perhaps more for proximity to the man himself than for the content of his speech.
    The topic of the Fares Lecture Series — the Middle East — is always relevant and, especially after the last few weeks of fighting in Gaza, Blair's lecture had particular resonance.
    Given the downward spiral Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have taken since the Second Intifada began in 2000, the tenor of Blair's speech proved academically interesting and perhaps even reassuring. The failure of the 1990s peace talks has undoubtedly cast a pall over an issue that for some seems unsolvable. The Israel-Palestine conflict may continue to plague the region and the world for decades to come.
    But Blair, currently serving as a Middle East Quartet representative, seemed unusually optimistic. He indicated that the answer is tenable — that the two-state solution is not impossible and did not perish with the Camp David summit in 2000 and Taba in 2001. While these comments should be evaluated critically, it was still refreshing for a major world leader to speak about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in such positive terms.
    His concluding references to the necessity of global alliances for solving the world's most challenging problems seemed to hint at the potential this country now has to restore old friendships under a new administration. And this, combined with Blair's final praise of the final outcome of the country's recent presidential election, proved encouraging, especially in the context of a lecture on the state of conflict in the Middle East.
    Beyond this, however, the audience would have been better served if Blair had been slightly more concrete and specific in his proposals and opinions. Blair stated that we need reinvigorated political negotiation and a combination of both hard and soft power to deal with a conflict that he defined as the most important factor in stabilizing the Middle East.
    He did not delve much deeper than this. And for an audience full of students and scholars, that was a shame.
Although Blair clearly could not begin to appropriately give this conflict its due in a 40-minute speech, his words, though reassuring and strong, barely skimmed the surface.
    Nonetheless, Blair was surprisingly witty and interesting — in both his manner of speaking and the subject matter in which he delved — a combination that lent itself to a positive, though perhaps academically underwhelming, experience for the Tufts community.