Middle East

After breakfast we receive a security briefing on the geopolitical region from Avi Melamed, an intelligence expert in Israel. It is impressed on us how Israel really exists in a permanent state of existential danger. The destabilizing role Iran plays is pretty obvious, and our briefing goes into the shia-sunni conflict as the source of much middle-east conflict going back 13 centuries. We also learn how that is explicitly playing out in Syria.