WATCH: Kerry speaks about US-Israel ties, peace process

US Secretary of State John Kerry spoke at the Brooking Institution’s Saban Forum Saturday, touching on relations between Jerusalem and Washington and regional challenges.

The event began at 2:15 p.m. EST (7:15 p.m. GMT). A video of the speech is available below.

Speaking at the forum earlier Saturday, Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid said ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be Israel’s “only priority,” and warned that Israel did not have any real strategy for resolving the decades-old puzzle.

“Peace is the end of the process,” he said. “In the beginning it is some sort of arrangement or agreement that is politically unrewarding, that is painful, technical and non-dramatic. But you have to go there because anything else is an existential threat.”

Watch the video of Kerry here:

https://youtu.be/9RiFy6iIeco

Separation, he said, was a necessary precondition for eventual peace. “In the beginning, it is not breaking the wall like in the famous Reagan speech,” he warned. “It is building a higher wall in order to make it feasible for our children to have peace ten, fifteen years from now.”

Speaking on the same panel with Lapid, former George W. Bush-era National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley agreed that “an Israeli-Palestinian peace must be embedded in a broader Israeli-Arab reconciliation,” but offered a dimmer vision of the prospects for an agreement.

“Simply getting to the table and talking does not generate success,” Hadley warned. “The piece of the puzzle always missing is the situation on the ground – how to make conditions of Palestinian life better now.”

Speaking at the forum on Friday, Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon called upon the US to play a more influential role in combating the Islamic State terror group and warned of increased Russian and Iranian influence in the region.

Addresing an audience that included former peace negotiators Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross and David Makovsky, as well as a number of members of Congress, Ya’alon described the security ties between the US and Israel as “superb,” even stressing US President Barack Obama’s efforts to speed up the renewal of a key defense agreement between Jerusalem and Washington.

Ya’alon, who has occasionally touched nerves in Washington with his criticism of Secretary of State John Kerry and his sometimes defiant rhetoric, instead trod carefully – if analytically – when asked if Obama was acting correctly in response to IS and the Syrian civil war.

“This is a global challenge [and] I believe the United States should be the leader of the Western world in order to meet this challenge,” Ya’alon said.

Ya’alon also emphasized the danger of increased Iranian involvement in Syria, noting that “the only terror attacks in the last two years from the Syrian side in the Golan Heights were perpetrated by the IRGC” – the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The defense minister said that Syrian President Bashar Assad – who has been propped up by Iran for years – doesn’t like the IRGC operations on the Golan border, but is powerless to do or say anything about them.

Although Ya’alon has quieted his rhetoric against the Iran nuclear deal since it was reached in July, he stressed that “we still consider the deal a historic mistake.”

The hawkish minister condemned Palestinian incitement as a root cause of the months-long uptick in violent attacks by Palestinians against Israeli targets.

“We do not want to rule over the Palestinians,” Ya’alon said, but complained that the prospects for peace were limited by poor Palestinian governance. “Since the dawn of Zionism, we have not had a Palestinian leadership that recognizes the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state,” he said.

Ya’alon advocated a slow, gradual approach toward Palestinian statehood, emphasizing that as defense minister, he would recommend that even in a final arrangement, Israel retain control of the Palestinian state’s “external boundaries.”