THE UNPROVOKED ATTACK ON ISRAEL: HOW DID THIS HAPPEN AND WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? A VIRTUAL CONVERSATION WITH EFRAIM HALEVY, FORMER CHIEF OF THE MOSSAD

For more than a decade, Israel has careened from disaster to disaster: Plagued by stubborn political polarization, it has been forced to hold repeated elections, five in just one four-year period. As political winds shifted, the current government moved to support the sentiment of conservative Orthodox parties, only to provoke a backlash that has seemed almost like civil war.

Simultaneously, relative calm on the West Bank has been regularly broken by attacks from a new generation of Palestinian militants. And the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza never brought about the expected peace and, instead, led to control by Hamas . . . culminating in the recent invasion that has left 1,400 Israelis dead, hundreds captive in Gaza and the nation in its greatest crisis since its founding.

Join us for an important virtual conversation with Israeli intelligence expert and diplomat Efraim Halevy, who served as the 9th director of the Mossad and the head of the Israeli National Security Council.

Halevy served as the envoy and confidant of five prime ministers: Yitzhak Shamir, Yitzhak Rabin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. He will be in conversation with Rick Salomon, cofounder and an executive member of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center and a frequent public speaker.