ABSTRACT
Arab countries watched uneasily as their neighbor, Israel, shed its socialist baggage and became an international technological and scientific hothouse with the influx of educated Russian immigrants. The basic programmatic structure of the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) summit includes plenary sessions and concurrent thematic sessions, to provide interaction between the private sector and the public sector, and country luncheons to highlight that country's comparative advantages for business investment. The MENA Summit was designed to reinforce the peace process and Israel's normalization of relations with its Arab neighbors by building a kind of economic scaffolding. Barriers were broken at Casablanca where the Israeli political and business elite mingled for three days with their Arab counterparts with hundreds of European and American business and government leaders, providing a supportive environment. The program at the MENA Summit most directly connected to the peace process was a plenary session on regional infrastructure projects.
