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On June 17, GMF’s Berlin office hosted the 4th annual Bundestag Forum on the United States, the office’s flagship event, with experts on American foreign policy briefing members of the German Bundestag, their staffs, German think tank representatives, and members of the media.   After opening June 16 with a dinner conversation on Russia at the representative office of this year’s sponsor, Deutsche Telekom, the event continued the next day with a talk on Israel and Palestine by Steven Erlanger, Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times. Mr. Erlanger pointed out that Germany is Israel’s second closest ally, after the United States, and that the Israel-Germany relationship is growing more important by the day.   Mr. Erlanger, who called Israel a domestic American political story, said there were two crucial events in the Israeli-Palestinian situation in the last year: first, that Israel is pulling out of Gaza and, second, the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. On the latter point, the Palestinians have to decide whether they stay a revolutionary movement or start state-building, he said. Regarding Gaza, there are three main questions to be resolved. First, what happens to the Israeli houses after they leave? Second, what happens to the greenhouses, which use sophisticated technology and account for 15 percent of Israel’s agricultural exports? Third, what happens to Rafa, the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, currently controlled by Israel?   Over lunch, Bruce Jackson, president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, and Amb. Stephen Sestanovich, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, discussed wider Europe and Russia, respectively. Mr. Jackson said there was increasing recognition in America that minor decisions in Europe affect American strategic policy. Turkey, Ukraine, the Black Sea, the Balkans, and the greater Middle East are all high on the Bush Administration’s radar screen, and European policies toward those regions have significant impact in the State Department and White House, Mr. Jackson said.   Amb. Sestanovich said there is not nearly as much consensus on Russia in the Bush Administration as there is on wider Europe. There are two points of broad agreement and two points of contention still being resolved in Washington. The two points of agreement are that American predictions about Russia in the last 15 years have been bad and that there has been a cycle of high expectations and disappointment. There is discord, though, regarding what the single biggest issue will be after Putin leaves office, as expected, in 2008, and over how the dynamism in the rest of the former Soviet Union affects future relations with Russia.