Itamar Rabinovich is Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University. He is Israel’s former ambassador to the United States and former Chief Negotiator with Syria in the mid- 1990s, and former President of Tel Aviv University (1999-2007). He is President of the Dan David Foundation (sponsor of the world’s largest history prize), President Emeritus and Counselor of the Israel Institute (Washington and Tel Aviv), and a Distinguished Fellow of the Brooking Institution’s Foreign Policy Program. He is the Vice Chairman of the Institute for National Security Studies, an external institute of Tel Aviv University and Israel’s leading think tank. He is also a senior research fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern studies, and is co-editor of the Center’s review journal, Bustan.
Professor Rabinovich is the author of more than ten volumes on the Modern History and Politics of the Middle East, as well as numerous essays and papers. Recent books include Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman (published by Yale University Press in 2017, and available also in German); Syrian Requiem: The Civil War and Its Aftermath (published by Princeton University Press in 2021), and Middle Eastern Maze: Israel, the Arabs, and the Region, 1948 – 2022 (published by the Brookings Institution Press in 2023).
Professor Rabinovich has held visiting appointments and fellowships in academic institutions around the globe. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded the Honorary Grand Golden Cross of the Austrian Republic and made a Commandeur l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the Government of the French Republic. In 2009 he was awarded the Korn-Gerstenman Prize for contribution to peace in the Middle East.