Dan Schueftan Coming To Georgetown
Prof. Dan Schueftan, a familiar visitor to Capitol Hill since the 1980s is returning to Washington this summer for an extended stay as the Aaron Goldman Visiting Israeli Professor at Georgetown University for the 2012-2013 academic year.
Schueftan is a stimulating and provocative thinker who has the ear of a wide spectrum of top decision makers in Israel and long popular with members of Congress and their staffs. Many of today's senior Israeli officials in the security, intelligence and foreign policy establishment were his students or have worked closely with him. He also has briefed senior European and American political and policy officials and is regularly sought for his views by media in the United States, Europe, Israel and the Arab world.
He will be teaching classes at Georgetown on the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as broader regional issues for undergraduates and graduate students.
Schueftan is the director of the National Securities Center at the University of Haifa and a senior lecturer at its School of Political Science; he also teaches at the Israel Defense Forces National Security College and the IDFs Command and Staff College. He lectures annually on the Middle East at Britain's Royal College of Defense Studies. He regularly lectures at universities and research centers in the United States and Europe
He was the first major Israeli thinker to propose the concept of "unilateral disengagement," which was described in his 1999 book "Disengagement: Israel and the Palestinian Entity." He proposed erecting a security barrier between Israel and the Palestinian territories, an idea which was endorsed by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak and followed by his successors.
He was instrumental in convincing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to disengage unilaterally from Gaza and his successor, Ehud Olmert, to propose extending that policy to the West Bank.
He is the author of three other books on Israeli security: "Palestinians in Israel – the Arab Minority and the Jewish State," "Attrition: Egypt's Post War Political Strategy 1967-1970" and "A Jordanian Option – Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians"