This person is no longer with the Carnegie Endowment.
Shlomo Avineri, professor of political science and director of the Institute for European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, rejoined the Carnegie Endowment as a visiting scholar in October 2001. A prominent political scientist who has published widely on comparative politics, he will research and write on the Middle East conflict and provide policy recommendations on a Middle East peace.
He was previously a visiting scholar at the Endowment from September to December 2000, during which time he focused on the new strategic relationship between Russia and the Middle East in the post-Cold War era.
Avineri served as director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the first administration of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin from 1975 to 1977. He also headed the Israeli delegation to the UNESCO General Assembly, and in 1979 was a member of the joint Egyptian-Israeli commission that drafted the Cultural and Scientific Agreement between the two countries. From 1990 to 1992 he was a member of an international team of observers, under the auspices of the National Democratic Institute for the first post-communist elections in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, and Croatia. He has also been involved in studies on processes of democratization and the emergence of nationalism in post-communist societies.
Previously, Avineri served as a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. and at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow.
Education: B.A. and M.A. degrees in political science and history, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Ph.D. in political science, London School of Economics
Selected Publications: The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx; Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State; Israel and the Palestinians; and The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State.
The current period of intense violence in the region has resulted in a serious unraveling of the Arab-Israeli peace process and suggest the near impossibility of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. Two defining moments have led to this conclusion: first, the Oslo agreement that raised high hopes for peace and then the failure of Camp David II that shattered them.
Prime Minister Sharon's analogy of George W. Bush's current policies to the abandonment of Czechoslovakia in 1938 is warped and ill-advised. But, the prime minister had a point. There exists a much more apt analogy which- not surprisingly- does go back to 1938-39. It is not Chamberlain and the Nazis, but the British and the publication of the pro-Arab 1939 White Paper on Palestine.
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The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War have fundamentally changed the strategic balance in the Middle East and have had a profound impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Carnegie's Shlomo Avineri argues that four facets can be discerned from current Russian attitudes toward the Arab-Israeli conflict that inform Russian policy.
The way out of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse may be two sets of unilateral steps: a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from most of the Palestinian territories still under its control, coupled with both consolidation to most of the larger and contiguous Israeli settlements and abandonment of the smaller and isolated ones–and, on the Palestinian side, a unilateral declaration of independence.
Senior Associates Anatol Lieven and Martha Brill Olcott and Visiting Scholar Shlomo Avineri discuss Russia and the security challenges from the south.
