Harry & Blanche Posen Memorial Lecture: Domestic Politics and National Security in Israel
Tuesday, November 24, 12:00 pm
Israel is facing unprecedented challenges and threats to its national security. Yet its decision-making on the most crucial issues has been flawed, due mostly to the failures of its political process and structure.
Israeli politics are suffering from endemic instability, increasing polarization and a lack of public trust in political and judicial institutions of the country. Reforms, therefore, are badly needed in order to enable the country to counter the existential threats on the regional as well as the global scene.
This lecture will present and analyze the most acute and severe threats, and will then try to describe and analyze the necessary response. This will be done against the background of the recent election results and the chances for a new coalition to govern more effectively. The significance of the electoral outcomes and their impact on possible meaningful political reforms will be addressed as well.
Special thanks to the Posen, Spiegel and Cohen families for making this annual event possible.
Professor Gabriel Ben-Dor. Gabriel Ben-Dor is Professor (Emeritus) at the University of Haifa in Israel. He served in the past as the Rector of the University, as well as Chairman of the Department of Political Science, Director of the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies and Dean of Research. He is a past President of the Israel Political Science Association and a member of a number of high-level public commissions and forums dealing with academic development and policy in Israel and abroad. In the past, he served as senior adviser on strategic affairs to the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
Professor Ben-Dor has been the director of the graduate study program at the National Defense College, the highest course of the studies in the Israeli Defence Forces. He is the founder of the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa; one of the leading research institutes on matters related to defense, security and strategy in Israel.
Professor Ben-Dor has published seven books and over one hundred and twenty articles in scholarly journals on Middle East politics, the Arab-Israeli conflict, national security affairs, strategic studies, ethnic problems and political theory.
Professor Ben-Dor has been a visiting lecturer at a number of universities in Western Europe, Canada and the United States. He holds a doctorate in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies from Princeton University in the United States.
