David Makovsky

David Makovsky is a senior fellow and director of The Washington Institute's Project on the Middle East Peace Process. He is also an adjunct lecturer in Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Mr. Makovsky is most recently the author, with Jeffrey White, of the Washington Institute Policy Focus Lessons and Implications of the Israel-Hizballah War: A Preliminary Assessment (The Washington Institute, 2006). Mr. Makovsky is also the author of the Institute Policy Focus Olmert’s Unilateral Option: An Early Assessment (The Washington Institute, 2006). He also contributed a chapter to the Institute Policy Focus Hamas Triumphant (The Washington Institute, 2006). His other publications include the Institute study Engagement Through Disengagement: Gaza and the Potential for Israeli-Palestinian Peacemaking (The Washington Institute, 2005); A Defensible Fence: Fighting Terror and Enabling a Two State Solution (The Washington Institute, 2004), which focuses on Israel's security barrier and its relationship to demography and geography in the West Bank; Making Peace with the PLO: The Rabin Government's Road to the Oslo Accord (Washington Institute/Westview Press/HarperCollins, 1996); and contributed to a history of U.S. involvement in the first Gulf war, Triumph without Victory (Random House, 1992). Mr. Makovsky is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. His commentary on the peace process and the Arab-Israeli conflict has appeared in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Chicago Tribune, Foreign Policy, and National Interest. He appears frequently in the media to comment on Arab-Israeli affairs.Before joining The Washington Institute, Mr. Makovsky was an award-winning journalist who covered the peace process from 1989 to 2000. He is the former executive editor of the Jerusalem Post and was diplomatic correspondent for Israel's leading daily Haaretz. Now a contributing editor to U.S. News and World Report, he served for eleven years as the magazine's special Jerusalem correspondent. He was awarded the National Press Club's 1994 Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence for a cover story on PLO finances that he co-wrote for the magazine.In July 1994, with the personal intervention of then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Mr. Makovsky became the first journalist writing for an Israeli publication to visit Damascus. In total, he has made five trips to Syria, the latest in December 1999 as he accompanied then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In March 1995, with assistance from U.S. officials, Mr. Makovsky was given unprecedented permission to file reports for an Israeli publication from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Mr. Makovsky received a bachelor's degree from Columbia University and a master's degree in Middle East studies from Harvard University.

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