Shlomo Ben-Ami Middle East debates Middle Eastern peace

Shlomo Ben-Ami

Israeli politician and historian. He was Foreign Minister at the time of the negotiations at Camp David

Shlomo Ben-Ami attended Tel-Aviv University and Oxford University where he received a DPhil in History. He returned to Tel-Aviv in the 1970s and served as the Head of the School of History from 1982 to 1986, when he became a Professor. In 1987, he was appointed to be Israel’s first Ambassador in Spain, where he served until December 1991. He was a member of Israel’s delegation to the Madrid Peace Conference and he headed the Israeli delegation at the Multilateral Talks on Refugees in the Middle East held in Ottawa, Canada in 1993.

Ben-Ami then created The Curiel Center for International Studies at Tel Aviv University, which he headed until 1996 and in the same year he was elected to the Knesset, where he served as a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. After Labour’s landslide victory in 1999, Ben-Ami was appointed as Minister of Public Security. In 2000 he became Foreign Minister, and he notably assisted the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack at the Camp David Summit. He has written extensively on Israeli affairs, with recent works including Quel avenir pour Israël? (2003) and Scars of war, wounds of peace : the Israeli-Arab tragedy (2006).