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U.S. ambassador to Israel, CNN reporter to discuss Middle East peace
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Martin Indyk, U.S. ambassador to Israel, and Ralph Begleiter, CNN's world affairs correspondent, will discuss "Peace and Power in the Middle East: The Future for Israel and Its Neighbors" at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 21, in the Salomon Center for Teaching, Room 101.
The event is part of the 1995-96 Stephen A. Ogden Jr. Memorial Lecture Series at Brown. The series is named after a Brown student in the Class of 1960 who died in 1963 of injuries from an automobile accident.
Indyk and Begleiter were in Israel following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and will have just returned. Itamar Rabinovich, Israel's ambassador to the United States, had been invited to participate in the lecture earlier this fall, but in the wake of events in Israel, his attendance could not be confirmed (as of Monday, Nov. 13). It is possible that both ambassadors will appear with Begleiter.
Prior to entering the government, Indyk served for eight years as the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research center that specializes in Arab-Israeli relations. He was also an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies where he taught Israeli politics and foreign policy. Indyk has published widely on U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli peace process and on U.S.-Israel relations.
Indyk was born in 1951 in London and was raised in Australia, where he received a bachelor's degree in economics from Sydney University and a doctorate in international relations from the Australian National University.
During the Persian Gulf Crisis in 1990 and 1991, Begleiter followed the delicate construction of an unprecedented international coalition which eventually went to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He covered the dramatic collapse of diplomatic efforts to avoid the war in Geneva in January 1991 and the extraordinary Middle East peace efforts by the United States after the war.
Begleiter played a key role in CNN's week-long live coverage of the historic Madrid Middle East Peace Conference in 1991, providing viewers with the first live report from inside the conference chamber as Arab and Israeli delegates mingled for the first time, and with continuing analysis and interviews with the negotiators. In June 1989, he covered the NATO summit meeting in Bonn, West Germany, where President Bush met for the first time with the other members of the NATO alliance.
Begleiter began his broadcast journalism career in 1967 in Providence, RI, where he worked as a reporter and writer for WICE-AM and WJAR-TV, as well as serving as news director for WBRU-FM. He was born in New York City in 1949 and holds a bachelor's degree with honors in political science from Brown and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Born in Jerusalem in 1942, Rabinovich holds a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern history from the Hebrew University. He earned a master's degree from Tel Aviv University and a doctorate from UCLA. He has taught at Tel Aviv University since 1971 and was a visiting professor at Princeton University in 1977-78 and 1985-86. He has risen through the academic ranks at Tel Aviv University to serve as dean of the humanities, director of the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, and finally as rector. He has been called on frequently to advise Israeli governments on Middle East politics and national security affairs.
Rabinovich's doctoral work was on Syria, and he has published several books on the Baath party in Syria, the war in Lebanon, and secret Israeli-Arab contacts during the 1950s.
Over the years, many heads of state, distinguished diplomats and other observers of the international scene have come to Providence as Ogden Lecturers. Presenters have included King Hussein of Jordan, Mario Soares of Portugal, Carlos Salinas of Mexico and Shimon Peres of Israel, who spoke during Brown's Commencement Weekend last May.
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