A Three-Way Peace Deal in the Middle East: A Conversation with Ehud Eiran

Israel has signed normalization agreements with the UAE and Bahrain. These are the first Middle East peace agreements in two and a half decades. Why now? What does each of the main actors in this drama stand to gain from these accords? Can Middle East diplomacy really bypass the Israeli Palestinian conflict as these agreements attempt to do?  And does the deal signal a new alignment of power in the region? 

Dr. Ehud (Udi) Eiran is a Senior Lecturer (US Associate Professor) of International Relations, University of Haifa, Israel, and an (active!) Board member at Mitvim – a leading Israeli think tank. He is also a senior fellow at the center for the Research of Intelligence Methodology.  Dr. Eiran directed the University of Haifa’s center for national security, and was one of the co-founders of its center for maritime strategy. He also served as the academic director of Israel’s National Security College, (on behalf of the University). Dr. Eiran held research appointments at Harvard Law School, Harvard's Kennedy School, and Stanford’s Department of Political Science, and was a visiting lecturer in the Department of Political Science at MIT. Prior to his academic career Dr. Eiran held a number of positions in the Israeli civil service including as Assistant to the Prime Minister's Foreign Policy Advisor. He is the author of two books and some fifty scholarly articles, book chapters, and policy briefs, as well as numerous op-eds mostly in American and Israeli outlets. His research interests include spatial technological and legal aspects of international conflict (mostly in the Arab-Israeli context), negotiation and conflict resolution, maritime strategy, and intelligence studies.     

Udi is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a visiting professor of Israel studies at UC Berkley.