David Makovsky
Director of the
Project on the
Middle East Peace
Process at The
Washington Institute
for Near East Policy
Link:
“The Interplay of Foreign Policy Interests and Domestic Determinants”
David Makovsky is the Ziegler distinguished fellow and director of the Project on the Middle East
Peace Process at The Washington Institute. 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 the coauthor with Dennis Ross of the 2009 book Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding
a New Direction for America in the Middle East (Viking/Penguin). He is also the author or coauthor
of a variety of Washington Institute monographs on issues related to the Middle East Peace Process
and the Arab-Israeli conflict, including these titles: Lessons and Implications of the Israel-Hizballah
War:A Preliminary Assessment (2006); Olmert's Unilateral Option: An Early Assessment (2006);
Hamas Triumphant (2006); Engagement Through Disengagement: Gaza and the Potential for
Israeli-Palestinian Peacemaking (2005); A Defensible Fence: Fighting Terror and Enabling a Two
State Solution (2004), which focuses on Israel's security barrier and its relationship to demography
and geography in the West Bank.
Mr. Makovsky wrote the history Making Peace with the PLO: The Rabin Government's Road to the Oslo
Accord (Washington Institute/Westview Press/HarperCollins, 1996); and contributed to a collection
focusing on the history of U.S. involvement in the first Gulf war, Triumph without Victory (Random
House, 1992). He 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 the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles
Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Chicago
Tribune, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and National Interest. He appears frequently in the media
to comment on Arab-Israeli affairs, including PBS's Newshour. He has testified before the U.S.
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on
Foreign 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, was diplomatic
correspondent for Israel's leading daily, Haaretz, and is a former contributing editor to U.S. News and World
Report. He served for eleven years as that 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 cowrote 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
from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for an Israeli publication.
