Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer: Israel, Hamas, and the Day After

US Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer comes to Duke to discuss "Israel, Hamas, and the Day After" in a moderated conversation with Professor Bruce Jentleson.

Joining Princeton's faculty in 2006 following a 29-year career in the U.S. diplomatic service, Daniel Kurtzer retired from the Foreign Service with the rank of career minister. From 2001 to 2005, he served as the United States Ambassador to Israel and from 1997 to 2001 as the United States Ambassador to Egypt. He served as a political officer at the American embassies in Cairo and Tel Aviv, deputy director of the office of Egyptian affairs, speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Middle East advisor on the policy planning staff, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, and principal deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research.

Throughout his career, Kurtzer was instrumental in formulating and executing U.S. policy toward the Middle East peace process. He served on Secretary of State James A. Baker's Middle East peace team that brought about the 1991 Madrid peace conference. He chaired the multilateral peace talks that followed, and headed the U.S. delegation to the Refugee Working Group.

Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Kurtzer to serve on the Secretary's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Governor Phil Murphy has reappointed Kurtzer to serve on the New Jersey-Israel State Commission. Previously, Kurtzer served as an advisor to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, and as a member of the Advisory Council of the American Bar Association's Middle East Rule of Law Initiative. In 2007, he was named the first commissioner of the professional Israel Baseball League.

He is the co-author of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East, co-author of The Peace Puzzle: America's Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, 1989-2011; editor of Pathways to Peace: America and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and numerous scholarly articles and op-eds on foreign policy issues. He is currently working on a co-authored study of the peace process between 2011 and 2022. Kurtzer received his doctoral degree (Ph.D.) from Columbia University.