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David Makovsky is the Ziegler distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), where he directs the Project on the Middle East Peace Process. WINEP, which often favors the policies pushed by Israel’s rightwing Likud Party, is a spin-off of the better known “pro-Israel” lobby the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). An award-winning journalist, Makovsky is a former editor of the conservative Jerusalem Post and has worked for the Israel daily Haaretz and U.S. News and World Report.[1]  Makovsky is also a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), which has been home to a number of neoconservative-aligned figures, including Eliot Cohen, Paul Wolfowitz, and Gary Schmitt. Makovsky’s brother, Michael Makovsky, is a program director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, where he has been a leading proponent of hawkish U.S. policies on Iran.[2]

Makovsky is the author of several works on Middle East affairs, including the Making Peace with the PLO: The Rabin Government's Road to the Oslo Accord (HarperCollins, 1996). More recently, he coauthored with Dennis Ross the 2009 book Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction in the Middle East (Viking/Penguin). In a review of the book for Foreign Affairs, L. Carl Brown writes that Ross and Makovsky provide a “Goldilocks” approach to the “myth” that all Mideast problems are linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arguing that “the neoconservative's approach is too hot, the realist school’s is too cold, and theirs is just right.” Writes Brown, “Even while dissociating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from other problems, the authors demonstrate linkages galore and stress the importance of resolving it. Surely, the old adage that in the Middle East everything is linked to everything else offers a better road map than denying any linkage between Israel and other issues.”[3]

According to his WINEP bio, Makovsky is “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.[4]

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.