From diplomacy to research

In 1980, after 31 years of service, Gazit took early retirement from the civil service and chose research. He became a fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, and the family relates that in the same period he also taught for about half a year at Brandeis University.

At one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities he researched President Kennedy’s Middle East policy, a period he had lived through at the embassy in Washington. That research became his book on Kennedy’s policy toward the Arab states and Israel.

As a scholar, too, he stayed loyal to Golda Meir, under whom he had headed both the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office. When she was accused after the Yom Kippur War of having missed a chance for peace, he came to her defence in lectures and articles, arguing from the documents that no opportunity had been missed.

Henry Kissinger, across from whom Gazit had sat in the negotiating rooms of 1973‎–‎1975, had once worked at the same center. He saw research as an extension of his career rather than a departure from it: a practitioner, he said, could offer political science a different angle from a theorist’s.

Of his archaeology degree, he recalled that the war led him to keep “serving the new state rather than minding my own little shop.” His books and articles examined negotiation, Kennedy’s policies, and Israel’s relations with the United States and its neighbours.

His first two books appeared in 1983: one on the peace process of 1969‎–‎1973, the other on President Kennedy’s policy toward the Arab states and Israel. In 1993 he published the essay “Peacemakers”, on mediation in the Arab–Israeli conflict.

Three of his studies appeared in the international Journal of Contemporary History: on the peace talks with King Abdallah (1988), on whether an opportunity for peace with Egypt was missed in 1971 (1997), and on the beginnings of the strategic relationship with the United States (2000).

His book Israeli Diplomacy and the Quest for Peace, published in London in 2002, sets out his research across four decades of diplomacy: from the Bernadotte mediation of 1948, through the Sinai Campaign of 1956, to the London Agreement of Hussein and Peres in 1987.

He was a research fellow at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University. At the Truman Institute, too, he kept checking facts with people on the other side. In April 1982 he wrote by hand to the lawyer Aziz Shehadeh of Ramallah, one of the first Palestinians to back a Palestinian state alongside Israel openly.

He sent him material on the question of Palestinians’ Jordanian citizenship, argued that in 1960 Jordan had extended its naturalisation rules to all Palestinians, added that “more research is required” to establish what had happened to that decision since, and wrote: “I benefited from our talk the other day.”

Shehadeh replied at legal length, and disagreed: in his view there was no legal basis for the claim that all Palestinians could obtain Jordanian citizenship as of right. Gazit’s records and studies serve researchers to this day, those who agree with him and those who dispute him.

Read it within the full timeline