Avraham Sela

Avraham Sela was born in 1945 in Iraq

Avraham Sela was born in Iraq on September 14, 1945. He immigrated to Israel with his family in 1950.

He studied Middle East studies and international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned a BA in 1971, an MA in 1974 and a PhD in 1986, and later did advanced study at Princeton University.

He served in the IDF as an intelligence officer from 1970 to 1986. He followed the Israeli-Egyptian talks up to the 1979 peace treaty and took part in the Naqoura talks with the Lebanese army.

Since 1988 he has taught international relations and been a research fellow at the Truman Institute of the Hebrew University. He has taught at universities in the United States, Canada and Turkey, and was a visiting fellow at Oxford. He has held the Ephraim and Shirley Diamond Chair of International Relations since 2003.

His research covers Middle East politics, inter-Arab relations, the 1948 war and Palestinian society. He has criticized the work of the New Historians, especially Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim. From 1997 to 2000 he was active in the Four Mothers movement, which called for an IDF withdrawal from Lebanon.