David Newman, Ben Gurion University, Joins SPME Board of Directors

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David Newman, professor of Political Geography and Geopolitics in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University, has joined the SPME Board of Directors. Newman had recently been appointed as a Faculty Representative from the International Advisor Board on Academic Freedom in Israel to address boycott issues in the UK.

Newman has indicated that he is very interested in working on Israeli-Palestininan academic rights and promoting collaborative research between Israelis and Palestinians.

Professor Newman is coming to the United States in mid-January and is eager to meet with colleagues in the DC area where he will be making presentations at the Library of Congress. SPME would be happy to arrange a convening of DC area faculty members to meet with him on January 18, 2008. Prof. Newman is willing to speak to any of the following topics:

*Drawing the Borders: The Changing Geopolitics of Israel / palestine (this
would include some interesting maps)

*Religion and Peace: Can the Two Ever Go Together in the Middle east?

*Reflections on the Academic Boycott in the UK: Is it Over?

* Israel at Sixty: The Unresolved Questions

Please advise us at spme@spme.org if you have interest and SPME will make some arrangements.

“We are delighted to have on board such an accomplished and reknown academic with Prof. Newman’s perspectives and experiences,” commented Dr. Ed Beck, President of SPME, “we are hoping that other professors with his perspectives and experiences become involved and active with SPME so that we become a broader-based bigger tent academic community seeking common ground and working together to raise the standards for academic integrity and honest debate with respect to the issues of Middle East peace. We welcome these perspective as we search for resolution of important difficult problems through academic processes.”

Newman is currently chief editor of the international journal, Geopolitics, a quarterly journal published by Taylor Francis (Routledge).

During 2007-07, Newman was a Leverhulme fellow at the University of Bristol, and he has recently been appointed to represent all of the Israeli Universities in the UK, and to deal with all academic boycott related matters, including the development of new scientific links between the two countries.

Newman was born and educated in the UK. His degrees are from the University of London (1978) and Durham (1981). From 1982-1987, he was a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Tel Aviv University, following which he was a senior lecturer in the Department of Geography at Ben Gurion University. In 1998, he founded the Department of Politics and Government, and served as its first chair from 1998-2003. From 1996-19987 he was Director of the Hubert Humphrey Institute for Social Research at Ben Gurion University. In 2003 he facilitated the founding of the Centre for the Study of European Politics and Society (CESPS) at the University.

Professionally, Newman serves as a member of the International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU) in the UK, the Association of Borderland Studies (ABS) in the USA, the Border Regions in Transition (BRIT) network, and as a member of the Commission on the World Political Map (WPM) of the International geographical Union (IGU). He has facilitated and attended as keynote speaker many international gatherings dealing with geopolitical and border related issues. Newman has spent periods of time as visiting professor and research fellow at a number of universities and research institutions throughout Europe and North America.

Newman has published widely on territorial dimensions of the Israel-Palestine conflict. In particular his work has focused on issues relating to borders and settlements. He is currently engaged in editing two new books on the Israel / Palestine conflict for Routledge Publishers to be made available as a student resource throughout the English speaking world.

In addition to his academic writing, Newman has published op-eds on related issues in a variety of newspapers, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian. Between 1996-2003, he wrote a weekly political column in the Jerusalem Post.

Since the late 1980’s, Newman has been involved in peace related activities and in a variety of Track II discussions and negotiations. This includes joint Israeli-Palestinian projects looking at territorial and border issues, funded by the Ford Foundations, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and the John & Catherine MacArthur Foundation. He has recently been appointed editor of the new Middle East Peace and Security book series, to be published from 2005 onwards by Routledge, based on papers presented at Track II discussions during the past decade. He is invited to give regular briefings on border and settlement related issues to the USA State Department, as well as the British and Canadian Foreign Ministries. He was previously active in the religious peace movements, Oz veshalom and Netivot Shalom.

He frequently lectures on issues relating to the Israel-Palestine peace process in both North America and Europe – to academic, political and Jewish community audiences – and appears frequently on major news channels, such as the BBC, CBS, Sky News, Public Radio, etc.

David Newman, Ben Gurion University, Joins SPME Board of Directors

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Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) is not-for-profit [501 (C) (3)], grass-roots community of scholars who have united to promote honest, fact-based, and civil discourse, especially in regard to Middle East issues. We believe that ethnic, national, and religious hatreds, including anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, have no place in our institutions, disciplines, and communities. We employ academic means to address these issues.

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