Elie Rekhess

Who is Elie Rekhess?

Elie Rekhess is a scholar of political history of the Arabs in Israel; Islamic resurgence in Israel; the West Bank and Gaza and Palestinian affairs. He serves as Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University and as the head of the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation at Tel Aviv University. He is also on the faculty of its Department of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University.

As of January 2009, he is the Crown Visiting Chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, affiliated with Department of History and the Center for Jewish Studies. As an expert on Arab society in Israel, Rekhess's knowledge covers the fields of Political Islam, Palestinian society and politics, the political history of the Arab minority in Israel, minorities and ethnicity in the Middle East, Israeli politics, and social and ethnic cleavages in Israel. He is also a former officer of the Israeli Defense Forces, actively engaged in the combat sector in his earlier years. As an IDF officer he has real-life experience dealing with combating the Palestinian resistance movement, which includes civilians, women, and children.