Dave Harden is the Managing Director of the Georgetown Strategy Group. Before founding the firm, Harden was a Minister Counselor in the career Senior Foreign Service. He recently served as the Assistant Administrator for the US Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance in the Obama Administration. In that capacity, Harden led a bureau focused on global crisis response and political transition with an annual budget of $4.8 billion with nearly 1,200 staff. Harden spearheaded all USAID efforts to respond to crises and stabilisation efforts – including responses in Haiti, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, the West Bank/Gaza and Yemen.
Our Voice of the Fortnight is from the Times of Israel's 'Wartime Diaries' podcast. In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, Shai Davidai – an Assistant Professor at Columbia University – became an unlikely public defender of Israel. And truthfully, even he was surprised by this turn of events: As a committed left-wing Israeli, he had spent years criticizing the government, and often took to the streets to demonstrate against its policies. But the atmosphere he witnessed on college campuses (and specifically on his own campus at Columbia), compelled him to speak up and speak out.