Professor David Newman OBE holds the Chair of Geopolitics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Newman founded the Department of Politics and Government at BGU in 1998, and the Centre for the Study of European Politics (now the Simone Weil centre for European Research) in 2003. From 2010-2016, Newman served as Dean of the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and in 2013 as awarded the OBE for promoting scientific cooperation between Britain and Israel. From 1998-2014, Newman served as chief editor of the academic Journal, Geopolitics.
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.