Gilead Sher is an attorney and former Israeli senior peace negotiator and Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Ehud Barak, heads the Center for Applied Negotiations at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv. He is a co-founder of the Israeli non-partisan organisation Blue White Future that advocates for a two-state solution. Sher was a lecturer and visiting scholar at Harvard Law School in 2016.
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.