Shmuel Bar

Shmuel Bar is Director of Studies at the Institute of Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel and on the steering team of the annual "Herzliya Conference". Bar served for thirty years in the Israeli government, first in the IDF Intelligence and then in the Israeli Office of the Prime Minister. During this period, he specialized in Islamic fundamentalism and the Jihadi movement and served in diplomatic postings. Since 2002, he has headed research projects--some of them for U.S. government agencies--and published extensively on issues relating to the Middle East, including radical Islamic ideology, Iranian defense doctrine, leadership and negotiation behavior, Syrian leadership and the Ba’ath party, Jordan, and the Palestinians. He holds a Ph.D. in History of the Middle East from Tel-Aviv University.