Biography
Gilead Sher is a Nonresident Fellow at the Baker Institute. He was chief of staff and policy coordinator to former Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, a senior negotiator with the Palestinians at the Camp David Summit and the Taba talks (1999-2000), and a delegate to the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement negotiations under former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Sher also served as a senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). He was a visiting professor and Israel studies fellow at Georgetown University in 2019, a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School in the fall of 2016 and a nonresident guest lecturer at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
As a reserve colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, Sher served as a company, battalion and brigade commander as well as a deputy armored corps division commander. During his compulsory service, he fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Sher authored “The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 1999–2001: Within Reach” (Routledge, 2006) and “The Battle for Home” (Yedioth Aharonot, 2016), and co-edited “Negotiating in Times of Conflict” (ContentoNow, 2016) and “Spoilers and Coping with Spoilers: Israeli-Arab Negotiations” (Indiana University Press, 2019). His forthcoming book “Reflections on Conflict Resolution: In the Middle East and Beyond” (2022) will be published by World Scientific Publishing.
Sher is a senior partner at Gilead Sher & Co. Law Offices. He serves on a number of corporate executive boards and public councils and chairs the executive board of directors of Sapir Academic College, one of Israel’s largest public colleges.
Contact at [email protected] or +97 252 894 1941.
Recent Publications
Israel plans a ground assault in Gaza as Hamas holds a large number of Israeli hostages
Gilead Sher is an Israeli lawyer and former senior negotiator in the peace process with the Palestinians. He said that Hamas is violating international law by not disclosing the identity, location or health condition of the hostages. “There's also a real fear that Hamas will treat [sic] the Israeli abductees with other Palestinian terrorist organizations. It has already announced that 30 of them have been handed to the Islamic Jihad,” said Sher, who is also a fellow in Middle East Peace and Security at Rice University’s Baker Institute.
In Foreign Policy: Over the Years, Netanyahu Led Failed Security Strategy on Gaza
“Over the years, [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] led a failed and misleading security concept,” said Sher. “He preferred … the status quo over in-depth political solutions—even transitional or interim—in the West Bank and Gaza. His policy attempted to nearly topple the PA [Palestinian Authority] and strengthen Hamas while fostering Hamas’s sense of impunity and capability.”
The Palestinian Dream Is Dying — and It's A Nightmare for Israel
Sher warned that, “if Israeli politics are not halted by democracies and the expansionist trends of the current government are not stopped by, first and foremost, America, then we are doomed to put an end altogether to the Zionist enterprise of having a Jewish democracy in parts of Eretz Israel.”