Adjunct Professor of Israeli Society

Ilan Peleg, Ph.D., earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from Tel Aviv University, and M.A. and doctoral degrees from Northwestern University. He has been the Charles A. Dana Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College since 1990 and served as chairman of Lafayette's Government and Law Department from 1985 to 1997. He has held appointments as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, research fellow at Princeton University, fellow in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, Skirball Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and associate member at St. Antony's College at the University of Oxford.

He is author of Begin's Foreign Policy 1977-1983: Israel's Move to the Right (1987); The Emergence of a Binational Israel: The Second Republic in the Making (Westview Press, 1989); Patterns of Censorship Around the World (Westview Press, 1993); Human Rights in the West Bank and Gaza: Politics and Legacy (Syracuse University Press, 1995) and many scholarly articles. Peleg's most recent book, Democratizing the Hegemonic State: Political Transformation in the Age of Identity, was published by the prestigious Cambridge University Press. He is heard frequently as a political commentator for CNN, Voice of America and National Public Radio. Peleg is the editor in chief of Israel Studies Forum: An Interdisciplinary Journal, the offical publication of the Association for Israel Studies. He speaks often on Middle East affairs in synagogues and Jewish community centers. In 2007, he was the inaugural speaker at Michigan State University's new series on modern Israel.