Gilead Sher

Guest Author

Gilead Sher (@GileadSher) was Chief of Staff and policy coordinator to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, a senior negotiator at the Camp David summit and Taba talks (1999-2001), and a delegate to the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement negotiations under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Over the last two and a half decades, Sher led numerous track-two negotiations. He served as a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies INSS. A reputable expert in negotiations and conflict resolution, Sher was a visiting professor and Israel studies fellow at Georgetown University in 2019 and is currently a senior fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. He was a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and a non-resident guest lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
The law firm he heads has extensive experience in complex commercial, civil, and administrative cases with national, regional, and international dimensions, negotiation strategy, and representation of leading clients from the business, private and public sectors. Sher is the author of The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 1999–2001 (2006) and The Battle for Home (2016), as well as coeditor of Negotiating in Times of Conflict (2015) and Spoiling and Coping with Spoilers (2019). His book Reflections on Conflict Resolution is scheduled for publication in the spring.
As a reserve officer in the Israel Defense Forces, Colonel Sher served as a company, battalion, and brigade commander, and as a deputy armored corps division commander. During his compulsory service, Sher fought the 1973 Yom Kippur War.