Martin S. Indyk, a diplomat, historian and educator who helped steer Middle East policy under two presidents, advocated a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and served as a director of multiple think tanks, died July 25 at his home in New Fairfield, Conn. He was 73.
The cause was esophageal cancer, said his wife, Gahl Hodges Burt.
Born in England and raised in Australia, Mr. Indyk moved to Washington in his early 30s, founded an influential research institute focused on Middle East policy and joined the Clinton administration shortly after becoming a U.S. citizen. “I like it when you’re around, Martin,” President Bill Clinton, a former Arkansas governor, once joked in his Southern drawl, “because you and I both have funny accents.”
Mr. Indyk became the first Jewish U.S. ambassador to Israel, serving from 1995 to 1997. He assumed the post again from 2000 to 2001 at a time when Clinton was trying to forge a settlement between the Israeli government and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Advertisement
From 2013 to 2014, Mr. Indyk served as President Barack Obama’s special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. He was a key figure in those peace talks, but their breakdown dashed his dreams of achieving a durable Middle East peace.
“He’ll be remembered for his commitment to the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace, which in the end broke his heart,” said David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist who knew Mr. Indyk for nearly four decades. “All of his efforts had basically been spurned by both sides. … His life’s work had ended up not producing the thing he dreamed of.”
Mr. Indyk had been consulted by the Biden White House as a key strategist on efforts to achieve normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia — overtures sidelined by the deadly October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas militants, and then by Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza.
At various times, Mr. Indyk drew indignation from opposite ends of the Israeli political spectrum and from voices outside Israel. He was “too pro-Israeli in the eyes of Israel’s critics, and at the same time too tough on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for many Israelis,” as the Forward newspaper put it in 2013.
He largely blamed Arafat and the Palestinians for the collapse of the 2000-2001 talks, but he also faulted the Israeli policy of building and expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank. Some Israelis and U.S. Jewish groups were particularly incensed by his call in late 2000 for Israel to share control of Jerusalem with the Palestinians.
Advertisement
“One way or the other, Israelis and Palestinians will have to find a way to coexist,” Mr. Indyk wrote in December 2001 in an online chat with readers on The Post’s website.
“The best way for both sides to work this arrangement out is through negotiations that lead to an agreement, if not for a marriage, then at least for an amicable divorce,” he continued. “But that can’t happen unless the basic principle is reasserted by the Palestinian side: no resort to violence in the effort to resolve the issues in dispute. [Arafat] has not fulfilled that obligation.”
More recently, in an interview with Foreign Affairs magazine on Oct. 7 — the day Hamas launched its cross-border rampage that killed about 1,200 people — Mr. Indyk criticized “a total system failure” by Israel to anticipate the attack.
He also blamed underlying Israeli “hubris” for a mistaken belief “that sheer force could deter Hamas, and that Israel did not have to address the long-term problems,” even though “many people told the Israelis that the situation with the Palestinians was unsustainable.”
Advertisement
Now, he said, “I fear that Hamas’s intention is to get Israel to retaliate massively and have the conflict escalate: a West Bank uprising, Hezbollah attacks, a revolt in Jerusalem.”
In a 2009 memoir, “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East,” Mr. Indyk acknowledged some hubris of his own in thinking the Middle East peace process in the mid-1990s was “irreversible.” He wrote: “The climb up that mountain seemed so natural and destined that I never thought of looking down to contemplate how easily and how far we could fall.”
He was especially critical of what he viewed as the naiveté of President George W. Bush, whom he slammed for a misguided attempt to stabilize the Middle East through a disastrous U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The result, he wrote, was to strengthen the hand of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda.
Advertisement
Mr. Indyk, who served under Democratic presidents and aligned most closely with liberal Israeli leaders, also wrote a diplomatic history, “Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy” (2021), which offered a generally admiring look at the 1970s Arab-Israeli peace efforts of the Republican former national security adviser and secretary of state.
Share this articleShareUnlike Kissinger, Mr. Indyk was largely an “implementer” of policy, “rarely a principal,” Ignatius said. “But because he was a strategic thinker, he ended up shaping the view of the principals to an unusual extent.”
Grasp of politics and policy
Martin Sean Indyk was born in London on July 1, 1951, to a family of religiously and politically liberal Jewish immigrants from Poland. He moved with his family to Australia and grew up with two siblings in the Sydney suburb of Castlecrag. His father was a surgeon.
Advertisement
He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1972, writing his political science thesis on the domestic and external factors affecting U.S. policy toward Israel, then moved to that country to attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
After returning to Australia, he received a doctorate in international relations from Australian National University in 1977 and worked as a Middle East analyst for Australia’s intelligence service, during a period when Israel and Egypt signed a landmark peace treaty and the shah of Iran fled an Islamic revolution.
He was increasingly unhappy in Australia, where he saw colleagues mesmerized by a prominent horse race just as the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel were nearing completion.
“It’s pathetic,” Mr. Indyk told a colleague, according to the Australian Financial Review. “The Middle East is being transformed, and all they’re interested in is the Melbourne Cup.”
Advertisement
After teaching foreign policy at Macquarie University in Sydney, Mr. Indyk immigrated to the United States in 1982 and went to work in Washington as a research director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israeli lobbying group. Three years later, he founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and spent eight years as its executive director.
A prolific writer who was quick to grasp the significance of developments in the Middle East, Mr. Indyk raised the influence of his think tank, in part by recruiting a bipartisan group of luminaries to its advisory board, including Democratic former vice president Walter Mondale and senior Republican diplomat Lawrence Eagleburger. He also became a fixture on television and in foreign policy journals.
Even before Clinton announced his candidacy for president, Mr. Indyk offered to advise him on Middle East policy, and he ended up briefing both President George H.W. Bush and Clinton during the 1992 campaign, the Australian Financial Review reported.
In 1993, a little more than a week after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen, Mr. Indyk joined the White House National Security Council, serving as an adviser to Clinton on Arab-Israeli issues. His two stints as ambassador to Israel began under Labor Party governments, with which Mr. Indyk had greater affinity. In the interim — from 1997 to 2000, partly coinciding with Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister — he served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs.
In September 2000, when he was ambassador to Israel, Mr. Indyk was stripped of his security clearance and investigated by the FBI after he was accused of improperly handling classified information, including by typing up confidential reports on an unclassified laptop during airplane flights. There were no indications that any secrets were compromised, and his clearance was restored the next month.
Advertisement
Mr. Indyk also drew scrutiny in 2014 when the New York Times reported that Qatar, an oil-rich Persian Gulf emirate that has hosted Hamas’s leader and helped fund Gaza’s government, had made a $14.8 million donation to the Brookings Institution the year before, when Mr. Indyk was on hiatus from the think tank and working as the Obama administration’s special envoy for Middle East peace. The donation was for a Brookings affiliate in Qatar and a project on U.S. relations with the Islamic world.
The think tank denied that Mr. Indyk benefited personally from the donation or that it compromised the institution’s scholarship in any way. After his turn as special envoy, he served as executive vice president of Brookings.
At the time of his death, he was the Lowy Distinguished Fellow in U.S.-Middle East Diplomacy at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Advertisement
His first marriage, to Jill Collier, ended in divorce. In 2013, he married Gahl Hodges Burt, a former aide to Kissinger and a White House social secretary during the Reagan administration. In addition to his wife, of New York, survivors include two children from his first marriage, Jacob Indyk of Fair Haven, N.J., and Sarah Indyk of Denver; two stepchildren, Christopher Burt of McLean, Va., and Caroline Burt of Los Angeles; a brother; a sister; and five grandchildren.
When he was first named ambassador to Israel, Mr. Indyk told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that maintaining a strong relationship between Israel and the United States had been his “life’s work.” The need for that bond became clear, he said, when the 1973 Yom Kippur War broke out while he was preparing to study in Jerusalem, and he ended up volunteering on a kibbutz in southern Israel.
“It taught me just how fragile Israel’s existence was,” he told the committee, “and how central the United States is to war and peace in the Middle East.”
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLyjtdOumKuhlah8c3yRbWZpb19ngnC5wKuroqZdnrulxcpmm56ZlGQ%3D