Dan Pattir

Dan Pattir (2008)

Dan Pattir (also: Dan Patir) Hebrew דן פתיר; born July 13, 1931 in Tel Mond , Israel is an Israeli university professor and publicist . Pattir was successively media advisor to Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin .

education

Dan Pattir was born in Tel Mond in the Sharon Plain in 1931 . His parents were among the founders of this settlement, the father came from Galicia . In 1947 Pattir went to Tel Aviv, where he obtained his university entrance qualification.

From 1949 to 1952 he studied political science and history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and from 1965 to 1968 at Howard University in Washington African Studies .

Journalist career

Pattir was already a sports reporter as a schoolboy and later worked for the Israeli daily newspaper "Davar" (Hebrew: the word), which belonged to the trade union umbrella organization Histadrut and was close to the Israeli labor movement, on a variety of topics, from sports to security issues to Politics. From 1956 to 1961 he worked in London for the BBC and at the same time as a foreign correspondent for Israeli newspapers. In the 1970s, Pattir was a political commentator for the Israeli Army Radio.

Worked as press attaché in Washington (1964–1969)

From 1964 to 1969 Pattir worked in Washington as a press attaché at the Israeli embassy. In 1966 he accompanied the then Israeli President Zalman Shazar on his first state visit to the USA. From February 1968, Yitzhak Rabin, who had resigned his post as Chief of Staff at the end of 1967 after the Six Day War , which was very successful for Israel , was his superior as ambassador to Washington. During Pattir's tenure in Washington, the United States, which had been "neutral" in the Palestinian conflict in the 1950s, gradually replaced France as Israel's most important military ally and security partner under Democratic President Johnson .

Press spokesman for Prime Ministers Rabin and Begin (1974–1981)

In 1974, Rabin, his last superior in Washington, succeeded Golda Meir as Prime Minister, and reappointed Pattir as his press secretary. Pattir was part of the Israeli negotiating team that, with the help of Henry Kissinger, negotiated the disengagement agreement with Egypt after the Yom Kippur War in 1974 .

When the Likud took over the government in 1977, and the position of Israel had become more difficult after the republicans were replaced by the liberal "dove" Jimmy Carter in Washington, the new Prime Minister Menachem Begin again resorted to the experienced and well-connected in Washington Pattir and again appointed him his press secretary, although he was politically close to Rabin's Labor Party and not to the Likud. Pattir resigned his office shortly before the Knesset elections in 1981 (and after Carter was replaced by the conservative “hawk” Ronald Reagan in the USA) and went to the USA for a research stay (see below).

Important tasks during the term of office of Pattir unter Begin were the coordination of the media activities during the visits of the Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat to Israel in 1977 and 1979 and the negotiations of Camp David (1978) and the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement of Washington 1979 he also served as media advisor to the Prime Minister of Jamaica, Edward Seaga .

In 1987 the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot published a series of interviews Pattir conducted with Menachem Begin, for whom he had worked as a media advisor in the late 1970s. Among other things, Begin revealed the role that the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu had played in the threading of the Camp David negotiations between Begin and the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat .

From 1981: University professor and journalist, commitment to Jewish-Arab understanding in Israel

From 1981 to 1986 Pattir was a Research Fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University . From 1986 to 1991 he headed the annual Jeane Kirkpatrick Forum for Leadership and Public Policy at Tel Aviv University .

Dan Pattir (2008) at the opening of the Israeli Cartoon Museum. Pattir is a connoisseur and collector of political cartoons in Israel

Pattir worked in various journalistic associations in Israel.

From 2000 to 2006 he was Vice President of the "Abraham Fund", an Israeli-American organization for understanding between Jews and Arabs in Israel, and served this organization as a consultant until 2008.

Private

Pattir has been married to the Israeli university professor Yael Pattir since 1956. A daughter of Dan and Yael Pattir, Gili, who was born in 1966, studied historian and herself a budding photographer and journalist, became known after her death from cancer in 1996 through a series of photos made at her own express request by the Israeli photographer Vardi Kahana, which her Represents disease history and has been shown at several exhibitions in Israel and abroad.

Web links

• Abraham Fund website
• Youtube: AFP report on Dan Pattir on the 30th anniversary of the Camp David agreement 1979–2009
• Youtube: Conversation between Dan Pattir and the American journalist and Middle East expert John Chancellor (before 1996)

literature

• Deborah Hart Strober, Gerald S. Strober: Israel at Sixty: An Oral History of a Nation Reborn: J. Wiley & Sons, 2008, ISBN 978-0-470-05314-0 (contains detailed interviews with, among others, Dan and Yael Pattir about her personal memories of her life in Israel)

credentials

1. ↑ (chabad.org) 1966: The Israeli President visits the Lubavitcher Rebbe
2. ↑ Romania Leader Mediated Sadat's '77 Peace Trip to Israel, Begin Says (from Reuters, LA Times, November 14, 1987 )
3. ↑ Yael Pattir is not the same name as the Israeli director of the US lobby organization J Street and a Meretz politician.
4. ↑ Deborah Hart Strober, Gerald S. Strober: Israel at Sixty: An Oral History of a Nation Reborn. J. Wiley & Sons, 2008, ISBN 978-0-470-05314-0 .
5. ↑ Vardi Kahana: Beauty has cut itself off: About Gili Pattir. Website ( Memento of the original from December 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ↑ Anna von Münchhausen: The fight against cancer - an end at eye level. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 31 July 2007.
7. ↑ Photo of Dan and Yael Pattir with their daughter Gili ( Memento of the original from December 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Vardi Kahana, 1994)