Arik Segal
Israeli Coordinator
Arik Segal is a mediator who specializes in the application of advanced technologies in innovative dialogue structures.
Born in Canada and raised in Israel, he holds an HBA in International Relations from the University of Toronto and a Masters' degree from Tel Aviv University in Diplomacy Studies, as well as a Mediator's certificate from Gevim Group.
Arik is a lecturer at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya . He delivers many workshops and training sessions in organizations and to foreign delegations
Arik is a frequent guest speaker on Israeli and international stages such as Harvard Business School. He regularly publishes op-eds on various platforms and is a US State Dept. international exchange alumni and a graduate of the International academy for leadership in Gummersbach, Germany.
Gülçin Sinav
Turkish Coordinator
born in 1986 in Aydın, she studied International Relations and EU in Izmir University of Economics. She holds a Master Degree in Advanced European and International Studies from Istanbul Bilgi University and European Institute. Formerly, she worked in Spanish Embassy, a liberal think tank ARI Movement and Istanbul Aydin University for different projects. Since March 2013, she has been working in Friedrich Naumann Foundation Istanbul Office. She is the project coordinator responsible from the projects on international/bilateral relations specializing on security; migration, integration and refugee crises; and liberal movements in Turkey.
Dr. Nimrod Goren
Nimrod Goren is the Founder and Head of Mitvim - The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies and a Teaching Fellow in Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Psychology from the Hebrew University, and his dissertation topic was "The role of external incentives in promoting peace: the cases of Israel and Turkey". After completing his doctorate, Dr. Goren was selected to take part in Public Policy training at Syracuse University as the Israeli participant in the U.S. State Department's Fulbright Hubert Humphrey Fellowship Program. Dr. Goren was the former Executive Director of the Young Israeli Forum for Cooperation (YIFC), and in this capacity he was awarded the 2009 Victor J. Goldberg IIE Prize for Peace in the Middle East. In addition, Dr. Goren served as a consultant in a Northern Ireland conflict resolution process, and has worked at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, The Nehemia Levtzion Center for Islamic Studies, and at The Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace.
Dr. Burcu Gültekin Punsmann
Dr. Punsmann holds a PhD from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, France. Her research specialization is in regionalism, border studies, peacebuilding and humanitarian aid. Dr. Gültekin Punsmann is currently working as Research Director in “Young Peacebuilders” in Germany. YP develops partnerships, research, projects, and tools that nurture peacebuilding passion and skill in children and youth with a focus on contexts impacted by armed conflict. Burcu Gültekin Punsmann has conducted consultancy assignments for NATO, the European Parliament, the UN and the Asian Development Bank. Between 2003 and 2009 she collaborated with the London-based international NGO International Alert, looking at the economic dimensions of peacebuilding in the South Caucasus as well.
Dr. Gallia Lindenstrauss
Gallia Lindenstrauss is a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies and a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center. She specializes in Turkish foreign policy. Her additional research interests are ethnic conflicts, Azerbaijan’s foreign policy, the Cyprus issue, and the Kurds. She has written extensively on these topics and her commentaries and op-eds have appeared in all of the Israeli major media outlets, as well as in international outlets such as National Interest, Hurriyet Daily News, Turkey Analyst and Insight Turkey. She is currently writing a book on Turkish-Israeli relations from the Flotilla incident to the Normalization agreement. Dr. Lindenstrauss completed her Ph.D. in the Department of International Relations at Hebrew University. She formerly lectured at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University.
Denis Ojalvo Oner
Denis did his undergraduate and Graduate Studies in Sociology and Political Science, at Haifa University, ISRAEL. He Graduated in Business Administration at Istanbul University and in International Relations at Galatasaray University TURKEY, while his M.A. Thesis subject was: Turkish-Jewish Lobbying.
Denis was formerly a major stakeholder and CEO of sourcing & supervising services company for European department stores and currently retired. Denis is the author of book published in Israel in 2009 on the Turkish Sufi poet Yunus Emre, and has translated the poems into Hebrew. Foreword by H.E. Ambassador Namık Tan, then on duty in Israel.
Denis is a columnist in the Turkish-Jewish weekly newspaper ŞALOM and active in communal and international NGO's. He is a member of the European Jewish Parliament and Coordinator of its Intercultural Dialogue Committee.
Anat Kaufman
Anat is a projects director at the Economic Cooperation Foundation (ECF); an Israeli policy planning think-tank dedicated to achieving a peaceful and sustainable Israeli-Palestinian two-state solution. Her areas of responsibility include cooperation in trade and economic ventures, related policy-planning issues in the West Bank and other cross-border issues.
She holds a B.A. in Politics (Cum Laude) from The University of London, and MSc in NGOs & Development from the London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE), and is an alumnus of the Bucerius Summer School on Global Governance.
Anat previously worked as a researcher at the World Health Organization's (WHO) Israeli-Palestinian collaborative research program at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and while in London, she worked for the Africa and Latin America department at the UK's leading international organization on poverty alleviation in the developing world (VSO International).
Ünal Çeviköz
Ünal Çeviköz was born in İstanbul in 1952. He has BA degrees in English Literature and Political Science from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and an MA degree in International Relations from Brussels University. Çeviköz joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1978 and served in various posts in the Ministry as well as abroad. In 1989, hewas detached from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs starting a job at NATO’s International Secretariat. In 1994, he was commissioned withlaunching the NATO Information Office in Moscow. Following this, he prepared the NATO-Russia Founding Act and in 1997 he returned to his duty at Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ankara, Turkey. He served asTurkey’s Ambassador from 2001 to 2004 in Azerbaijan and from 2004 to 2006 in Iraq. From 2007 to 2010, he was back in Ankara as Deputy Undersecretary for bilateral Political Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2009, he prepared the protocols signed between Turkey and Armenia. In 2010, he was appointed as Ambassador to London. After completing his duty in the summer of 2014 he retired from the government service. He has been elected as the President of the 28thGeneral Assembly of International Maritime Organization and held this position between 2013 and 2015.
Senem B. Çevik
Senem B. Çevik, Ph.D, is a lecturer in International Studies at University of California, Irvine and University of California, Los Angeles. She teaches courses in diplomacy, communication and experiential learning at both campuses. Prior to joining UCI, she was an assistant professor at Ankara University, Turkey and lecturer at Atılım University, Turkey. Since 2007 she has served as a fellow with the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI), a non-profit that studies societal conflict and psychologically informed dialogue. Çevik was a Leadership Institute fellow at the Center for Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) at Bennington College in 2015. During her 2015-2017 Tobis fellowship at UC Irvine’s Center for Ethics and Morality she completed her research project on Turkish-Armenian musical diplomacy. Çevik is a member of American Jewish Committee (AJC) Abraham Society. She is also a faculty member of the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) a campus based citizen diplomacy initiative. She has attended several NATO training programs on media, terrorism and strategic communication. In 2010 she attended the Stanford University Summer Institute in Political Psychology and received training in public diplomacy from University of Southern California in 2013. Her research focuses on public diplomacy, peace-building, strategic communication and conflict management with an emphasis on Turkey and the Middle East. Dr. Çevik has a co-edited book (with Philip Seib) titled Turkey’s Public Diplomacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and co-authored (with Burcu Gültekin Punsmann) Pathways to a Common Future: Youth Perspectives on Turkey-Israel.
Dr. Tsameret Levy
Dr. Tsameret Levy-Daphny holds a PhD from the School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University, where she wrote her dissertation on Ottoman elites of Diyarbakir Province (southeastern Turkey) in the 18th century. While studying, she lived in Istanbul for varying periods. She won a scholarship from KOC University in Istanbul, where she spent the 2008–2009 academic year as a research fellow at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (RCAC).
Since 2016 she has been the director of the Turkey Forum at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, which aims to deepen our understanding of Turkey—one of the important players in the Middle East. Through the forum she has sought to develop an important environment for interdisciplinary (historical, sociological, and cultural) study of Turkey and to expose the Israeli public to new Turkish cinema as a tool for observing Turkish society and culture. Turkish Film Week, which has been held in Cinematheques in Israel since 2018, is the fruit of this initiative.
Dr. Salih Bıçakçı
Dr. Salih Bicakci is an associate Professor in Kadir Has University
Dr. Salih Bıçakçı holds a Ph.D. of Tel Aviv University presenting his dissertation on Cultural Dimensions of Uzbek Modernization (1865-1924). Mr. Bıçakçı has a Master’s degree from Turkic and Turkish Studies Institute at the Marmara University. Since 2012, he is Assoc. Prof. İn Kadir Has University. Dr. Bicakci is the Director of Middle East and Africa Research Center since 2014. His main fields of interests are Cyber Security, Security in the Middle East, Turkish Foreign Policy and Critical Theory.
Dr. Umut Uzer
Umut Uzer is an Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Istanbul Technical University. He works on the impact of nationalism, identity and state-building in the Middle East and the Caucasus. He has published on Turkish foreign policy, Turkish nationalism, Israeli-Turkish relations and Arab perceptions of the Cold War He is the author of two books: An Intellectual History of Turkish nationalism (2016) and Identity and Turkish foreign policy (2011)
Uzer has taught at Smith College, University of Maryland University College, FIT (SUNY), University of Utah, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul Commerce University and Eastern Mediterranean University. He was affiliated with the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), a major think tank in Brussels and was a visiting professor at University of Antwerp. He is a monthly contributor to the newspaper Şalom and has been a member of the Turkish delegation to IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) between 2012-2016. He was the keynote speaker at the International Holocaust Day commemorations at Kadir Has University in 2014 and at Bilkent University in 2015.
