Professor Uzi Rabi, Ph.D (Tel Aviv University, 2000) is the Director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, and a senior researcher at the Center for Iranian Studies, both at Tel Aviv University. Formerly, he was the Head of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. From 2004-2005, he held a visiting professorship at the Lipinski Institute of San Diego State University.

Prof. Rabi is the director of the TAU Workshop, an annual ten-day seminar for international scholars that focuses on the geopolitical situation of Israel and its neighbors, and the co-editor of Bustan: The Middle East Book Review.  His research focuses on the modern history and evolution of states and societies in the Middle East, Iranian-Arab relations, oil and politics in the Middle East, and Sunni-Shi’i dynamics; within this framework he has supervised the dissertations of numerous doctoral candidates in this field over the years.

Publications

Rabi has written a number of books in both English and Hebrew. In 2015, he published “Yemen: Revolution, Civil War, and Unification” (I.B Taurus), which covers the modern history of Yemen. He published a related book in Hebrew, Yemen: the Anatomy of a Failed State (Kibbutz HaMeuchad) in 2014. In 2007, Prof. Rabi published Saudi Arabia: An Oil Kingdom in the Labyrinth of Religion and Politics (The Open University, in Hebrew).  In 2006, he published The Emergence of States in a Tribal Society: Oman Under Sa’id bin Taymur. Rabi has edited a number of volumes, including Iran’s Time (2008), and International Intervention in Local Conflicts: Crisis Management and Conflict Resolution Since the Cold War (2010), and Lost in Translation: Forgotten Paradigms of the Arab Spring, together with Abdelilah Bouasria. Additionally, he has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Middle Eastern Studies, the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and Otre-Terre – Revue Europeene de Geopolitique.

Lectures and Appearances

Professor Rabi is regularly invited to the Knesset and other governmental forums to deliver briefings and lectures on matters of national and regional importance. Additionally, he has presented many academic papers over the years. He has given annual lectures at the Middle East Studies Association conference; in 2015 the subject of his lecture was Israel and Iran following the P5+1 nuclear treaty.  He has frequently given other lectures in both academic and non-academic forums; the latter includes a roundtable discussion at NATO Headquarters in 2008. Professor Rabi frequently provides expert commentary and analysis on a number of international and Israeli news outlets, including Arabic language television channels. During “Operation Protective Edge,” Rabi was a fixture in both Israeli and international media.