Mr Henry Siegman is a former National Director of the American Jewish Congress, serving as its executive director for 16 years.
15 Facts About Henry Siegman
1.
2.
Henry Siegman is a former non-resident visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and a former Senior Fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations.
3.
Henry Siegman, a Jewish American, was born in 1930 in Frankfurt, Germany.
4.
Henry Siegman served as a United States Army chaplain in the Korean War, where he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and the Purple Heart.
5.
Henry Siegman is a former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
6.
Henry Siegman is a critic of Israeli policies in the West Bank.
7.
Henry Siegman refers to Israel as a "de-facto apartheid" state and has said in 2012 and 2014 that, without substantial objective change, the "two-state solution is dead".
8.
Henry Siegman says that Yasser Arafat made a "disastrous mistake" in rejecting the peace offer, but that "based on my 14 years of dealings with Arafat, I reject the notion that he was bent on Israel's destruction".
9.
Henry Siegman is critical of Ariel Sharon, about whom he wrote: "The war Sharon is waging is not aimed at the defeat of Palestinian terrorism but at the defeat of the Palestinian people and their aspirations for national self-determination".
10.
Henry Siegman strongly defended former president Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
11.
Henry Siegman has criticized the peace efforts by Ehud Olmert and George W Bush.
12.
Henry Siegman has described the process as a "scam" because of a "consensus reached long ago by Israel's decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state".
13.
Nathan Guttman, writing in The Forward said that Henry Siegman helped to publicize the "Saudi plan", after it was revealed publicly for the first time in The New York Times.
14.
Journalist David Rieff said, in 2004, that Henry Siegman is "perhaps the most perceptive American observer-participant in the last two decades of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations".
15.
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said that Henry Siegman was known as holding left-of-center views that fit with the American Jewish Congress's liberal approach, and that "when he left the organization, it became clearer he was no longer a critic of Israel, that his criticism borders being anti-Israel".