| Steven Plaut | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1951 Philadelphia |
| Occupation | Professor, University of Haifa |
| Subjects | Economics, Business |
Steven Plaut (born 1951) is an American-born Israeli associate professor of Business Administration at the University of Haifa and a writer. Plaut is a member of the editorial board of the Middle East Quarterly, a publication of the Middle East Forum think tank.
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Steven Plaut was born in Philadelphia, where his father settled after escaping Nazi Germany. Plaut grew up in a Zionist and Conservative Jewish home. In 1981, the family immigrated to Israel.
Plaut received his undergraduate degree from Temple University in Philadelphia, his MA from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University, specializing in international and urban economics and later in finance and worked at the Federal Reserve Bank. Before his professorship at the Haifa University, he taught at Oberlin College, the Technion, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, Central European University, Tel Aviv University, University of Nantes, and Athens Laboratory for Business Administration.
In his 2002 book The Scout Steven Plaut describes his near-death experience as a kidney cancer patient at an intensive care ward. The historical novel is a series of life stories exchanged between him and another patient in the ward, an Israeli bedouin scout.
Steven Plaut is an outspoken critic of the Israeli-Arab peace process and Israel's unilateral withdrawal policy. Since the Oslo Accords, he has argued that Arab leaders will continue to seek the destruction of Israel through violence and terrorism.[1] He cites the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada and the campaign of suicide bombings as evidence.[2]
Plaut is critical of left wing figures such as Michael Lerner and Norman Finkelstein whom he describes as self-hating Jews and apologists for terrorism who are promoting the destruction of Israel.[3] Plaut is opposed to what he sees as left-wing extremism in Israeli universities, and is actively involved in Isracampus,[1] a website monitoring such activity.[4] In the Canadian Jewish Tribune, he denounced Anarchists Against the Wall, a group protesting the Israeli West Bank barrier which he says is composed of "violent hooligans and anarcho-fascist thugs."[5]
Plaut was sued for libel by Neve Gordon, a faculty member at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Department of Politics and Government, claiming that Plaut slandered him in certain articles and alleged e-mails. In May 2006, the Israeli magistrate's court in Nazareth ruled in favour of Gordon, and ordered Plaut to pay Gordon 80,000 shekels in compensation plus 15,000 shekels in legal fees.[6] Both sides appealed to the District Court in Nazareth and in February 2008, the court upheld a libel judgment relating to a publication in which Plaut called Gordon a "Judenrat Wannabe" but reduced the damages to 10,000 shekels (about $2,700) on the basis that, in the court's view, Plaut was entitled to criticize Gordon.[7][8]