Biography of Jonathan Schanzer

View writings by Jonathan Schanzer

Middle East analyst Jonathan Schanzer is the author of Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine, a new book that challenges the notion of Palestinian unity.

Mr. Schanzer is Vice President of Research for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Before joining the FDD, he was deputy executive director of the Jewish Policy Center and the editor of the JPC's journal, inFOCUS Quarterly. Prior to that, he was a counterterrorism analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Prior to that, he was a Research Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he authored the book Al-Qaeda's Armies: Middle East Affiliate Groups and the Next Generation of Terror, Mr. Schanzer got his start in the policy world as a research fellow at the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank headed by scholar Daniel Pipes.

Mr. Schanzer holds a BA from Emory University and a masters degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo in 2001, and is working towards a PhD at Kings College London.

Mr. Schanzer has traveled widely in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories. He speaks Arabic and Hebrew.