Saadia touval biography of michael

(Saadia E. Touval, Saadia Eli Touval, Saadia Eli Weltmann)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born January 28, 1932, in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia); died of gastric cancer, April 17, 2008, in Rockville, MD.

Political scientist, educator, and author. Touval held the view that the most effective mediators of international conflicts are not the objective negotiators, as is often thought, but the biased participants whose self-interest fortifies their persistence in the pursuit of an acceptable conclusion.

Touval moved from his native Yugoslavia to what was then British Palestine as the teenage son of a diplomat. He remained in the newly formed State of Israel for several years, teaching at Tel Aviv University from 1967 through the 1980s.

There he had an opportunity to observe international mediation at work, particularly the failures of the ongoing Arab-Israeli negotiations. He compared theory to practice, not just in the Middle East, but al