Martin Indyk, blunt diplomat who longed for Arab-Israeli peace, dies at 73

Martin Indyk, the Jewish academic who brought intellectualism to pro-Israel advocacy and endured heartbreak as a US diplomat committed to bringing peace to his beloved Israel, has died.

Indyk, 73, died Thursday, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the think tank he co-founded, said in a statement. His wife, Gahl Hodges Burt, said the cause was esophageal cancer, The Washington Post reported. He died at home in New Fairfield, Connecticut.

Indyk, who grew up in Australia, twice served as US ambassador to Israel and was assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, all during the Clinton Administration. He later served as a peace negotiator. 

He was tireless, and never shied from a confrontation. He never lost his Australian accent even as he rose to the heights of US diplomacy, nor his sarcastic wit. 

“Ambassador Indyk calls it as he sees it,” an Obama administration official told the Forward in 2014, the last time Indyk had an official US role, as a special envoy supervising the 2013-2014 Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. “It’s the Australian in him, perhaps. He’s more frank than most diplomats, but he is speaking out because he cares about Israel’s future.”

Until the end

As recently as last month, Indyk deployed typically biting rhetoric to excoriate one of his nemeses, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but in terms that made clear that what most upset Indyk most was the danger he believed Netanyahu posed to Israel.

“Israel is at war on four fronts: with Hamas in Gaza; with Houthis in Yemen; with Hezbollah in Lebanon; and with Iran overseeing the operations,” Indyk said on June 19 on X, a day after Netyanyahu claimed — and the Biden administration denied — that President Joe Biden was withholding weapons from Israel.  

“What does Netanyahu do?” Indyk continued. “Attack the United States based on a lie that he made up! The Speaker and Leader should withdraw his invitation to address Congress until he recants and apologizes.” (Netanyahu did not recant, was not disinvited and delivered the speech on Wednesday.)

Indyk was an unusual diplomat in that he rarely held back, in public or private interactions. He may be the only US diplomat to have the distinction of enduring public anti-Jewish slurs from both Israeli and Arab officials. 

Once, while serving as US ambassador to Israel in 1997, Indyk seemed close to coming to blows with a hardline right-wing Israeli politician, Rehavam Ze’evi, who called him a “yehudon,” the Hebrew equivalent of an antisemitic slur. Ze’evi was angry at Indyk for pushing Israel to make concessions in negotiations with the Palestinians.

“The last time someone called me a Jew-boy I was 15 years old and he got a punch in the face,” Indyk, then the US ambassador to Israel, told Ze’evi at a public event.

Ze’evi and Israel’s government later apologized for the slur. 

A year after that, Indyk was promoted to assistant secretary of state, in part because he wanted out of the ambassador’s job because he found it so hard to get along with Netanyahu, then in his first term. 

Indyk nonetheless kept a hand in trying to bring about Israeli-Palestinian peace, but was also in charge of a vexing challenge for the Clinton administration — how to contain both Iraq and Iran, two countries that were deeply antagonistic to the United States but also deadly enemies to one another.

Once again, he came under antisemitic attack. In a letter to the U.N. Security Council, just 15 months after the Ze’evi incident, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf wrote, “The statements of the United States Assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk, who is a known Jew and Zionist, are simply an official and documented reaffirmation of the enmity of the United States administration toward Iraq.”

Bill Richardson, then the US ambassador to the United Nations, demanded an apology, which he did not receive.

Indyk was born in London and raised in Australia. He traced his ambitions to become a peacemaker to 1973, when he was studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, during the Yom Kippur War. 

“It taught me just how fragile Israel’s existence was and how central the United States is to war and peace in the Middle East,” Indyk said in 1995 of his experience in Israel during Senate confirmation hearings for his first diplomatic role, as US ambassador to Israel.

He volunteered on a kibbutz in 1973, and considered settling in Israel. Instead, he returned to Australia and launched a career in government as a Middle East analyst. 

Indyk came to the United States in 1982 on a sabbatical and soon found work with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby, where he was mentored by Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s hard-charging director of foreign policy who saw in Indyk a version of himself — impatient with niceties and eager to find out what exactly was at the essence of the vague bromides US diplomats dispensed.

Indyk and Rosen noticed that conservative think tanks, a relatively recent phenomenon,  were putting out policy papers that were soon becoming Reagan administration policy. It was a revelation. A think tank could come up with detail-rich policies, and find officials eager to claim the plans as their own.

So in 1985 Indyk launched the Washington Institute in partnership with Barb Weinberg, a top AIPAC donor. The think tank remains influential, with direct lines into the governments of the United States, Israel and multiple Arab nations.

“From the outset, Indyk emphasized bipartisan approaches to regional problems and outreach that transcended traditional zero-sum thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict, packaged in highly accessible formats that brought the analytical product of Institute experts directly to readers across the government,” the Washington Institute said in its memorial for Indyk.

AIPAC also mourned Indyk, even though in recent years if he attended an AIPAC event, there were tensions over his tendency to criticize Israel’s right-wing governments and their pro-settlement policies.

“Martin’s leadership helped make the Institute one of Washington’s premier foreign policy research organizations,” AIPAC said.

In presidential election years, AIPAC reaches out to candidates for brief meetings to assess their Israel policy, and to offer advice. Rosen scheduled a meeting in the 1992 presidential cycle with Bill and Hillary Clinton and had a hunch: Indyk and the Clintons, all three infatuated with the deep intricacies of policy, would get along.

Indyk, directing the Washington Institute, was no longer with AIPAC, but Rosen asked him to come to the meeting. At the meeting with the Clintons, the usually loquacious Rosen sat back and watched history unfold as the three clicked with each other. A scheduled 20-minute meeting stretched for hours. 

The Clintons were not afraid to display their ignorance, asking blunt questions. Indyk intuited they would also not be afraid to hear and absorb long, complex answers which would prompt more questions.

“I like it when you’re around, Martin,” Clinton once joked, “because you and I both have funny accents.”

Once elected president, Clinton brought Indyk on to the National Security Council as a Middle East specialist. Indyk played a central role in bringing about the Oslo accords, and the September 1993 handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat.

Within two years, Indyk, who became a US citizen, made history when Clinton named him the first Jewish US ambassador to Israel.

Indk left government with Clinton in 2001 and watched his dreams of a two-state outcome crumble under the pressures of the Second Intifada, and increased Palestinian-Israeli mistrust.

“He battled cancer the way he lived his life, with purpose and an unrelenting spirit,” tweeted Dennis Ross, who served as a peace negotiator alongside Indyk. “Martin lived a life of meaning; he pursued peace-making between Israel and its neighbors with passion, skill and decency.”

After leaving government, he transitioned into permanent think tank mode, housed for years at the Brookings Institution and then at the Council on Foreign Relations. He briefly returned to government under President Barack Obama to supervise the 2013-2014 peace talks, the last serious round of negotiations, which were also unsuccessful.

He claimed not to have patience for Jewish and Israeli agonizing over whether American leaders liked them, lashing out in 2011 at Bush administration alumnus Elliott Abrams, who fretted on a panel they were both on that Obama had “no great love in his heart for Israel.” 

“It’s time to grow up,” Indyk said. “We should get over the question of whether he loves me or he loves me not, and focus on [the] question of finding a solution to conflict with the Palestinians. When Israel decides by itself to solve that problem, it will have the overwhelmingly cuddly support of the US President.”

And yet, Indyk was no stranger to sentiment. Taking on his last government role in 2013, he said he still held dear the notion that one day, he could help forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace.

“Fifteen years ago my son, Jacob, who was 13 at the time, designed a screensaver for my computer,” he said, addressing then-Secretary of State John Kerry, who selected Indyk for the job. “It consisted of a simple question that flashed across the screen constantly: Dad, is there peace in the Middle East yet?”

He is survived by his wife, Gahl Hodges Burt, two children from his first marriage, Jacob and Sarah, and five grandchildren.