The passing of Ambassador Dr. Dore Gold, among Israel’s great scholar-diplomats, is a terrible loss for Israel and the Jewish people. Dore embodied a rare combination of talents. He was a consummate scholar of Israel, the Middle East, and U.S.-Israel relations. He received the finest education, earning his BA, MA, and PhD at Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation under the renowned professor J.C. Hurwitz on Saudi Arabia provided him with a deep academic grounding in the Arab world and the Middle East.
Dore made aliyah in 1980. He added a personal layer of scholarship at Brovender’s yeshiva, developing an expertise in Jewish text and philosophy. Dore’s scholarly career then began at Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center, where he ran the U.S.-Israel Defense Project. There he began to establish his uniqueness as an independent thinker writing against established orthodoxies. At Jaffee, he wrote a minority opinion in a compendium article, opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state in the hills of Judea and Samaria, before Israel’s peace processes in Madrid and Oslo.
As a young advisor to then-Deputy Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Madrid Conference in 1991, Dore brought his policy and national security expertise. Dore was a firm believer in the Jordanian-Israeli relationship, and the possibility of a federal-confederal, security-based approach to the Palestinian issue. Dore’s profound strategic concern about preventing future attacks from the East led him to pioneer a revival of General Yigal Alon’s defensible borders concept, which he advanced following the 1967 war.
Dore’s total commitment to defensible borders – including Israel’s control of the Jordan Rift Valley and the Judean-Samarian hill ridge, punctuated his various roles as foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu, and in his role as ambassador to the UN and director-general of Israel’s foreign ministry. Dore’s advocacy was critical to raising awareness of maintaining the security of Israel’s coastal plain that houses the vast majority of Israel’s population and infrastructure.
Dore prevailed upon Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to include defensible borders in an American letter endorsing Israel’s security needs as provided by President George W. Bush on April 14, 2004, in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. Gold’s insistence on defensible borders then has become even more critical following Hamas’s invasion and Hizbullah’s attacks.
But Dore’s strategic vision was even more expansive. As early as 2007, he warned Israel and the world about the Iranian regime’s deceptive diplomacy toward the West in his bestselling book, The Rise of Nuclear Iran. Dore’s book gave rise to pathbreaking policy work at the JCPA, the first policy institute that coined the phrase “Iranian octopus” in 2007, illustrating Iran’s control of countries across the Middle East, which King Abdullah of Jordan called “the Shiite Crescent.”
Dore’s outstanding bona fides as a young scholar diplomat with an eloquent ability to convey simply and cogently complex strategic concepts succinctly to the international media impressed Prime Minister Netanyahu, who relied on Dore’s broad abilities as a policy strategist and an eloquent diplomat and spokesman both to the Arab world and the West following Netanyahu’s narrow victory over Shimon Peres in 1996.
Dore’s success as foreign policy advisor would bring him to represent Israel at the United Nations in 1997, where he would champion Israel’s rights-based diplomacy. At the UN, Dore led the diplomatic counteroffensive against the PLO’s representative Nassar al-Kidwa, who together with his uncle, Arafat, subverted Israel’s fundamental legal and historical rights, in a continuous campaign that had begun in the early 1970s.
I remember Dore proudly hosting an event at the UN showing Israel’s millennia of archaeological history with artifacts from both the First and Second Temple periods proving the Jewish people’s profound connection to the Land of Israel since antiquity. On a personal level, Dore was a man of integrity who was completely dedicated to protecting Israel and the Jewish people, and saw Jerusalem as the anchor and flashpoint for Jewish sovereignty. His 2007 bestseller The Fight for Jerusalem encapsulated the future battle of the Jewish people in the Middle East. What Dore understood for decades – the centrality of Jerusalem in the Islamist war over Jerusalem and against Jewish sovereignty – Hamas vindicated in its October 7, 2023, massacre which it named “al-Aqsa flood.”
Dore skillfully and eloquently advanced and conveyed to the world through the United Nations General Assembly, Israel’s incontrovertible historical and legal rights, the delegitimization of which today have become mainstream discourse at the UN and its agencies. Dore summarized his j’accuse charge against the UN system in his bestselling 2004 book Tower of Babble, exposing its hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy. Twenty-five years later the UN’s malign behavior concerning Hamas’s October 7 massacre has only vindicated his thesis.
Dore’s visionary approach to Israel’s national security, his scholarship, and diplomatic finesse was only matched by his consummate personal integrity. He displayed the qualities of a true gentleman of an era gone by. He also paved a new pathway for Israelis of American descent to play essential roles in Israel’s national security and foreign policies and its international diplomacy. Those individuals include Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, Canadian-American Foreign Policy Advisor Ophir Falk, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Dr. Michael Oren, and current Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Dr. Yehiel Leiter, all of whom have followed the path that Dore established years earlier. Dore’s enormous contribution to Israel and the Jewish people cannot be overestimated. We at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs are dedicated to continuing his legacy of embracing Arab allies and securing Israel’s borders while battling the disinformation, delegitimization and defamation of Israel in a battle that Dore led with courage and moral clarity. May his memory be a blessing.
