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Saadia Touval
Saadia Touval (1932-2008) was a political scientist and one of the leading theorists of international mediation. He is perhaps most famous for arguing that “biased mediators” in international disputes are often more effective than so-called “honest brokers.”

Early Life
Saadia Eli Weltmann was born Jan. 28, 1932, in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, and raised in the British mandate of Palestine. He and his parents Hebraized their surname to Touval after his father, a lawyer, was appointed Israeli ambassador to Budapest after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

As a teenager during the siege over Jerusalem in 1948, he acted as a runner carrying messages between the Jewish paramilitary group known as Haganah and command posts on the borders of Jewish and Arab Jerusalem.

In 1949, he joined his parents on a trip to Europe and the United States. Upon his return to Israel, he joined a group of 60 very young people to establish Kibbutz Nahshon and later served in the IDF.

In 1954, he returned to the United States to study at Harvard University, where he completed his BA (Class of 1957) and, three years later, in received a doctorate in government.

Academic Career
Upon returning to Israel in 1960, Saadia Touval taught briefly at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before moving to the newly-established Tel Aviv University, where he was among the founders of the Political Science Department. He later served as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences.

In 1975, he published a highly influential article, “Biased Intermediaries: Theoretical and Historical Considerations,” in which he argued that a mediator’s bias can be an advantage for parties seeking to resolve a dispute. It was considered a fresh concept which he later expounded on in The Peace Brokers: Mediators in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1979 (1982).

In 1994, Dr. Touval wrote a much-cited article in the journal Foreign Affairs that questioned the United Nations' effectiveness as a post-Cold War mediator and referred to failures in Afghanistan, Angola, Haiti, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia.

"Intractable disputes," he wrote, "should be mediated by states motivated by self-interest to do so and possessed of the resources and credibility for effective negotiation, with the international community lending encouragement and support through the United Nations. Otherwise, the new world disorder will continue apace."

In the 1990s until his passing in 2008, he taught in the conflict management program at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington from 1994 to 2007.

Among his other books are Somali Nationalism (1963), The Boundary Politics of Independent Africa (1972), and Mediation in the Yugoslav Wars (2001).