About the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development
We are a very small non-profit with a very large mission: peace and development in the Middle East. Every day we work towards solutions in mutual respect and understanding through dialogue and education.
The Institute for Middle East Peace and Development was established by Dr. Stephen P. Cohen in 1979 at CUNY, and is now an independent organization. We are grateful for the help we received from Cyrus Vance, Moshe Dayan, and Boutros Boutros Ghali in the days of our founding. IMEPD was designed to serve as a venue for confidential, Track II Arab-Israeli dialogue. We pioneered bringing together social scientists from Middle East universities for collaborative research, culminating in the Images in Conflict Project. We convened the first secret official negotiations between Israel and the PLO, supervised by Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres.
Today we organize confidential discussions with Syrian leadership.
We inaugurated a new institutional focus by convening an interfaith meeting of high-level Arab-Muslim religious leaders with their counterparts from the US.
We consistently advocate Jerusalem as a dignified city, and have been undaunted by political pressure in advancing our vision of the city of peace.
The related issues of economy and water have become central as American leadership advocates a strong Palestinian economy; we, too, focus our energies on this important effort.
We at the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development are dedicated to the work we do in the Middle East and in the United States. Find out more about who we are.
