José S. Vericat
José S. Vericat is a Middle East expert with more than two decades of experience working in conflict zones and active war theaters. He has led negotiations with armed non-state actors and interviewed hundreds of militants, including movement founders, senior political leaders, religious figures, military commanders and foot soldiers.
Before joining the European Institute of Peace, he was the Carter Center’s Israel-Palestine Country Representative and Field Office Director promoting viable peace between Israelis and Palestinians and inter-Palestinian reconciliation. Previously, he was a Middle East advisor at the International Peace Institute (IPI) influencing policy-making at the UN headquarters, an EU official working on security sector reform in Palestine, and a prize-winning journalist covering the Second Intifada and the Iraq war.
His main professional areas and academic interests are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Gaza Strip, political Islam and the religious discourse of Islamist movements. He is a regular contributor to media outlets and specialized publications. Among other contributions in recent years, in September 2020 he published the long essay “A Palestinian Statelet in Gaza” in the peer-reviewed Journal of Palestine Studies. Since 2022, he is a member of Yale University’s Middle East Legal Studies Seminar (MELSS).
He has a PhD in Oriental Studies from Oxford University—where he was the Sheikh Zayed Islamic Studies scholar—and an MA in International Relations from Columbia University.
He speaks fluent Spanish and Arabic, and has full professional working proficiency in Hebrew.