Farewell letter from Prof. Efraim Karsh, Director of the BESA Center

Dear Friends and Readers,

On my last day as Director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you most warmly for your vote of confidence in the Center over the past five years.

During this period, BESA doubled the number of research associates and exponentially expanded its worldwide reach and impact by increasing its output from some 20 publications a year over the preceding decades to nearly 400 per annum—a twenty-fold leap. As a result, BESA has become the globally most widely read Israeli think tank in the fields of strategic and foreign affairs, Middle Eastern studies, and political science, with some 300,000 page views per month (compared to just 15,000 in the preceding decade), crossing the half-a-million threshold a few months ago. Given that BESA’s publications are widely recirculated, reposted, cited, commented upon, and translated into other languages, they likely reach millions of readers every month.

Needless to say, this spectacular progress would not have been possible without your keen interest in the Center and its activities, for which we are all most grateful.

Best regards,

Prof. Efraim Karsh

Director

Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies

efraim.karsh@kcl.ac.uk