Prof. Shlomo Ben-Ami was educated at Tel Aviv University where he did his B.A and M.A in History and Hebrew Literature, and Oxford University where he received his D.Phil.

In 1987, he was appointed to be Israel’s first Ambassador in Spain, where he served for four years. He was a member of Israel’s delegation to the Madrid Peace Conference. In 1993, he headed the Israeli delegation at the Multilateral Talks on Refugees in the Middle East held in Ottawa, Canada.

After Labor’s landslide victory, in 1999 Professor Ben-Ami was appointed as Minister of Public Security and then became Foreign Minister. As such he conducted the secret negotiations with Abu Ala in Stockholm [The Swedish Channel]. He participated with Prime Minister Barak in the Camp David Summit, after which he led the Israeli team in all the different phases of the negotiations with the Palestinians, including Taba.

His thorough account of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during the last two years of President Clinton in office (the inside story of Camp David and Taba) was published in Hebrew: A Front Without a Homefront: A Voyage to the Boundaries of the Peace Process (Yedioth Ahatonoth, Tel-Aviv, 2004). His comprehensive overview of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the quest for peace- Scars of War, Wounds of Peace. The Arab-Israeli Tragedy- was published Weidenfeld and Nicolson (London, 2005) and Oxford University Press,New York, 2006).

Prof. Ben-Ami serves now as the vice-president of the Toledo International Center for Peace.