Uri Bar-Joseph

Who is Uri Bar-Joseph?

Uri Bar-Joseph is a professor in The Department for International Relations of The School for Political Science at Haifa University. He specializes in national security, intelligence studies and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He earned his PhD in 1990 from Stanford University, under the supervision of Alexander George. His dissertation, Intelligence intervention in the Politics of Democratic States: The US, Israel, and Britain was published by Penn State Press and won Choice’s Outstanding Academic Books Award for 1996.

Bar-Joseph is best known for his studies of the intelligence failure of the Yom Kippur War. His book, The Watchman Fell Asleep, is the first detailed academic study of the subject and is considered the most important study in this field. It won the Israeli Political Science Association Best Book Award in 2002. The Israeli made docudrama, "The Silence of the Sirens", which is based on this book won the Israeli Academy award for the best television feature film in 2004 .

In 2010, Bar-Joseph published The Angel, which recounts the story of Ashraf Marwan, who was President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s son in law, and an Israeli spy. Marwan’s early warning, on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, that war will break the following day, convinced Israeli leaders to order the mobilization of the reserve army and this early mobilization prevented the complete occupation of the Golan Heights on the second day of the war. In 2011, a second edition of the book, including new findings, was published. In this edition, Bar-Joseph revealed for the first time that Marwan continued working for the Israeli intelligence services till 1998. He also disclosed the name of the person who had leaked the true identity of “The Angel” to the foreign press: former Chief of Military Intelligence Eli Zeira, who had served in this capacity during the Yom Kippur War. The document written by Bar-Joseph about this leak served as the basis for the official charges pressed by senior Israeli intelligence officers against Zeira, charging him with leaking the identity of the most important spy in Israel’s history whose warning had effectively saved the country in 1973.