NORWICH, Connecticut — Veteran diplomat Martin S. Indyk, an author and leader at prominent U.S. think tanks who spent years working to find a path to peace in the Middle East, died Thursday. He was 73.
His wife, Gahl Hodges Burt, confirmed in a telephone conversation that he died of complications from esophageal cancer at the couple’s home in New Fairfield, Connecticut.
The Council on Foreign Relations, where Indyk has been a leading member of U.S. and Middle East diplomacy since 2018, called him a “rare, trusted voice in an otherwise polarized debate over U.S. policy toward the Middle East.”
Indyk, originally from Australia, served as U.S. ambassador to Israel from 1995 to 1997 and from 2000 to 2001. From 2013 to 2014, he was special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during the administration of former President Barack Obama.
When he resigned in 2014 to join the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, symbolizing the latest failed U.S. attempt to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. He remained Obama’s special adviser for Middle East peace issues.
“Ambassador Indyk has invested decades of his extraordinary career in the mission of helping Israelis and Palestinians achieve lasting peace. It is the reason for Martin’s career, and I am grateful for the wisdom and insight he has brought to our collective efforts,” then-Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement at the time.
In a May 22 social media post on X, amid the ongoing war in Gaza, Indyk urged Israelis to “wake up” and warned them that their government is “leading you to greater isolation and destruction” after a proposed peace deal was rejected. Indyk also called on the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in June about X, accusing him of “playing the martyr in a crisis of his own making” after Netanyahu accused the US of withholding weapons Israel needed.
“Israel is at war on four fronts: with Hamas in Gaza; with the Houthis in Yemen; with Hezbollah in Lebanon; and with Iran overseeing the operations,” Indyk wrote on June 19. “What is Netanyahu doing? Attacking the United States based on a lie of his own making! The Speaker and Leader should rescind his invitation to address Congress until he apologizes.”
Indyk also served as special assistant to former President Bill Clinton and senior director for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council from 1993 to 1995. From 1997 to 2000, he was assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.
In addition to his work at Brookings and the Council on Foreign Relations, Indyk worked at the Center for Middle East Policy and was the founding executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Indyk’s successor at the Washington Institute called him “a true American success story.”
“He was born in Australia and came to Washington to have an impact on the shaping of U.S. Middle East policy, and he certainly did that — as a groundbreaking scholar, an astute analyst and a remarkably effective policy entrepreneur,” said Robert Satloff. “He was a visionary who not only founded an organization on the idea that sound public policy is rooted in sound research, he embodied it.”
Indyk has written or co-authored several books, including “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East” and “Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy,” which was published in 2021.