The author was born in Tayyibah, near Jerusalem. He has BA and MA degrees in political science and Arabic and a PhD degree in political science from the SUNY at Binghamton. Between 1982 and 2002, h...view moreThe author was born in Tayyibah, near Jerusalem. He has BA and MA degrees in political science and Arabic and a PhD degree in political science from the SUNY at Binghamton. Between 1982 and 2002, he served as an editor and later as a chief, Arabic Reporting Section, UN. He also served as an assistant professor at the University of Oran, Algeria, and Temple University, Pennsylvania. A number of his books and articles, dealing with sociopolitical change, have been published in the US and Southwest Asia.view less