Yehezkel Dror


Yehezkel Dror is a former professor of political science at Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Biography

Arthur Yehezkel Friemann, later renamed Yehezkel Dror, was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1928, and emigrated to Mandate Palestine with his family in 1938. He graduated from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa in 1946.
He was a faculty member of the Hebrew University's Department of Political Science from 1957 until his retirement, and was also head of its Public Administration division from 1964. He is a pioneering author in the fields of management, policy science, public administration, capacities to govern, leadership and security issues.
Dror holds a B.A. and Magister Juris from the Hebrew University, and LLM and SJD qualifications from Harvard University. Outside academia he served as a senior consultant on policy-making and planning for the Israeli government, and founded the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. He engaged in international consultantship, serving inter alia from 1968-70 as a senior staff member at the American Rand Corporation.

Main contributions

Colleague David Levi-Faur considers him to be "one of the most influential scholars in the founding generation of public administration in the world. He is an important voice in connection with promoting planning, prior deployment and prediction in public policy. To a large degree, the world is moving against Dror, which is a pity."
In 1968, Dror joined the RAND Corporation as a senior staff member. The RAND think tank was instrumental in planning America's strategy in the Cold War. While at RAND, Dror developed the concept and introduced the term of "crazy states", arguably his most widely known contribution to strategic thought. In his definition, as laid out in his 1971 book "Crazy States", such a state or organization is characterized by fanaticism, and the fact that they follow their goals while ignoring the common profit-and-loss considerations.
In Israel Dror became known to the general public due his participation in the Winograd Commission, set up to examine what went wrong during the 2006 war against the Hezbollah organization in Lebanon. Dror had previously long recommended the establishment of a strong National Security Council, but in his opinion, he was only given the power to effectively sustain the concept once he became part of the
Winograd Commission, which led to the partial implementation of his idea. In a mid-2020 interview, he advanced the concept of a similar body being created for overseeing domestic policy.

Selected publications