Staff

Ksenia Svetlova served as a Knesset member from 2015 to 2019. She is a director of the Israel-Middle East program at the Mitvim Institute for Regional Foreign Policy and a Fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at Reichmann University. Svetlova is an expert on Middle Eastern and Russian affairs. She has written for newspapers and media outlets, including the Jerusalem Post, the Jerusalem Report, Haaretz and the BBC Russian Service. Her book “On high heels through the Middle East” (Pardes) was published in 2021.

Before founding ROPES in 2017, Ben reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for The New Republic and other leading publications. He wrote the magazine’s 2013 cover story on the two-state solution —called “mind-altering” by former Secretary of State John Kerry — and co-authored its 2014 article on the Kerry peace talks, which won the National Press Club’s diplomatic-reporting award and a National Magazine Award nomination. Ben has been a guest Israel expert on BBC, CNN, and MSNBC.

Ibrahim Abu Ahmad is an Arab-Palestinian-Israeli who was born and raised in Nazareth and today lives in Herzilya in Central Israel. He works as a geopolitical speaker and writer, focusing on topics such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the challenges facing the Arab minority in Israel, the war in Syria, the instability in Lebanon, and Iranian intervention in the region. In addition to serving as Director of Alumni Relations, Ibrahim leads the ROPES tourism delegations to promote geopolitical tourism for groups from the Middle East, focused on the conflict’s complex political realities.

Daphna Goldschmidt-Cohen is a Public Diplomacy Leader and was the first-ever female Chairperson of a professional football club in Israel, Hapoel Jerusalem FC, which under her leadership launched the first professional women’s team within an Israeli football club. She has built pioneering resource development and corporate gifting initiatives for peace-building through sport using powerful alliances with USAID, Facebook, Google and more. She was commissioned by the US State Dept., ESPN and the Univ. of Tennessee to develop and teach an eLearning module for female leaders on “Grant Writing from a Public Diplomacy Perspective” in 2020.