Short answer: Yes, during his lifetime. Fouad Ajami, the Lebanese-born American scholar of the Middle East, died in 2014, so he is not a living voice on Israel today. But across three decades of visits, scholarship, and journalism, he built a well-documented reputation as one of the more Israel-sympathetic Arab-American intellectuals of his generation, praising Israel's democratic durability and repeatedly turning his sharpest criticism inward, at Arab political culture, rather than outward at Israel. He was not Jewish and had no personal or ancestral tie to Israel; his stance came from political and scholarly conviction. As of August 2026.
What Fouad Ajami has actually said and done
- 1978: Ajami appeared in a filmed debate with a young Benjamin Netanyahu. By his own later account and that of colleagues, he was, in his own words, "very much the angry Arab" at the time, reflecting an early sympathy with Palestinian causes before his views shifted. This is documented by Middle East historian Martin Kramer and corroborated by the Middle East Forum's Campus Watch.
- 1980: Ajami made his first visit to Israel, entering cautiously by land from Jordan rather than flying in directly. He later said he was not yet bold enough to arrive openly, according to Martin Kramer's account.
- 1981: In his book "The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967," Ajami criticized Arab political culture for channeling self-criticism into blaming Israel and the United States instead of confronting its own failures. Reviewing the book in Commentary Magazine, Martin Kramer noted this as a break from the common Arab fixation on what Ajami himself termed "the perfidy of Israel," a point also discussed by Campus Watch.
- May 2008: Marking Israel's 60th anniversary, Ajami wrote favorably of Israel's achievement in building "a durable state" that balanced secularism with faith and sustained a "deep and abiding democratic ethos," contrasting it with the Arab world's failure to draw similar lessons, per Middle East Forum's Campus Watch.
- 2011: When the Palestinian Authority moved for a unilateral statehood vote at the UN General Assembly, Ajami wrote that Palestinian Arabs had similarly "misread" the 1947 UN partition vote decades earlier, a framing critical of Palestinian strategic choices rather than of Israel, as reported by Middle East Forum's Campus Watch.
- September 20, 2012: Ajami published the Wall Street Journal op-ed "Muslim Rage and the Obama Retreat," part of his long-running WSJ column that was frequently critical of anti-Western currents in the Arab and Muslim world.
- June 22, 2014: Ajami died of cancer at his home in Maine, at age 68. Obituaries noted he had been a Hoover Institution senior fellow and, from 1980 to 2011, director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, according to the Washington Post and NPR.
- June 2014 (post-death assessment): In a Haaretz opinion piece following his death, columnist Seth Lipsky described Ajami as "a courageous scholar who was friendly to Israel," a summary of the view widely held among pro-Israel commentators, as published in Haaretz.
Who Fouad Ajami was
Fouad Ajami (1945-2014) was a Lebanese-born, Shia Muslim American academic and public intellectual. He grew up in a village in south Lebanon within sight of the Israeli border, which he later said sparked an early fascination with the Jewish state. He spent decades as director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS (1980-2011) and later became a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.
His early public posture, visible in that 1978 filmed debate with a young Netanyahu, was that of a conventional pro-Palestinian Arab intellectual. Through both scholarship and repeated personal visits to Israel beginning in 1980, his views shifted. He became known, distinctively among Arab-American scholars of his generation, for treating Israel's democratic durability with respect and for directing sharp criticism inward at Arab political culture rather than outward at Israel. This drew criticism from some Arab and academic quarters, where he was accused of an anti-Arab tilt, and a few critics went so far as to label him sympathetic to Israel in the extreme.
There is no evidence in the public record of Ajami donating to Israeli causes, appearing at pro-Israel fundraising or advocacy events, or having any Jewish-identity connection. He was not Jewish; his family background was Lebanese Shia Muslim. His relationship to Israel was that of a scholar and columnist, regularly published in the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News, and Foreign Affairs, and appearing on CBS as a Middle East analyst, whose writing over decades trended toward viewing Israel's state-building as a model the Arab world failed to learn from, and toward faulting Palestinian and Arab leadership, rather than Israel, for the region's unresolved conflicts.
The bottom line
Fouad Ajami is not a living public figure to weigh in on Israel today; he died in June 2014. During his lifetime, however, he built a well-documented reputation, across decades of visits, scholarship, and journalism, as one of the more Israel-sympathetic Arab-American intellectuals of his era. He praised Israel's democratic resilience and repeatedly directed his sharpest criticism at Arab political failures rather than at Israel. He was not Jewish and had no personal or ancestral tie to Israel; his stance was a matter of political and scholarly conviction, not identity.
Carry that same pride, every day
Ajami's writing on Israel's "deep and abiding democratic ethos" is the kind of clear-eyed appreciation worth wearing, not just reading. If his story resonates, our I Stand With Israel collection lets you carry that same conviction into daily life.
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
