« Previous Story | Next Story »

August 21, 2005

Joshua Gleis, PhD Candidate and Rabble Rouser

Joshua Gleis is known to many as one of the strongest pro-Israel voices at Fletcher. He has taken on that role in roundtable discussions at Fletcher’s Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies and on social list-serve debates because he feels that there needs to be a balanced voice. A dual Israeli and U.S. citizen, issues relating to the Middle East are close to his heart, but he certainly does not see them in a vacuum. He speaks up, even when his opinions are unpopular or in the minority; as a result, he has inspired positive action in his community and forced others to think about their own views more deeply, and articulate them more clearly.

For his MALD degree at Fletcher, Gleis focused on International Security Studies, and International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution. His 2005 MALD thesis looked at “how Israeli counter-terrorism can be incorporated by the United States.” Now as a PhD candidate, Gleis intends to elaborate upon his thesis and conduct a comparative case study of counter-terrorism in the UK and Israel, exploring how other democratic states can use the lessons learned to combat terrorism on their own soil. Before coming to Fletcher, Gleis did a variety of things. After working as a campaign manager for a candidate for the New York State Assembly in 2001, he acted as a part-time spokesperson for the Israeli consulate. He then dabbled in direct marketing and even started his own company importing Christian religious articles from Israel. For the six months before his first semester at Fletcher, Gleis was the Assistant Director of the New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania division of Young Judea, a Jewish youth movement.

A volunteer firefighter during his undergraduate days at Cornell University, Gleis was profoundly affected by the events of September 11. Responding to a radio report calling all with firefighting experience to join in the rescue effort, Gleis spent the infamous day at a Manhattan station, the voices of firefighters’ frantic families fresh in his mind.

“I saw the second plane hit, the huge explosion, and I knew it was terrorism.” He had had friends killed by suicide bombers in Israel and felt personally drawn to the issue of terrorism. A few days later, a college friend reminded him of a speech he had made at Cornell as a Near-Eastern Studies major in 1999 about the need to assassinate Osama bin Laden. After the Nairobi Embassy bombing, few Americans had even heard of bin Laden at the time, and many found the speech extreme. “This helped solidify that I wanted to go back to school,” Gleis recalled. Colleagues and friends advised him to get more work experience, but he felt it was the right time for him to pursue an advanced in international security.

In addition to working as Editor in Chief of the Fletcher Ledger—the school’s online publication, participating in the Mediterranean Club, and educating Tufts undergrads about Israel through a Hillel fellowship, in 2005 Gleis also remained socially active, spearheading a massive, school-wide letter-writing campaign to draw attention to the genocide in Sudan. Frustrated by the lack of action and dialogue about the atrocities in Darfur, he decided there simply wasn’t enough being done. “I sent some emails and some people got involved,” he recaps humbly. In reality, Gleis mobilized the entire school, enlisting graduates, undergraduates, professors, and staff to help with the effort.

“So much of the world's attention is focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict and conflicts in Europe and so little attention is paid to issues related to Africa.” A descendant of Holocaust survivors, Gleis says he was “frustrated to think that if I were alive during the 1940s--when the Holocaust was taking place—and all that was being done in academic circles in Boston (arguably the heart of academia for America) were speeches and lectures, etc., and no actual action, I would be fuming. In truth, little was being done.”

So while the region of Darfur did not directly relate to his studies on counter-terrorism, Gleis felt it was important to rally people. He modeled his Sudan crusade on the ‘pen campaigns’ carried out during the American Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, which put pressure on the government to pass the Civil Rights Act. Instead of a petition in one envelope, this campaign generated hundreds of individual letters. “With that kind of volume, it’s hard not to be noticed.” Letters were sent to members of the UN Security Council, the Sudanese Ambassador to the U.S., Secretary of State Colin Powell, and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. “We were not making new, larger demands. We only requested that the Sudanese government follow what was required under international law.” For weeks, Gleis and his equally invested partners printed letters, stuffed and stamped envelopes, and filled all the mailboxes they could. “All people had to do was sign.”

Although Gleis’s interests span the globe and run the proverbial gamut, his passion is counter-terrorism. During the summer of 2004, he worked as the created an internship in the New York City Police Department’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau. “The NYPD felt that there wasn’t enough being done by the Federal Government [to combat terrorism], and so, in essence, they created their own FBI and CIA.” Doing intel analysis gave Gleis an authentic look at how intelligence is conducted at the local level. “Fletcher gave me the opportunity to do the internship. Without the connections and in-depth knowledge I gained at Fletcher, this never would have been possible. I credit Fletcher with opening so many doors.”

As for the future, Gleis intends to working political consulting and eventually run for political office one day. “There’s a lot to be done,” he says. If his success in mobilizing people on the Tufts campus is any indicator, we’ll surely see him on the ballot soon.

Article by Claire Topal, MALD '05

Posted by jessica at August 21, 2005 12:27 PM