Martin Indyk was an accomplished negotiator, a creative diplomat, a brilliant scholar and a founding Board member of the Lowy Institute.
One of the missions that Sir Frank Lowy gave the Lowy Institute when he established it 20 years ago was to project Australian voices abroad. This is a good description of Martin Indyk’s life.
Raised and educated in Sydney, Indyk served twice as US ambassador to Israel in the 1990s and early 2000s during President Bill Clinton’s administration, and later became President Barack Obama’s special envoy for Middle East peace.
Clinton is said to have joked, “I like it when you’re around, Martin, because you and I both have funny accents.”
A steadfast believer in diplomacy and a deep thinker about international affairs.
In his 30s, after completing a doctorate at the Australian National University, Indyk moved to Washington, DC, to enter the think tank world. In short order, he was talent spotted by Clinton. He took up US citizenship and became Clinton’s key adviser on the Middle East. He was a leading negotiator during an intense period of US-brokered Middle East peace efforts, which included the Oslo peace process and the Camp David negotiations.
Indyk died overnight after a battle with cancer. He was 73.
A steadfast believer in diplomacy and a deep thinker about international affairs, Indyk established the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and served in senior positions at the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations. He also had a long-standing association with the Lowy Institute.
In 2002, Sir Frank asked Michael Fullilove, now the Lowy Institute’s Executive Director, to write a feasibility study for a new institute and suggested that he consult Indyk and other think tank experts. Indyk went on to become a founding member of the Lowy Institute Board, on which he served until his death. His briefings to the Board on political dynamics in the Middle East and the United States were brilliant and illuminating.
Sir Frank praised Indyk as a scholar and friend, saying “few Australians have had such a large impact on the world, and for good.”
In more recent years, he was a frequent visitor to the Biden White House to advise on plans to normalise relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. That nascent breakthrough, with the potential to remake the modern Middle East, was derailed by the deadly October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas militants.
Throughout his career, Indyk was a consistent advocate of a two-state solution. In March, he argued in an article on the Gaza war that “if the conflict is to be resolved peacefully, the two-state solution is the only idea left standing”.
Outside of government, Indyk was a renowned public thinker and scholar. He appeared regularly in the pages of Foreign Affairs and on the opinion pages of major mastheads. In September 2023, Indyk delivered a Lowy Institute lecture on the art of diplomacy in conjunction with the release of what was to be his final book, Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy.
In 2021, Michael Fullilove interviewed Indyk for The Director’s Chair podcast. Indyk reflected on his early life as the son of Polish Jewish immigrants and upbringing in Sydney’s Castlecrag, and how he came to be fascinated with the Middle East.
“I was very much a Sydney boy,” Indyk said. But he had a sense that he was “somewhat different”, leading him on a search for identity.
“I went to Israel as a first-year university student with a group of 30 other Jewish kids from Sydney and Melbourne. And that had a profound effect on me. I was at an impressionable young age, it was my first trip overseas, Israel was in its heroic phase after the Six-Day War, that was in 1969.”
But only a few years later, during a return visit to Jerusalem in 1973, the Yom Kippur War broke out, a shock that became an epiphany.
“I decided during that war that I was somehow – I didn’t know how – going to devote my life to trying to help Israel to make peace with its neighbours,” Indyk said.
“Living through that war and seeing the role that the United States played, first of all, in helping Israel turn the tide of battle with a massive military resupply, and then watching Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State, negotiating first a ceasefire and then engaging in his shuttle diplomacy, where he laid the foundations for the American-led peace process, I decided at that point that I was going to study, learn as much as possible about the role of the United States in settling the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
His contribution across a subsequent career as a diplomat and in think tanks earned wide acclaim.
Indyk is survived by his wife, Gahl Hodges Burt, two stepchildren, Christopher and Caroline Burt, and two children, Sarah and Jacob, from a first marriage to Jill Collier, along with five grandchildren, sister Shelley and brother Ivor.
