Issue 100: Finally

Life is too short not to celebrate important milestones. After many years, I am delighted to share that I have completed my PhD in Planning, Governance, and Globalization at Virginia Tech.

This was a long journey. I recall the first time I met my advisor, Professor Joel Peters, who understood that I was considering various doctoral programs and shared details with me about Virginia Tech’s School of Public and International Affairs. It was a meeting that changed my life. In 2014, we relocated from Jerusalem to the US with our nine-month-old child, and I committed myself to my studies. There are few instruction manuals for this kind of transition. After many years abroad, we needed to reintegrate into American life: find jobs, create a new routine and structure for our family, learn the bureaucratic norms, and of course I needed to read/write/read/write/read/write. The first year I commuted several hours each way, often driving back late at night hyped up on Red Vines and Good & Plenty, or crashing on a friend's air mattress when the drive wasn't worth it. We were fortunate to have family and friends who supported us until we found our footing.

My dissertation proposal was accepted just around the time of our second daughter’s birth, a joyous occasion on multiple levels. Shortly thereafter, I was offered a position back in Jerusalem - and so we packed up our lives again, returned home, and I carried the dissertation with me across the Atlantic.

I don’t think I ever anticipated the process to be so challenging. Successfully writing a dissertation requires a high degree of time management and discipline. I struggled to maintain a consistent writing rhythm, and my self-criticism regularly got in the way of my progress. There were also other distractions - pandemics, job changes, new children. My thinking on the subject shifted and changed, as did the goalposts of what I hoped the dissertation would achieve, academically and personally.

And then October 7 happened. In the months that followed, I was genuinely uncertain whether any of this would ever get done - and at the same time more determined than ever to finish. Some experiences have a way of clarifying what matters.

I’ve been asked what kept me motivated.

From the beginning, I had the right guide. Joel Peters recruited me to Virginia Tech and remained a steady source of inspiration across all the years and detours that followed. In Ethics of the Fathers, we are instructed to “provide for yourself a teacher, and acquire for yourself a friend.” In Joel, I found both.

I also had the perfect partner. None of this would have been possible without my wife, Sarah Cytryn, who gave up more evenings, weekends, and holidays than either of us care to count. This is as much her achievement - and our daughters’ - as it is mine.

My dissertation, Energy as Statecraft: Natural Gas, Israeli Foreign Policy, and the Eastern Mediterranean, examines how new energy resources shape state foreign policy - specifically, Israel’s transformation from chronic energy poverty to significant natural gas producer across fourteen years of Eastern Mediterranean diplomacy. I found that energy neither catalyzes peace nor drives conflict; it amplifies the character of the bilateral relationships into which it is introduced. More on the research, and what comes next, in future posts.

I took the long way round. As Tolkien wrote, not all who wander are lost.

Now, after many years of hard work, my mental RAM is free to address new questions - but first I am going to pause and reflect.

As my eldest daughter said upon learning that I had completed my PhD: “finally.”

Yes, finally.