Don Peretz (October 30, 1922 - April 29, 2017) served as a fellow at USIP.

Peretz attended Queens College for three years from 1939-41. Inspired by two role models—his Quaker college professor and a pacifist rabbi who was a neighbor— Peretz became a conscientious objector during World War II. He also joined other Jewish pacifists as an early member of the Jewish Peace Fellowship, founded in 1941. Peretz was sent by the army to the University of Minnesota to study Japanese. Peretz was then assigned as a non-arms bearing Japanese interpreter for a naval medical unit tending to wounded civilians from the Battle of Okinawa.

In 1946, Peretz took advantage of the G.I. bill for WWII veterans to travel to Mandatory Palestine, his father’s homeland, and study at Hebrew University. The following year, he worked as a correspondent for NBC News, reporting on the growing conflict in the region. In 1949, Peretz worked for a year as a representative of the American Friends Service Committee with the UN Relief for Palestine Refugees in the northern city of Acre and the western Galilee.

After spending a year working for the Voice of America, in 1952, Peretz was awarded a two-year Ford Foundation grant to study the Israeli Arab refugee problem. This research, one of the first major academic studies of the 1948 Palestinian refugees, was later to become his doctoral thesis at Columbia University. It was published in 1958 as a book entitled Israel and the Palestine Arabs.

Peretz worked for the American Jewish Committee for a year in the mid-1950s during which he traveled throughout the Middle East to help address hardships affecting Jewish communities in several Middle Eastern countries causing many to flee. He also conducted research on the status of Israeli Arabs.

Afterwards, Peretz taught at several colleges including Hofstra University, Long Island University, Hunter College and Vassar College. Peretz next worked at the New York State Board of Education for five years prior to beginning a 25-year tenure as a professor at SUNY-Binghamton. From 1966 to 1992, he taught and directed the school’s Southwest Asia North Africa Program. In the 1970s, Peretz worked with the pacifist multi-denominational Fellowship of Reconciliation helping arrange meetings for US activists on Middle East peace delegations.