Steven Plaut

Steven Plaut (1951 – January 17, 2017) was an American-born Israeli economist, academic and writer. He was an associate professor of Business Administration at the University of Haifa as well as a member of the editorial board of the Middle East Quarterly, a publication of the Middle East Forum think tank.

Steven Plaut was born in Philadelphia. In 1981, Plaut immigrated to Israel with his family. He died on January 17, 2017, in Haifa, Israel at the age of 65 after battling cancer for many years.

The most important lesson of recent years, and it is by now understood by everyone except university leftists and anti-Israel journalists, is that nothing will really put an end to the terror and rockets from Gaza other than some good old-fashioned R&D – Reoccupation and Denazification. Everything else is a delusion. Israel must re-occupy the Gaza Strip, subject it to martial law, and carry out a decades-long program of Denazification.

In March 2013, a letter from Plaut was received by the office of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Prime Minister of Turkey. The letter condemned as illegal Turkey's occupation of Northern Cyprus and attacked the Turkish Prime Minister, accusing him of being behind the Gaza Flotilla "terrorist attack" on Israeli soldiers. Plaut apologized for Israel not killing a larger number of "terrorists" on the flotilla ship. He claimed it was time to give back "occupied Constantinople" to its "true owner", namely, Greece.

Plaut was sued for libel by Neve Gordon, a faculty member at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Department of Politics and Government, claiming that Plaut slandered him in certain articles and alleged e-mails. In May 2006, the Nazareth Magistrate's Court ruled in favor of Gordon, and ordered Plaut to pay Gordon 80,000 shekels in compensation plus 15,000 shekels in legal fees. Both sides appealed to the Nazareth District Court, and in February 2008, the court reversed three out of four of the libel claims but upheld a libel judgment relating to the fourth, a publication in which Plaut called Gordon a "Judenrat Wannabe". It reduced the damages to 10,000 shekels (about $2,700) on the basis that, in the court's view, Plaut was entitled to criticize Gordon.

In his 2002 book The Scout Steven Plaut describes his near-death experience as a kidney cancer patient at an intensive care ward. The historical novel is a series of life stories exchanged between him and another patient in the ward, an Israeli Bedouin scout.

In his 1985 book titled The Joy of Capitalism, Plaut argues for free market economics and compares the profit motive to the libido. In the book he discusses energy, housing, banking and agricultural policy as well as equality and income distribution.