December 2006 Eran Hayet is appointed as the executive director of the Center, with Tawfic Alawi as one associate director and a rotating BYU-affiliated expatriate as a second associate director. Eran was the first Israeli to be appointed to this newly restructured position.

Eran Hayet was born in 1964 and spent his early childhood in Kibbutz Ga’aton, in the northwest part of the Galilee. He lived in Chile from age seven to nine and Panama from age eleven to fifteen before returning to Jerusalem to complete high school. Following high school, Hayet served as an officer in the Israeli Air Force for five years and then studied international relations and Latin American studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While at Hebrew University, he worked as a parliamentary aide at the Knesset. From 1990 to 1993, he was the spokesperson for the Peace Now movement. In 1994, he became the facilities manager at BYU’s Jerusalem Center, and in 2002, he was appointed to his current position as executive director of the Center.

(Information about Eran is from BYU Studies Quarterly 54:4)