Joseph (Yosef) Heller is Professor Emeritus in the Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Born in Tel Aviv, he studied general and Jewish history at the Hebrew University, completing his BA and MA with distinction. He earned his PhD at the London School of Economics and subsequently joined the Hebrew University faculty, becoming senior lecturer by the late 1970s. He held visiting appointments at Yale and the University of London. His research interests included the history of Zionism and the Israeli state, the Arab–Israeli conflict, the great powers and the Middle East, and international relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Selected works:

• The Birth of Israel, 1945–1949: Ben-Gurion and His Critics (University of Florida, 2000)
• The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror, 1940–1949 (Routledge, 1995)
• British Policy towards the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1914 (Frank Cass, 1983)