In a reaction to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Tel Aviv Uni
versity decided sometime in 1975 to establish a center for security studies. A number of individuals within and outside the University community posited that one possible reason for Israel's thorough surprise on October 6, 1973 was that no institution outside the Israeli “establishment” had assumed the responsibility of evaluating the premises on which government policy was based – premises that also guided the planning and conduct of Israel’s defense establishment. Had such a research institute existed prior to the 1973 War, it might have questioned the assumptions leading to the intelligence assessment that war was unlikely.
The effort to establish such a center began in earnest in late 1976 when Prof. Haim Ben Shachar, then president of the University, and Prof. Zvi Yavetz, then dean of Humanities, heard that Maj. Gen. (ret.) Aharon (Ahrale) Yariv had decided to abandon his brief career in Israeli politics. Yariv was known to combine military experience with statesman-like instincts. He was also extremely charismatic and charming – an embodiment of “an officer” and “a gentleman.” With his uncompromising honesty and integrity, he felt unfit for the demands of political life.
The University delegation worked diligently to persuade Yariv to help realize the University’s efforts to study national security affairs. In response to the overture, Yariv insisted that the newly established institute be completely independent, and on that basis the Center for Strategic Studies was launched in early 1978. In 1983, the Center received its first major financial boost when Mr. Melvin (Mel) Jaffee of Orange County, California pledged a significant sum of money to the Center’s endowment. In recognition of this important contribution, the Center was renamed the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.
A number of decisions about the Center’s structure were made from the outset. The most important of these was that the Center would not be structured along “country desks” that corresponded to Israel’s neighboring states. Instead, the Center adopted a thematic structure, built on the principal issues that it proposed to address: the Middle East military balance, US policy in the Middle East, international terrorism, and public opinion and national security. These were supplemented in later years by additional long term projects, such as regional security and arms control, and many research projects of more limited duration devoted to specific issues.
The road to serious recognition of the Jaffee Center in the Israeli military and academic scene proved to be an uphill battle. While Yariv, as the founder and first head of the Center, enjoyed huge personal prestige, as an institution the new Center had yet to prove that it should be granted a place in Israel's security debate. Within a few years, however, the Center began to acquire a reputation for groundbreaking and taboo-breaching studies of key aspects of Israel’s national security. These included Aryeh Shalev’s book The West Bank: Line of Defense, which focused on the territorial dimensions of Israeli security, Shai Feldman's book Israeli Nuclear Deterrence, on Israel’s nuclear policy, and Mark Heller’s book A Palestinian State: The Implications for Israel, which analyzed the ramifications of establishing an independent Palestinian state.

Governmental resistance to the Center's involvement in security-related deliberations gradually diminished, and the Center became increasingly perceived as “neutral ground” by different arms of the Israeli defense establishment. Through the 90s the Center's staff became increasingly engaged in two additional forms of activities. The first was a set of Track-II talks, affording the ability to conduct an ongoing discourse with research colleagues in neighboring states. The second was a series of strategic dialogues conducted between the Center and counterpart institutions in key countries. By the late 1990s, the Center supplemented its books, monographs, conferences, and brainstorming sessions with additional forums for analysis and evaluation. Beginning in early 1998, Strategic Assessment was launched as the Center’s quarterly. Additional publications and research activities have joined the list, and helped the Center attain its standing as Israel’s foremost research institute in national security affairs.