Robin Twite was born in England and took his BA and MA in History at Balliol College in Oxford, England.
He worked as a career official in the British Council for 30 years and served as head of the Council’s Israeli office from 1968 to 1973. From 1973 to 1976 he took a leave from the Council to serve as Administrative Director of the Open University in Israel.
Returning to the Council he was the Open University’s advisor on adult education and wrote reports for the Governments of India and Sri Lanka on the feasibility of establishing Open Universities in their countries.
From 1980 to 1984, Twite was director of the Council’s office in Calcutta where he administered a sixty million British aid program supporting projects on the treatment of sewage in Calcutta (together with the World Bank), the mechanization of coal mines in North Eastern India, training in the use of fertilizers by farmers in Orissa and Bengal, and the provision of health services in remote districts of Orissa. In his last post he was director of the Council’s world wide network of libraries and information which included some 120 libraries with over two million books and was at the same time responsible for British Government assistance to publishers seeking to secure overseas markets.
On his retirement in 1990, he came to Israel and spent five years at the Truman and Davies Institutes at the Hebrew University working on conflict resolution. For seventeen years (from 1995 onwards) he was director of the Environmental Program at the Jerusalem based Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, which was managed jointly by Israelis and Palestinians. The program, which was financed largely by international donors, included research on air pollution, many different water issues, as well as trainings for Israelis and Palestinians on environmental mediation and participation in a large scale project on the impact of climate change on the Jordan Basin known as GLOWA and financed by the German Government. All these were cross-border activities involving Israelis, Jordanians, Palestinians, and experts from abroad.
In 1984 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire.
He is author of a number of articles on environmental issues in the East Mediterranean and in Israel and Palestine.
