He should fit in just fine in the Obama White House.
Via Haaretz:
Robert Malley, the White House aide who advised President Bill Clinton during his futile effort to broker an agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians at Camp David in 2000, is rejoining the White House, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.
The paper quoted administration officials as saying that Malley will manage the fraying ties between the United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf. As a senior director at the National Security Council, he will help devise American policy from Saudi Arabia to Iran.
Malley, who has been program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, has been something of a lightning rod in a field that can be culturally and ideologically treacherous. In 2008, he was forced to sever his ties as an informal adviser to the Obama presidential campaign when it was reported that he had met with members of Hamas, which the State Department classifies as a terrorist organization.
Malley also came under fire for an article, co-written with Hussein Agha, that argued that some of the blame for the failure of the Camp David talks lay with the Israeli leader at the time, Ehud Barak, and not just with the uncompromising position of the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, which was the conventional wisdom then.
Some right-wing critics accused Malley of showing a persistent anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian bias in his writings. A few even cited his father, the prominent Egyptian-born Jewish journalist, Simon Malley, who had close ties to the Egyptian government.