Maher Bitar (c) with his wife, daughter, and former boss, Sept. 21, 2015. President Joe Biden on Friday appointed Palestinian-American attorney Maher al-Bitar, who served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council as Director for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs and as deputy to Samantha Power, to be the new director of the NSC intelligence service. Politico, which broke the news, described Al-Bitar’s new job as “the day-to-day connective tissue between the intelligence community and the White House.” A graduate of Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, al-Bitar received a Master of Science in Forced Migration from Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Center on a Marshall scholarship and has worked with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Jerusalem.