Palestine Center Annual Conference 2022

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh:

The Jerusalem Fund invites you to our Palestine Center Annual Conference titled, ‘75 Years of Partition: Ethnic Cleansing and Dispossession’ to be held on November 11, 2022, in Washington, D.C. See below for details on our speakers and presenters, panels, and RSVP at Events@thejerusalemfund.org by sending us your name, title and contact information.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Joseph Massad, a Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University. He is the author of several books, dozens of scholarly articles, and hundreds of op-eds. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, Desiring Arabs, and Islam in Liberalism. His forthcoming book is tentatively titled The Age of Independence: A Settler-Colonial History of the World. He is a recipient of a number of research and teaching Awards, including the Lionel Trilling Book Award for his book Desiring Arabs, The Scott Nearing Award for Courageous Scholarship, and The Columbia University Faculty Mentoring Award. His works have been translated into more than a dozen languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Persian, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Japanese, Chinese, German, and Indonesian.

First Panel “Ethnic Cleansing”

Gideon Levy, a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982 and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor. He was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize in 2008, the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001, the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997, and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award in 1996. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso.

Fellow Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at IPS, focusing on the Middle East, U.S. wars, and UN issues. She is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. In 2001 she helped found the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights and now serves on the national board of Jewish Voice for Peace. She works with many anti-war and Palestinian rights organizations, writing and speaking widely across the U.S. and around the world. She has served as an informal adviser to several top UN officials on Middle East issues and was twice short-listed to become the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Francesca Albanese, an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University and a Senior Advisor on Migration and Forced Displacement for the think tank Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD), where she co-founded the Global Network on the Question of Palestine (GNQP), a coalition of renowned professional and scholars engaged in/on Israel/Palestine. She has published widely on the legal situation in Israel/Palestine; her latest book, Palestinian Refugees in International Law (Oxford University Press, 2020), offers a comprehensive legal analysis of the situation of Palestinian refugees from its origins to modern-day reality.

Moderated by Said Arikat

Said Arikat is a Member of the Palestine Center Committee and the Washington bureau chief for the Palestinian newspaper al-Quds, a daily for which he is a writer, columnist, and analyst. He previously served as spokesman and director of public information for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq and currently teaches as an adjunct professor at American University in Washington, DC.

Second Panel “Human Rights”

Shawan Jabarin is a Palestinian national and father of four children. Since 2006, Jabarin has been the General Director of Al-Haq, the first human rights organization in the Arab region. Jabarin received a BA in Sociology from Birzeit University and an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the National University of Ireland, Galway. Jabarin received the Outstanding Student Award from the Irish Centre for Human Rights. In 1987, Jabarin started his career at Al-Haq as a field researcher, documenting human rights abuses by the Israeli occupying authorities throughout the occupied Palestinian territory. He then shifted to legal research and accepted a leadership position in international advocacy. Jabarin served as a part-time lecturer at Birzeit University, Palestine. Jabarin participated in numerous international conferences on International Criminal Law and Human Rights Law worldwide. Jabarin also took part in many graduate and advanced academic programs at Columbia University, USA, and the University of Strasbourg, France.

Omar Shakir serves as the Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, where he investigates human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza and has authored several major reports, including a 2021 report comprehensively documenting how Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against millions of Palestinians. As a result of his advocacy, the Israeli government deported Omar in November 2019. A former Fulbright Scholar in Syria, Omar holds a JD from Stanford Law School, where he co-authored a report on the civilian consequences of US drone strikes in Pakistan as a part of the International Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic, an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Affairs, and a BA in International Relations from Stanford.

Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focus is on Palestine-Israel peace, the use of international legal mechanisms by political movements, and U.S. foreign policy in the region. Previously, she was the coordinator and senior legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team during Palestine’s bid for UN membership and was a member of the Palestinian delegation to Quartet-sponsored exploratory talks between 2011 and 2012.

Moderated by Professor Osamah F. Khalil

Dr. Osamah Khalil, Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is the author of America’s Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State (Harvard University Press, 2016) and the editor of United States Relations with China and Iran: Toward the Asian Century (Bloomsbury Press, 2019). Khalil is a frequent media commentator and contributor for local, national, and international media outlets.

Third and final Panel, “Analysis and Action”

Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian author, journalist, media consultant, internationally-syndicated columnist, Editor of Palestine Chronicle, and former editor at major Middle East news networks. Baroud is the author of six books and a contributor to many others; his latest volume, co-edited with Ilan Pappe, is Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out. His books include My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, The Last Earth, and These Chains Will Be Broken. His books are translated into many languages, including French, Italian, Turkish, Arabic, Korean, and Malayalam. Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter. He was a Non-Resident Scholar at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. Currently, he is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU).

Jinan Chehade is a third-year law student at Georgetown Law. She is the co-founder and past chair of SJP Chicago. Jinan studied Public Policy and Arabic at DePaul University, where she was president of SJP DePaul. She has also worked at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and the ACLU. Before law school, Jinan founded Hearts4Humanity, a national youth-led campaign that raised over $1 million for humanitarian causes. Jinan recently led a delegation of Chicago’s youth organizers to Palestine. She is the co-founder and co-president of Law Students for Justice in Palestine at Georgetown Law.

Moderated by Professor Abdel Razzaq Takriti

Abdel Razzaq Takriti is the inaugural Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Arab History and the Founding Director of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Center for Arab Studies at the University of Houston. He holds a Ph.D. from St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and has published widely on modern Palestinian history as well as on the themes of anticolonialism, revolution, state formation, and intellectual traditions. Professor Takriti’s articles have appeared in leading journals, including the American Historical Review, Radical History Review, and Journal of Palestine Studies. His book Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman (Oxford University Press, 2013; paperback edition, 2016) was a finalist for the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize for best debut book in non-British history. He is the co-author, with Karma Nabulsi, of the digital humanities, project The Palestinian Revolution (University of Oxford Department of Politics and International Relations, 2016), which received the 2019 Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) Undergraduate Education Award.