Reimagining Palestine

Tareq Baconi (Moderator)

Tareq Baconi is a writer. He is the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018). His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Washington Post, among others. He is the former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine at the International Crisis Group based in Ramallah. He serves as the president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.

Fida Adely

Fida Adely is the Clovis and Hala Maksoud Chair in Arab Studies at Georgetown University and the Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Her research interests include education, labor, development, and gender in the Arab world. She is the author of two books and many scholarly articles. Her most recent publication is Working Women in Jordan: Education, Migration, and Aspiration. Dr. Adely was previously a lecturer at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs, as well as a Visiting Professor in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. She currently serves on the board of the Middle East Studies Association and Insaniyyat: The Society of Palestinian Anthropologists. 

Rochelle Davis

Rochelle A. Davis is an Associate Professor & Sultanate Oman Chair in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the School of Foreign Service Georgetown University, Washington D.C., USA. Her research focuses on refugees, war, and conflict, particularly Syrian and Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons. Since 2010, her research projects have included training refugees and local community members to develop questions and conduct interviews. To date, these projects have amassed over 300 in-depth interviews with refugees and migrants in the region. She is also a Senior Researcher on a joint project between Georgetown University and the International Organization for Migration grant conducting a mixed-methods panel survey of over 3000 Iraqi households displaced since 2014 by ISIS/ISIL/Da’esh. Her first book, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced, (Stanford University Press, 2012) was co-winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award recognizing outstanding publications in Middle East studies. The book addresses how Palestinian refugees today write histories of their villages that were destroyed in the 1948 war, and the stories and commemorations of village life that are circulated in the diaspora. Professor Davis is currently writing a book on the role of culture in the U.S. military wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, based on research she has conducted since 2006.

Raja Khalidi

Raja Khalidi is the Director General at the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS). He has conducted research and published and lectured widely on Palestinian economic conditions in Lebanon, in the Arab region in Israel and in the occupied territories. He worked with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) from 1985 to 2013. As a senior economist, he served as Coordinator of its Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian people, Head of its Debt and Development Finance Branch and Chief of the Office of the Director or the Division of Globalization and Development Strategies.

Issam Younis

Issam Younis is the General Director of the Gaza-based Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian non-governmental organization with consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UN ECOSOC). He served as a member of the Board of Trustees at Al-Azhar University in Gaza from 2008 and 2018. Between 2018 and 2021, he held the position of Commissioner General of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) and was also a member of the Palestinian Higher Education Council from 2019 to 2021. He received several human rights awards and has published numerous articles on human rights and international law.