Closing Panel: Palestine Reimagined
This session will discuss pathways toward achieving equal citizenship and security, and how these can be pursued in a manner that addresses conditions described by human rights organizations, the International Court of Justice, and other international bodies as “apartheid.” The panel will consider how replicating existing power dynamics may be avoided, and whether a two-state solution is realistic. Panelists will also explore the viability of a binational one-state future with equal rights, and whether this vision is a serious prospect or no more than an aspirational goal.
In Conversation with Dean Safwan M. Masri
Safwan M. Masri is the Dean of Georgetown University in Qatar and a Distinguished Professor of the Practice at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. Prior to joining Georgetown in October 2022, Professor Masri was Executive Vice President for Global Centers and Global Development at Columbia University, and a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Prior to that, Dean Masri was a professor at Columbia Business School, where he also served as Vice Dean. He previously taught engineering at Stanford University and was a visiting professor at INSEAD (Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires) in France. Dean Masri is the author of Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly (2017). He is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an honorary fellow of the Foreign Policy Association. Dean Masri led the establishment of King’s Academy and Queen Rania Teacher Academy in Jordan. He is a trustee of International College in Beirut and serves as a director of AMIDEAST and of Endeavor Jordan.
Wesam Ahmad
Since moving to Palestine in 2006, he has been working as a human rights advocate with Al-Haq, the oldest Palestinian Human Rights organization. He has contributed to the development of Al-Haq’s work in the area of Business and Human Rights including corporate accountability, focusing on the role of corporate actors and the economic incentive structure perpetuating the continued colonization of Palestine. He is currently the Head of the Al-Haq Center for Applied International Law, which serves as the educational and capacity building arm of the organization.
Diana Buttu
Diana Buttu is an expert in international human rights law. She was the former legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team and part of the team that assisted in the successful litigation of the illegality of the separation wall before the International Court of Justice.
Ussama Makdisi
Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley. He was previously a Professor of History and the first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University in Houston. In 2012-2013, he was an invited Resident Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin). The Carnegie Corporation named Makdisi a 2009 Carnegie Scholar as part of its effort to promote original scholarship regarding Muslim societies and communities, both in the United States and abroad. Makdisi was awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy of Berlin. His most recent book Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World was published in 2019 by the University of California Press. He is also the author of Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (Public Affairs, 2010). His previous books include Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008), which was the winner of the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, the 2009 John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, and a co-winner of the 2009 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize given by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. He is also the author of The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000). Makdisi co-hosts a new podcast called Makdisi Street.
Ilan Pappe
Ilan Pappe is the Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, Exeter, England. He founded and directed the Academic Institute for Peace in Givat Haviva, Israel between 1992 to 2000 and was the Chair of the Emil Tuma Institute for Palestine Studies in Haifa between 2000 and 2006. He was a senior lecturer in the department of Middle Eastern History and the Department of Political Science in Haifa University, Israel between 1984 and 2006. He was appointed as chair in the department of History in the Cornwall Campus, 2007-2009 and became a fellow of the IAIS in 2010. His research focuses on the modern Middle East and in particular the history of Israel and Palestine. He has also written on multiculturalism, Critical Discourse Analysis and on Power and Knowledge in general.
Sherene Seikaly
Sherene Seikaly is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores economy, territory, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine tells a global history of capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is the Editor of Journal of Palestine Studies, Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UCSB, co-editor of the Stanford Studies Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures Series, and co-editor of Jadaliyya.