gaza future roundtable may2025

Two years on, the consequences of the Gaza genocide extend far beyond Palestine. Western complicity and inaction have exposed the true face of the so-called “rules-based” order. With the era of US hegemony potentially coming to a turbulent close, what will the future look like for Palestinians and for a world on the cusp of profound geopolitical and moral transformation?

In this policy lab, Leila Farsakh and Abdaljawad Omar join host Tariq Kenney-Shawa to trace the historical trajectory leading to October 7, examine how Gaza has become both a site of extermination and a catalyst for global rupture, and discuss what comes next for Palestinians.

Abdaljawad Omar is a Palestinian writer based in Ramallah, Palestine. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University, where his teaching and research focus on political theory, decolonial thought, and the intellectual history of Palestine. Omar holds a PhD in interdisciplinary social sciences, with scholarly work centered on Palestinian resistance, settler-colonialism, and revolutionary politics.

Tariq Kenney-Shawa is Al-Shabaka’s US Policy Fellow and co-host of Al-Shabaka’s Policy Lab series. He holds a Masters degree in International Affairs from Columbia University. Tariq’s research and writing have covered a range of topics, from the role of open-source intelligence in exposing Israel’s war crimes to analysis of Palestinian liberation tactics. His writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among others. Follow Tariq on Twitter @tksshawa and visit his website at https://www.tkshawa.com/ for more of his writing and photography.

Al-Shabaka policy analyst, Leila Farsakh, is Associate Professor and Chair of the political science department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation (Routledge, 2012), and of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-determination beyond Partition (California University Press, 2022). She has worked with a number of organizations, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris and MAS in Ramallah, and she has been a senior research fellow at Birzeit University since 2008. In 2001, she won the Peace and Justice Award from the Cambridge Peace Commission.

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