Rania Muhareb is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Law and Criminology at Maynooth University, and a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Irish Centre for Human Rights in the School of Law at the University of Galway, where she completed her PhD in December 2024. Her doctoral research examined the mobilization of the apartheid framework by grassroots organizers and human rights organizations to pursue international justice and accountability in Palestine. Rania was the 2025 Palestine Postdoctoral Fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, where her research focused on Palestinians’ right to health, drawing on the Apartheid Convention, the Genocide Convention, and the settler-colonialism framework.
From this author
In this Focus On, Al-Shabaka’s policy analysts imagine Palestinian political futures within the context of historical and ongoing realities. Among other topics, they revisit the history of popular committees and consensus-building efforts during the First Intifada to show how local Palestinian governance might be strengthened, and how we might rethink the meaning of self-determination from the grassroots. They consider how various aspects of Palestinian society, including health, education, and policing, could be transformed to help sustain a new political vision for liberation, and revive popular engagement in colonized Palestine and beyond. And they examine the different means through which Palestinians can utilize international legal avenues to strategize an effective anti-apartheid movement.
The Unity Intifada of May 2021 emphasized the centrality of Palestinian popular mobilization in the struggle against Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime. It is imperative that discussions of an anti-apartheid movement in Palestine remain true to the Unity Intifada’s decolonial praxis: to confront Zionism’s “racist settler colonialism in all of Palestine” and to challenge Israel’s fragmentation of the Palestinian people as a tool of domination.
Rania Muhareb joins host Yara Hawari to discuss Palestine's case at the International Criminal Court. Whilst many legal experts are optimistic toward the possibility of pursuing justice for Palestinians, some remain less hopeful, citing the many challenges that lay ahead in terms of international pressure, Israeli lobbying, as well as institutional issues within the ICC itself.
Netanyahu has pledged to begin annexing parts of the West Bank as soon as next month. What are the implications of such a move, and what can be learned from Israel’s previous annexations of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights?
