topicPolitics
featured
When four donkeys were evacuated from Gaza to a German zoo in November 2025, their rescue was celebrated as a humanitarian success. Yet while the animals were transported to safety, given new names, and described as leaving behind "hunger and misery, beatings and hardship," Palestinian children have been unable to evacuate amid a relentless ongoing genocide.
In this commentary, Asmaa Abu Mezied examines how humanitarian concern operates through racialized hierarchies of grievability that render animal suffering more visible and rescue-worthy than Palestinian human life. She further argues that animal welfare interventions are materially entangled with the dispossession of Palestinian survival infrastructure, showing how it can become an enabling mechanism of colonial violence rather than its interruption.
In this policy lab, we are joined by policy expert Lara Friedman and investigative journalist and writer Antony Loewenstein to explore the shift in Israel’s relationship with the US from dependence to deeper symbiosis.
The advisory opinions issued by the International Court of Justice on Palestine reveal both the possibilities and the limits of international law, which has come under intense scrutiny amid the Israeli regime’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and broader settler-colonial project across Palestine.
Acknowledging the persistent gap between legal principle and political enforcement, this policy brief examines how these opinions can be leveraged to strengthen legal and diplomatic accountability at both the international and domestic levels. It argues that the opinions provide an opportunity to move legal discourse on Palestine beyond the dominant UN framework of statehood within the 1967 borders and to reassert the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination within a broader liberation-oriented framework aimed at ending settler colonialism and advancing justice for Palestinians as a whole.
Palestinian scholar, lawyer, and former director of the Palestine Research Center, Sabri Jiryis, joins this episode to discuss the historical significance of the Center and its archives, as well as his seminal work, The Foundations of Zionism, recently translated into English for the first time.
The US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon, as well as the ongoing genocide in Palestine, are reshaping the political landscape of the region. Alliances are being recalibrated, and old assumptions about US power are being tested. The war has also underscored how deeply the global economy remains tied to fossil fuels and to the strategic importance of the Gulf within international energy and trade networks.
In this roundtable, Palestinian analysts Diana Buttu and Adam Hanieh examine what this moment reveals about the changing architecture of US imperial power, the regional order now taking shape, and the implications for the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
Palestinian scholars Diana Buttu and Adam Hanieh analyze what this moment reveals about the architecture of the US empire, the regional order being remade in real time, and what it means for the Palestinian liberation struggle at the center of it all.
People across the world are living through a moment of profound crisis. The ongoing genocide in Gaza, the US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon, the resulting energy and economic shocks, and the erosion of the international legal order are unfolding alongside the fragmentation of the Western-led global system. Together, these converging tremors are exposing the limits of US hegemony, reshaping the strategic positions of Arab Gulf states and China, and intensifying debates over multipolarity, regional realignment, and South-South solidarity.
In this roundtable, Yara Hawari and Tareq Baconi reflect on this impasse, highlighting the centrality of Palestine to understanding the historic transformations the world is witnessing today. They discuss the bankruptcy of the liberal international order, the changing dynamics of the US-Israeli imperial power in West Asia, and the ways Palestine has emerged as a converging point through which a different global order may be forced into being.
In this policy lab, Josh Ruebner and Ahmed Moor join host Tariq Kenney-Shawa to examine the fight over the Block the Bombs Act, wider efforts in Congress to restrict US military support for Israel, and what these battles reveal about the future of Palestine advocacy in US politics.
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s US policy fellow, joins our latest episode to unpack the widening divide between the US Democratic Party’s elite and its voting base over the ongoing Gaza genocide, military aid to the Israeli government, and support for Zionism.
This policy brief argues that, by maintaining the classification of such zones as provisional security arrangements rather than permanent borders, the Israeli regime exercises territorial control while limiting the immediate legal and political costs associated with declared annexation.
Amjad Iraqi, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group and Al-Shabaka policy member, joins our latest episode to explore the regional chaos that the US-Israeli war against Iran has created and the Israeli strategy behind it.
Media & Outreach
The healthcare infrastructure that sustains West Bank communities is collapsing amid accelerated settlement expansion and violent attacks.
New York City’s ties with Israel go far deeper than one man, and there are concrete things Mamdani can do to break those ties.
“This has to be viewed in the wider context of Israel’s growing isolation on the international stage and their desperate attempt to cultivate whatever relationships they can," Tariq Kenney-Shawa, US policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, told Middle East Eye.
We’re building a network for liberation.
As the only global Palestinian think tank, we’re working hard to respond to rapid developments affecting Palestinians, while remaining committed to shedding light on issues that may otherwise be overlooked.
Policy Briefs 
Commentaries 
Policy Memos 
Roundtables 
Policy Focuses 
Reports 
Policy Labs 
Podcasts 