Yara Hawari is Al-Shabaka’s co-director. She previously served as the Palestine policy fellow and senior analyst. Yara completed her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, where she taught various undergraduate courses and continues to be an honorary research fellow. In addition to her academic work, which focused on indigenous studies and oral history, she is a frequent political commentator writing for various media outlets including The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Al Jazeera English.
From this author
While it remains unclear how and when Israel will respond to Iran’s operation, geopolitics have undoubtedly already shifted. In this roundtable, Al-Shabaka analysts Fadi Quran, Fathi Nimer, Tariq Kenney-Shawa, and Yara Hawari offer insights on the regional impact of Iran’s recent maneuver and situate the ongoing genocide in Gaza within this broader context.
Mainstream media coverage of the genocide in Gaza throughout the West has highlighted not only deep biases in favor of the Israeli regime, but also the ease in which Palestinians are dehumanized. In this commentary, Yara Hawari details Israel’s strategy to strip Palestinians of their humanity in the public realm, as well as the role of Western media in advancing Israel’s aims. She reveals consistent patterns of journalistic malpractice since October 7, 2023, and concludes that the Western outlets are inescapably complicit in the Israeli regime’s genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza.
As the Israeli regime continues its genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, many have begun to weigh in on the future of Hamas and of Palestinian leadership more broadly once the bombardment ends. One of the dominant proposals circulating amongst analysts, Palestinian and otherwise, is the revival of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), with Hamas as a member party.
The Israeli regime’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has caused widespread devastation across the besieged area. Palestinians have reaffirmed consistently that there is no safe place in Gaza, and that this current assault by the Israeli military is only the latest in over 75 years of attempted ethnic cleansing. As global solidarity with the Palestinian people reaches unprecedented levels, Western powers continue to lend their support to Israel’s efforts towards Palestinian erasure. In this devastating yet critical moment, Al Shabaka’s Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Fathi Nimer, Yara Hawari, and Alaa Tartir weigh in on the unfolding situation since October 7th, 2023, and position it within the context of ongoing Israeli settler colonialism and Palestinian resistance.
A sovereign Palestinian state is today perhaps further from reality than ever before. Indeed, with the demise of the so-called two-state solution and the entrenchment of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid across Palestine, the possibility of a Palestinian nation-state is arguably defunct. What does a Palestinian political future beyond partition look like? What would this entail for Palestinians within colonized Palestine and across the diaspora? Given their forced fragmentation, how might Palestinians forge collective visions for their political future?
As of 2023, Mahmoud Abbas surpasses his democratic mandate as President of the Palestinian Authority by 14 years. And as speculation mounts about his successor, the question of his legacy lingers. In a new Al-Shabaka roundtable, policy analysts Tareq Baconi, Yara Hawari, Alaa Tartir, and Tariq Kenney-Shawa reflect on Abbas’s impact on Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
The term “normalization” emerged following the signing of the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, which stated that the “signatories shall establish among themselves relationships normal to states at peace with one another.” Previously, relations with the Israeli regime were more colloquially referred to as khiyanah (betrayal or treachery)
A new wave of repressive UK government policies aims to suppress protest and political expression, posing a direct threat to Palestine solidarity work. Al-Shabaka’s senior policy analyst, Yara Hawari, locates this latest crackdown within Britain’s enduring support for Zionism, and shows how only in broad, intersectional alliances can social justice activists effectively repel state-led repression.
Jerusalem continues to lie at the center of political developments in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and in the shifting landscape of US and EU foreign policy toward Palestine and the Israeli regime.
From the COVID-19 pandemic to the Black Lives Matter movement, events that have unfolded on the global stage have impacted our realities over the past two years.
