Have Arab states abandoned the Palestinian people?
In this policy lab, Al-Shabaka analysts Tareq Baconi and Ibrahim Fraihat weigh in on the historical understanding of normalization, implications of the UAE-Israel agreement and other normalization developments across the region, and ways forward for Palestinians in light of these changing dynamics.
Tareq Baconi serves as the president of the board of Al-Shabaka. He was Al-Shabaka’s US Policy Fellow from 2016 – 2017. Tareq is the former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict at the International Crisis Group, based in Ramallah, and the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018). Tareq’s writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, among others, and he is a frequent commentator in regional and international media. He is the book review editor for the Journal of Palestine Studies.
Ibrahim Fraihat is Associate Professor of International Conflict Resolution at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and a non-resident fellow at Deakin University’s Middle East Studies Forum in Australia. He previously served as Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at the Brookings Institution and taught conflict resolution at Georgetown University and George Washington University. His recent books include Conflict Mediation in the Arab World (Syracuse University Press, 2023), Rebel Governance in the Middle East (Palgrave, 2023), Iran and Saudi Arabia: Taming a Chaotic Conflict (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and Unfinished Revolutions: Yemen, Libya, and Tunisia after the Arab Spring (Yale University Press, 2016). He holds a doctorate in conflict analysis and resolution from George Mason University and is the recipient of that university’s Distinguished Alumni Award (2014).
