Learning & Unlearning Palestine Part 1: Who Can Speak on Palestine?
- Analysis
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Analysis
In-depth analysis on existing or potential policies that impact possibilities for Palestinian liberation.
Insights and perspectives on social, political, and economic questions related to Palestine and Palestinians globally.
Concise analysis into a specific policy, its background and implications.
Commentary that brings together insights from multiple analysts.
Compilations of past Al-Shabaka works surrounding a specific theme.
Longer-form, ad hoc projects that seek to confront research questions outside the scope of our regular analysis.
A policy-driven research initiative by Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.
Our monthly webinar series that brings together Palestinian experts.
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.
After Hamas’s recent announcement that it will hand over governing authority in Gaza to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), urgent questions about who will shape Gaza's future and on whose terms have reemerged. These questions are particularly salient given that the NCAG’s framework reflects the same technocratic and externally imposed logic that has come to characterize the dominant international proposal for Gaza's reconstruction: one that treats it as a technical exercise in disaster management, sidelining Palestinian sovereignty, return, and self-determination. In contrast, this roundtable asks what it means to understand Gaza as an Indigenous region rather than simply a besieged strip or humanitarian space. Nour Joudah and Dena Qaddumi explore how Indigenous frameworks reshape prevailing understandings of urbanism, reconstruction, and governance; why reconstruction must begin with Palestinian agency and reclamation rather than externally designed colonial master plans; and how rebuilding is already taking place through everyday forms of Indigenous endurance, social organization, and spatial resistance under conditions of ongoing genocide.
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