Apartheid: How Useful is the Framework for the Palestinian Struggle?

In our first Palestine Policy Lab session, Al-Shabaka analysts Yara Hawari and Diana Buttu weigh in on the usefulness of the Apartheid framework in the Palestinian context.

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.

Diana Buttu is a lawyer who previously served as a legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team and was part of the team that assisted in the successful litigation of the Wall before the International Court of Justice.  She frequently comments on Palestine for international news media outlets such as CNN and BBC; is a political analyst for Al Jazeera International and is a regular contributor to The Middle East magazine.  She maintains a law practice in Palestine, focusing on international human rights law.

Latest Analysis

 Politics
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.
Al-Shabaka Yara Hawari
Yara Hawari,Tareq Baconi· May 26, 2026
 Politics
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.
Al-Shabaka Tariq Kenney-Shawa
Tariq Kenney-Shawa· May 21, 2026
 Civil Society
We cannot understand Gaza’s endurance through a binary that casts Palestinians, individually or collectively, as either heroic in their resistance or passive victims. Rather, we must approach it through a decolonial conception of sumud (steadfastness): a historically situated, relational, and materially conditioned practice of collective endurance that emerges, shifts, and persists within ongoing colonial violence.
Abdalrahman Kittana· May 12, 2026