Article - Biden's Mideast Visit: Sobering Lessons for Palestine

US President Joe Biden’s July 2022 visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia signified a new era of regional alliances that are inextricably linked to the expanding normalization deals heralded by the Abraham Accords. Indeed, the US appears more determined to buttress these authoritarian and apartheid regimes with military and technological superiority, particularly for future confrontations with Iran. What must Palestinians learn from these troubling regional developments? What can they and their allies in the Arab world do to ensure the viability of the Palestinian liberation movement?

Join Al-Shabaka’s commissioning editor, Nadim Bawalsa, for a discussion with Al-Shabaka policy analysts, Dana El Kurd and Amjad Iraqi, about these developing regional dynamics.

Nadim Bawalsa is Associate Editor with the Journal of Palestine Studies. From 2020-2023, Nadim served as Al-Shabaka’s commissioning editor. He is a historian of modern Palestine, and author of Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (Stanford University Press, 2022). His other work has appeared in the Jerusalem Quarterly, the Journal of Palestine Studies, NACLA Report on the Americas, and as well as in edited volumes. He earned a joint doctorate in History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies from New York University in 2017, and a Master’s in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in 2010. In 2019-2020, he was awarded a PARC-NEH fellowship in Palestine.  

Dana El Kurd is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Richmond and a senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington. She specializes in Palestinian and Arab politics, with a focus on mobilization, public opinion, and international intervention. Her book Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Her work has appeared in academic journals including Global Studies Quarterly and Democratization, as well as in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and the Financial Times.

Amjad Iraqi is a senior Israel/Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group. He was previously a senior editor at +972 Magazine, an associate fellow with Chatham House’s MENA Programme, and an advocacy coordinator at Adalah. Among other outlets, he has written for the London Review of BooksThe New York Review of BooksThe Nation, and The Guardian, and has appeared on various podcasts including “The Ezra Klein Show”. Amjad has an MA in Public Policy from King’s College London, and an Hon. BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Toronto.

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