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Members

Policy Members are Al-Shabaka’s foundation of expertise, talent and commitment. They may contribute to Al-Shabaka’s work by writing policy briefs, position papers, commentaries, blog entries, and Op-Eds and disseminating Al-Shabaka’s policy advice and opinions.

Inès Abdel Razek

Al-Shabaka Member Inès Abdel Razek is Advocacy Director for the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD), an independent Palestinian organization. Prior to joining the PIPD, Inès held advisory positions in the executive offices of the Union for the Mediterranean in Barcelona, the UN Environment Programme in Nairobi and the Palestinian Prime Minister's Office in Ramallah, where she focused on international governance and development cooperation policies. Inès is also an advisory board member of the social enterprise BuildPalestine. She holds a Master's degree in Public Affairs from Sciences-Po, Paris. Twitter: @InesAbdelrazek

Ali Abdel-Wahab

Al-Shabaka member Ali Abdel-Wahab works as a data analyst and evaluation and follow-up assistant at the Tamer Institute for Community Education in Gaza. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and is interested in the world of data, big data, and computer social sciences. He has worked as a research assistant in several Palestinian and European institutes and has written several articles and scientific papers. He is also a member of the political youth forum in Gaza's Masarat Center. His research focuses on issues of political economy, digital transformation, and the social network, with particular focus on Palestine.

Ramy Abdu

Al-Shabaka policy member Ramy Abdu is an academic, financial expert and human rights advocate. He is an assistant professor of law and finance, as well as the founder and Chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. Ramy previously served as a project and investment coordinator for the World Bank. He holds an MBA in Finance from Jordan University as well as an MReS and PhD in Law and Finance from Manchester Metropolitan University (UK).

Kifah Abdul Halim

Al-Shabaka Member Kifah Abdul Halim is a Palestinian journalist, translator, and activist. She began her career as a political and media advisor and worked with several NGOs, serving inter-alia as the Director of the Occupied Territories Department at Physicians for Human Rights. In recent years, she has focused her career on journalism, leading context and investigative reports for newspapers and digital platforms as well as for feature documentaries. She is the Editor of "Alasa'a" - an independent critical electronic magazine - and works with various Palestinian cultural institutions, producing festivals, concerts, writers’ and artists’ residencies, and other programs.

Ayman Abdul Majeed

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ayman Abdul Majeed is Researcher and Survey Unit coordinator for the Center for Development Studies at Birzeit University. He has spent nearly 20 years in community research and programs focused on marginalized groups including women, youth, people with disability, children, and Palestinian refugees in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon. He is a member of the National Committee for Women Employment’s (2010-2013). His publications include: women with disability and access to justice (Center for Development Studies, BZU 2013, and Low youth participation in the labor market in Palestine: Reasons and limitations from a gender perspective 2011, Population Council, Cairo. He took his MA in Gender and Development at Birzeit University in 2006.

Wassim F. Abdullah

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Wassim F. Abdullah  is a veteran engineer in electronics and telecommunications who has worked on diverse projects and policies to encourage multi-media and an information-based economy in Palestine. These include TV and radio stations, the Palestine Media Center, the Palestinian Legislative Council video-conference system between Ramallah and Gaza and its integration with the voting system, and the audio and lighting systems of Ramallah festivals. He also participated in the design of the IT strategy for Palestine and has consulted for Palestinian governmental as well as international organizations.

Shatha Abdulsamad

Al-Shabaka policy member Shatha Abdulsamad is pursuing her MA in International Human Rights Law and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo. She previously worked as a political officer for the British Consulate General in Jerusalem and as programme manager at the German think-tank Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. Her field of expertise includes political analysis, human rights, and strategic political communication. She holds a higher diploma in Strategic and Political Communication from Birzeit University, a master’s degree in Business Management from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and a bachelor's degree in Public Administration from Birzeit University.

Hazem Abu Helal

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Hazem Abu Helal is a political, social and human rights activist. He holds a BA in law from the University of Jerusalem and a higher diploma in NGO Management from Birzeit University. Hazem has contributed to founding a number of Palestinian civil institutions, youth groups and campaigns involved in political and social issues in Palestine and the Arab world. He has worked with several civil institutions on youth and education issues in Palestine and as a facilitator and trainer on gender, human rights, advocacy, and life skills for youth.

Mai Abu Moghli

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Mai Abu Moghli is a Post Doctoral Research Associate at the RELIEF Centre/UCL and a fellow at the Arabic Council for Social Sciences. She holds a PhD in human rights education from the UCL Institute of Education and an MA in human rights from the University of Essex. Mai has over twelve years of experience working in the fields of human rights and education in the MENAT region. Her research covers human rights education in conflict contexts, teacher professional development (TPD) in crisis and emergencies, refugee education and  education policies and identity.  

Suheir Abu Oksa Daoud

Al-Shabaka Member Suheir Abu Oksa Daoud holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is an associate professor in the Department of Politics at Coastal Carolina University, Conway, South Carolina. She has been a visiting assistant professor at Harvey Mudd College, a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Pomona College, and a visiting scholar at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. Prior to this she worked as an Israeli Knesset member adviser. Daoud has published four volumes of Arabic poetry and literature, and her academic book, Palestinian Women and Politics in Israel, was published in 2009 by the University of Florida Press. 

Talal Ahmad Abu Rokbeh

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Talal Ahmad Abu Rokbeh is a Palestinian political researcher based in Gaza. He holds a master's degree in political science from Al-Azhar University in Gaza, and is the managing editor of the Tasamoh [Tolerance] Magazine. Abu Rokbeh is a member of the Arab Network for Tolerance. He has prepared numerous research papers and political and legal studies, including work on the political transformations in Palestine and their repercussions on tolerance in Palestinian society, and the role of international law in protecting women in times of war. Abu Rokbeh is a trainer in the fields of democracy and human rights, as well as a community activist and advocate for women's and youth issues.

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Mjriam Abu Samra

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Mjriam Abu Samra is a doctoral researcher in International Relations at the University of Oxford, UK. Her work focuses on Palestinian Transnational Student Movements and their contribution to the broader Liberation Movement through different political periods. She had previously completed her Masters in Middle East Politics at SOAS in London. Recently, Mjriam has been based in Amman, Jordan, where she is completing her research. She has lectured at the University of Jordan Faculty of Politics and International Studies. Mjriam has been a co-founder of the Palestinian Youth Association “Wael Zuaiter” in Rome, Italy, and of the transnational Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM).

Mohammad Abu Zaineh

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Mohammad Abu Zaineh is Adjunct Professor of Economics at Aix-Marseille Université School of Economics and École des hautes études en santé publique in Paris. He has worked with UNAIDS in Geneva, the Palestine Economic Policy Institute in Ramallah and the Department of Economics as well as the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University, Palestine. His main areas of research include measurement and explanation of socioeconomic inequality; public economics and policies (applied mainly to health and the health care sector) and economic development.

Wajjeh Abu Zarifa

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Wajjeh Abu Zarifa is a journalist, researcher and professor of political science in Gaza, and a fellow at the University of Chicago. He holds a PhD from the Cairo-based Institute of Arab Research and Studies in political science, and a master's degree in Israeli studies from the University of Jerusalem. Abu Zarifa has participated in numerous international conferences and seminars, and published scientific papers and research as well as political articles and opinion pieces. He has worked in the press for 30 years with local and international media outlets including most recently NBC News. Abu Zarifa served in a number of community posts, including director of the PLO's national office for the defense of land and resistance of settlement, and a member of the Secretariat of the Palestinian Journalists' Syndicate.

Refqa Abu-Remaileh

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Refqa Abu-Remaileh is professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Film at the Freie Universität Berlin’s Arabic Department, specializing in Palestinian literature and film. She is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) project “PalREAD – Country of Words: Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present” (2018-2023). She received her MSt in modern Middle Eastern Studies and DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford (2004, 2010).

Caroline Abu-Sada

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Caroline Abu-Sada is Director of the Research Unit of Medecins Sans Frontieres Switzerland, and an Honorary Lecturer at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI), University of Manchester. She has worked on food security, agriculture and health issues, and coordinated programs in the Middle East for Oxfam GB, the United Nations and MSF Switzerland. Dr Abu-Sada works include "ONG palestiniennes et construction étatique, l’expérience de Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC) dans les Territoires occupés palestiniens, 1983- 2005", IFPO, Beirut, 2005; and “Dilemmas, Challenges, and Ethics of Humanitarian Action”, Mc Gill-Queen's University Press, 2012. She has taught political science at New York University, Paris and at Sciences Po, Lille.

Ayah Abubasheer

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ayah Abubasheer holds a Master’s degree in Global Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She has published articles at Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, Mondoweiss and Middle East Eye.

Jehad Abusalim

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Jehad Abusalim is currently a PhD student in the History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies joint program at New York University. His main area of research is Palestinian and Arab perceptions of the Zionist project and the Jewish question before 1948. He also studies the political and social history of the Gaza Strip and the impacts of the Palestinian Nakba, and how it radically impacted the political, social, demographic, and economic realities of Gaza.

Hashem Abushama

Al-Shabaka Member Hashem Abushama graduated from Earlham College with a BA in Peace and Global Studies. In 2015, Abushama became a Youth Representative of Palestine Refugees at the United Nations. He was appointed as a Youth Ambassador to the [email protected] Conference in the United Nations Headquarters in New York. At Earlham, Abushama served as the President of the Earlham Student Body. Recently, he has been selected as one of first two Rhodes Scholars from Palestine. While at the University of Oxford, Abushama hopes to pursue his graduate studies in International Development with a particular focus on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies.

Zena Agha

Zena Agha served as Al-Shabaka's US Policy Fellow from 2017 - 2019. Her areas of expertise include Israeli settlement-building in the occupied Palestinian territory with a special focus on Jerusalem, modern Middle Eastern history, and spatial practices. She has previously worked at the Economist, the Iraqi Embassy in Paris, and the Palestinian delegation at UNESCO. In addition to opinion pieces in The Independent, and The Nation, Zena’s media credits include the BBC World Service, BBC Arabic and El Pais. Zena was awarded the Kennedy Scholarship to study at Harvard University, completing her Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies.

Halah Ahmad

Al-Shabaka Policy Analyst Halah Ahmad completed her Master’s in Public Policy at Cambridge University as the Lionel de Jersey Harvard Scholar at Emmanuel College. She has conducted strategic policy research for government agencies and NGOs in Greece, Albania, Berlin, the West Bank, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. She currently leads policy and public relations work at the Jain Family Institute, an applied social science research institute based in New York City. Her own research covers topics of equitable development and social welfare, ranging from urban planning and tourism, to displacement, housing, and economic justice. Halah completed her undergraduate degree with honors in comparative religion and sociology at Harvard.

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Amal Ahmad

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Amal Ahmad is a Palestinian economic researcher. Amal interned at the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute in Ramallah before completing a Master’s degree in development economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Her work focuses on fiscal and monetary relations between Israel and Palestine; she is also interested in the political economy of development in the broader Middle East.

Abdullah Al-Arian

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Abdullah Al-Arian is an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar, where he specializes in the modern Middle East and the study of Islamic social movements. He is the author of Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat's Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is also co-editor of the Critical Currents in Islam page on the Jadaliyya e-zine. Twitter: @anhistorian

Mariam Al-Mozian

Al-Shabaka policy member Mariam Al-Mozian lives in Gaza and holds a PhD in Political Science from the Institute of Arab Research and Studies. She previously worked as media officer at the General Union of Palestinian Women and as an adjunct professor at Al-Quds Open University in Rafah. Her work specializes in assessing civil society institutions' programs and their suitability for the Palestinian context, including research on the role of civil society institutions in empowering young women leaders.

Mohammed Al-Rozzi

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Mohammed Al-Rozzi is a doctoral student at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Before commencing his doctoral studies, Al-Rozzi completed his undergraduate studies at Bethlehem University, where he earned a bachelor in Occupational Therapy. In 2011, he completed his Master’s degree in Childhood Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. Al-Rozzi has worked with many international non-governmental organisations and UN agencies, including Mercy Corps, Terre des Hommes, the Norwegian Refugee Council, World Vision and UNICEF. Through his work experience, Al-Rozzi has developed extensive multidisciplinary expertise in child protection and participation issues, education in post-conflict settings and psychosocial wellbeing at times of crisis. His research interests include child labour, juvenile justice and education policy.

Samer Alatout

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Samer Alatout is an associate professor in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published extensively on water and environmental politics in historic Palestine (1900-2010) and is now working on a book on the subject. Alatout has also published on the politics of occupation (water, the apartheid wall). Most recently, he's been researching the state building process in Palestine. He is on the Executive Council of the International Water History Association and sits on the editorial boards of a number of academic journals, including Political Geography and Resilience.

Zarefa Ali

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Zarefa Ali received her MA degree from Birzeit University in International Studies with a concentration in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies.

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Nijmeh Ali

Nijmeh Ali is a political and academic activist with a PhD from the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her research focuses on the power of resistance theory in exposing the ‘power of powerless’ and the capacities of oppressed groups in creating genuine social change, particularly among Palestinian activists in Israel. From 2014 to 2018, Nijmeh was a researcher at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago. She previously earned a BA from Haifa University and MA from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Maureen Ali

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Maureen Ali, former cultural editor of The Middle East magazine, is a writer and film-maker based in Beirut. She is the editor of the book “A Lost Summer,” a compilation of blogs, texts and other writings about the 2006 Israeli War on Lebanon and wrote the texts for “Watercolors,” a campaigning book by photographer Mazen Jannoun about the state of the Lebanese coast. She is an active member of Inaash, Association for the Development of Palestinian Camps, Beirut.

Hanna Alshaikh

Al-Shabaka Member Hanna Alshaikh is an adjunct professor at DePaul University, teaching courses on political Islam, the intersections of religion and politics in the Middle East, and Islamic thought. Hanna is also a research fellow at the American Friends Service Committee, working on an oral history project on the Palestinian diasporic narrative, activism, immigration, and intergenerational issues. She holds a BA from DePaul University, where she double majored in Islamic World Studies and Arabic, and earned her MA from the University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES). Her research focused on social and intellectual history in the late Ottoman Palestine.

Ahmad Amara

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ahmad Amara is a human rights advocate and a graduate of the joint PhD program in History and Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University. Before pursuing his PhD degree, Amara served for three years as a clinical instructor and global advocacy fellow with Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program. Amara holds an LLB and LLM from Tel-Aviv University, and a second master’s degree in international human rights law from Essex University in the United Kingdom. Amara has a number of publications, including the co-edited volume “Indigenous (In)Justice: Human Rights Law and Bedouin Arabs in the Naqab/Negev” by Harvard University Press.

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Sabrien Amrov

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Sabrien Amrov is pursuing her Ph.D. in Human Geography at the University of Toronto. In 2013, she earned her master’s degree in International Relations, with Honours, from the University of Ottawa. Her MA thesis on the Security Sector Reform in the West Bank was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In 2011, she earned her Honours Bachelors in Conflict Studies and Human Rights with a Minor in Arabic Language and Culture from the same university.  Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Middle East Monitor, Rabble and TRT World.

Yara Asi

Dr. Yara M. Asi is a Post-Doctoral scholar at the University of Central Florida, where she has taught in the Department of Health Management and Informatics for more than 6 years. She is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Scholar to the West Bank. Her research focuses on global health and development in fragile and conflict-affected populations. Along with working at one of the first accountable care organizations in the United States, she has also worked with Amnesty International USA, the Arab Center Washington DC, the Palestinian American Research Center, and Al-Shabaka: Palestinian Policy Network on policy and outreach issues. She has presented on topics related to global health, food security, health informatics, and women in healthcare, and has published extensively her research in journal articles, book chapters, and other outlets. Dr. Asi's forthcoming book with Johns Hopkins University Press about the threats war and conflict pose to public health and human security.

Nada Awad

Al-Shabaka policy member Nada Awad holds a master’s degree in International Relations and International Security from Sciences Pro Paris. She works on human rights violations in the Arab region as the international advocacy officer at the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS). She was previously responsible for the Advocacy unit at Al-Quds University’s Community Action Center, where she focused on the issue of forcible transfer of Palestinians from Jerusalem. She also worked as an archival researcher at the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut.

Valentina Azarova

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Valentina Azarova is a visiting academic at the Manchester International Law Centre (MILC), University of Manchester, and a strategic and legal adviser to the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN). Valentina received her PhD from the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland, Galway. She was a co-founding member of the Al-Quds Bard College, Al-Quds University, where she directed and taught on the human rights program for five years (2009-2014). She also taught at Birzeit University’s Graduate Studies School (2014-2015). Since 2008, she has worked at HaMoked – Center for the Defence of the Individual; Al-Haq; and the MATTIN Group, and consulted a range of international and inter-governmental organisations on international law as it relates to the Israeli-Palestinian context. Her research concerns the role of third parties and the contribution of domestic and transnational regulatory processes to the enforcement of international law. Her publications can be accessed here.

Cecilia Baeza

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Cecilia Baeza is lecturer at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, Brazil. She is co-founder of RIMAAL, a network of researchers on the links between Latin America and the Middle East. She holds a doctorate in international relations from Sciences Po-Paris.

Salem Barahmeh

Al-Shabaka policy member Salem Barahmeh is the Executive Director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy. He is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the US Middle East Project and previously worked as an international affairs advisor to Dr. Hanan Ashrawi at the PLO and the Palestine Investment Fund. He has also worked at Portland Communications in London, as a Policy and Public Affairs Advisor to Gulf governments, and for the Palestinian Embassy to the United States. Salem received a BA in Government from Lawrence University and an MA in Law and Politics from King’s College London.

Ahmad Barclay

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ahmad Barclay is an architect and environmental designer presently based in Beirut. He is co-founder of arenaofspeculation.org, and also works on Visualizing Palestine and #3awda. Ahmad previously worked with DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) on the “Laboratory of Returns” project, investigating architectural models for the return of Palestinian refugees. His academic research has focused on the potentials of architecture and planning as tools of 'spatial resistance' in the Palestinian struggle.

Nadia Barhoum

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Nadia Barhoum is a research associate at UC Berkeley where she works on issues of political ecology and climate adaptability, data visualization, structural inequality, and spatial politics within marginalized communities. She previously worked as the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Division at Human Rights Watch and as an Advocacy Officer with a local NGO in East Jerusalem. She completed her BA in Political Economy at UC Berkeley and her MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths College at the University of London. Nadia has been active in youth organizing within transnational Palestinian communities and is a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement.

Mussa’ab Bashir

Al-Shabaka Member Mussa’ab Bashir is an interpreter and translator, he holds a B.A. in French and Pedagogy from Al-Aqsa University, Gaza. He worked with international NGOs in the Gaza Strip until 2006. He has also worked as a TV reporter for Spanish-speaking media, as well as an analyst of Israeli and military affairs in the Middle East. 

Samar Batrawi

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Samar Batrawi is a Dutch-Palestinian PhD candidate and teaching assistant in international relations theory at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She is interested in identity politics and social movements in the Middle East, specifically those that interact with the question of Palestine. Her doctoral research explores how the Salafi-jihadi movement has framed Palestinian grievances and the question of Palestine more generally. She has previously worked for the Clingendael Institute for International Relations in The Hague and the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling in Ramallah. Her work has appeared in Foreign Affairs and Strife Journal.

Tamara Ben-Halim

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Tamara Ben-Halim holds an MSc in Human Rights from the London School of Economics and an MA in Modern European Languages from the University of Edinburgh. Tamara has worked in non-profit and civil society for over 6 years, focusing on creative solutions to problems of social injustice, community mobilisation, and communication and outreach. She co-founded and led the international effort, Cycling4Gaza, for many years. She has produced several short films, including her documentary film Ain El Hilweh, which was nominated for an award at the California Arab Film Festival in 2011.

Nael Bitarie

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Nael Bitarie is a Palestinian Syrian. Since 2004, Nael has been working with refugees from Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and refugees in Sweden where he currently lives. He is a Co-founder of Sawa for Development and Aid in Lebanon where he was the programmes manager. Currently he is a consultant and board member at Jafra Foundation. His work focuses on community mobilization, capacity building, and development. Currently Nael works with a number of initiatives in relation to Al-Yarmouk camp crisis.

Zaki Boulos

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Zaki Boulos, born to Palestinian parents, has embarked on several careers, from sound engineering (10 years), to maintaining websites and editing content. He is also active on most issues concerning Palestine, providing technical/editorial assistance. He has helped set up communications at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (Beirut), and most recently he has been involved with Al-Shabaka on editing assignments.

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Irene Calis

Al-Shabaka policy member Irene Calis is an anthropologist in the Critical Race, Gender, & Culture Studies Collaborative at American University, DC, where she teaches in both Arab World Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is a scholar, activist, and organizer whose research and activism focuses on emancipatory politics from the perspective of everyday life. This has involved living and working with farming and youth communities throughout the West Bank, as well as with popular struggles in Oceania, South Africa, and indigenous North America. Her current work on political futures situates the Palestinian struggle in a wider conversation with the global South, and in particular with indigenous-settler experience and intellectual thought. Calis holds a PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics & Political Science.

Muna Dajani

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Muna Dajani is a Palestinian environmental researcher and activist from Jerusalem. Muna holds a Masters degree in International Development and Environment. She is currently a PhD student at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the department of Geography and Environment. Her research will aim to identify the link between identity, resilience and farming under belligerent occupation, where farming acquires political subjectivity as a form of cultural resistance. Her research interests are environmental politics, community-led resource management, and social impacts of climate change.

Rawan Damen

Al-Shabaka Member Rawan Damen has produced and directed more than 25 hours of TV documentaries, translated into multiple languages, including the award-winning Al Nakba series. Rawan worked as a senior commissioning producer at Al Jazeera Media Network from 2008 to 2016, where she supervised 250 hours of documentaries. She has founded and led teams on multiple digital platforms, notably the innovative project Palestine Remix and was awarded the Media Creativity Award from the Arab Thought Foundation in December 2015. Rawan holds an MA in Communications Studies from Leeds University, UK, and a BA in Media and Sociology from Berziet University, Palestine.

Ahmad Diab

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ahmad Diab is a Palestinian writer and Fulbright scholar. He is currently working on his PhD at New York University. His interests lie in the intersection between literature, film, and power structures.

Yasmeen El Khoudary

Al-Shabaka Member Yasmeen El Khoudary is an independent London-based researcher and writer specialised in Palestinian archaeology and cultural heritage, with a focus on Gaza. She holds an MA in Cultural Heritage Studies from University College London. Prior to moving to London, she co-founded Diwan Ghazza, an independent, voluntary cultural initiative based in Gaza. She has published extensively on several topics in the Guardian, CNN, and Al-Jazeera English, among others. Twitter handle: @yelkhoudary | Blog: yelkhoudary.blogspot.com. 

Dana El Kurd

Al-Shabaka Member Dana El Kurd received her PhD in Government from The University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in Comparative Politics and International Relations. Her dissertation explores how international patrons affect authoritarian consolidation in the Palestinian territories. Dana writes regularly for publications such as Al-Araby al-Jadeed, The Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog, and Foreign Affairs. She currently works as a researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and its sister institution, the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

Rayya El Zein

Al-Shabaka Member Rayya El Zein is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research concerns performance, media, popular culture, the political economy of leisure, and spectatorship in urban Arab contexts and diasporas.

Ahmad El-Atrash

Al-Shabaka Member Ahmad El-Atrash is a Palestinian spatial planner and urban development specialist. He has extensive experience working with think-tanks, academic institutions, NGOs, and UN agencies in issues related to geo-political and strategic planning, governance reform, resilience, and sustainable development within the Palestinian context. Ahmad has a PhD in Spatial Planning from TU-Dortmund University in Germany.

Raed Eshnaiwer

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Raed Eshnaiwer is a PhD candidate at Universite Libre de Bruxelles, in Political Science, European Studies and Area Studies. Raed’s research focuses on the impact of forced migration on the identity of the state: Syrian refugees in Jordan as a case study.

Basem Ezbidi

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Basem Ezbidi currently teaches at the Honors Program and the Department of International Affairs at Qatar University. He previously worked at Birzeit University as part of the department of Political Science and the Master program of Democracy and Human Rights. Ezbidi holds a Ph.D. in political theory from the University of Cincinnati in the United States. He has written on Hamas, state-building, and the West and the Moslem World. Among his publications, The Muslim World and the West – A Muslim Perspective; Coauthor of “Palestinian National Authority and the Future of State Formation”, and ‘Hamas and Palestinian Statehood’; Co-editor of "Popular Protest In The New Middle East: Islamism and Post-Islamist Politics''.  

Dana Farraj

Dana Farraj is a legal researcher and has been a certified lawyer at the Palestinian Bar Association since 2019. She obtained her master’s degree in International Humanitarian Law from Aix-Marseille University and her bachelor’s degree in law from Birzeit University. Her research interests include refugee law, human rights law and international criminal law. 

Basil Farraj

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Basil Farraj is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute, Geneva and a research assistant for the VIPRE Initiative. Basil’s work focuses on political prisoners, violence directed against them, and ways in which they resist the incarcerating regimes. His work reaches for the intersections of memory, resistance and art by prisoners and others at the receiving end of violence. Basil has previously conducted fieldwork in a number of countries including Chile and Colombia.

Marwa Fatafta

Marwa is a Palestinian writer, researcher and policy analyst based in Berlin. She leads Access Now’s work on digital rights in the Middle East and North Africa region as the MENA Policy Manager. She is also an advisory board member of the Palestinian digital rights organization 7amleh. Previously, she worked as the MENA Regional Advisor for Transparency International Secretariat. Marwa was a Fulbright scholar to the US, and holds an MA in International Relations from Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. She holds a second MA in Development and Governance from University of Duisburg-Essen.

Ibrahim Fraihat

Al-Shabaka Member Ibrahim Fraihat is a professor of international conflict resolution at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, and Affiliate Scholar at Georgetown University. He previously served as Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and taught international conflict resolution at George Washington University and George Mason University. His latest book is Unfinished Revolutions: Yemen, Libya, and Tunisia after the Arab Spring​ (Yale University Press, 2016). He is the recipient of George Mason University's Distinguished Alumni Award (2014) for his achievements in the field of conflict resolution. ​Fraihat can be followed on Twitter @i_farihat.

Yassmine Hamayel

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Yassmine Saleh Hamayel is working on gender and security in Ramallah, and is active in the Palestinian youth movement. Her areas of interest include democratization, development, youth, and refugees.

Awad Hamdan

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Awad Hamdan is National Programs Director for American Muslims for Palestine.

Dyala Hamzah

Al-Shabaka policy member Dyala Hamzah is an associate professor of Arab History at the University of Montreal. She served as editor of the 2013 Routledge volume The Making of the Arab Intellectual and is author of the forthcoming text, Muhammad Rashid Rida ou le Tournant Salafiste (CNRS Éditions, 2019). Dyala has published with Princeton and Oxford University Presses, as well as in academic journals including CSAAME, REMMM and Égypte-Monde Arabe. She is currently conducting a project on Mandate Palestine and Arab Nationalism. Her upcoming Palestine. Le Sionisme est-il réformable? is under contract with Presses de l’Université de Montréal (PUM, 2020).

Fajr Harb

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Fajr Harb is a Palestinian political activist. He is currently the Assistant Director of The Carter Center Field Office in Ramallah. In addition to his experience in advocacy and fundraising, he has an academic background and training in the United States in both engineering and economic development.

Anaheed Al-Hardan

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Anaheed Al-Hardan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut. She is an advisory board member of the Palestinian Oral History Archive. Her research on right of return movement activism, critical research methods in Palestine studies and Palestinian intellectual history has appeared in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Qualitative Inquiry and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She is the author of Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently undertaking a new book-based research project on Palestinian and Arab decolonial theory within the context of south-south philosophies of liberation and decolonization.

Zaha Hassan

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Zaha Hassan is a human rights lawyer and visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focuses on Palestine-Israel peace, the use of international legal mechanisms by political movements, and U.S. foreign policy in the region. She previously served as coordinator and senior legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team during Palestine’s bid for UN membership from 2010-2012. She received her J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and an LLM in Transnational & International Law from Willamette University.

Thayer Hastings

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Thayer Hastings is a graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City where he is studying anthropology of the Arab world. He holds an M.A. degree from the Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. After completing a B.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle, he returned to Palestine, where he carried out research and advocacy in law and human rights. Thayer worked with Palestinian and international non-governmental organizations, including BADIL Resource Center and the American Friends Service Committee. His research and writing continue to be informed by a commitment to community-led initiatives and decolonizing methodologies.

Yara Hawari

Yara Hawari is the Senior Analyst of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. She 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 also a frequent political commentator writing for various media outlets including The Guardian, Foreign Policy and Al Jazeera English.

Saleh Hijazi

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Saleh Hijazi is a human rights activist and researcher presently living in London where he works at Amnesty International. He is advisor to Al-Quds University Human Rights Clinic where he worked as academic coordinator and lecturer. Saleh holds a master's degree in human rights from the University of Essex and a bachelor degree in philosophy and political science from Lawrence University. His interests are social movements and caricature.

Ata Hindi

Al-Shabaka member Ata Hindi is currently a PhD in Law candidate at Tilburg University and holds an Advanced LLM in Public International Law from Leiden University. He has previously worked with a number of international NGOs focused on international law, especially in Palestine and the Arab World.

Sara Husseini

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Sara Husseini specialises in international relations and strategic communications. She has advised senior Palestinian officials across a number of departments, including the PLO Secretary-General and the Palestinian Ambassador to Germany. With a special focus on European-Palestinian relations, Sara has served on interministerial taskforces, engaged in outreach campaigns and presented to a wide range of international audiences. She has also supported several civil society initiatives and organisations, including Palestine Works and most recently BuildPalestine, where she currently serves as Chair of the Board. Sara holds a PhD in Christian-Muslim relations from the University of Birmingham, UK.

Anas Iqtait

Al-Shabaka Member Anas Iqtait is a research scholar at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University. His research focuses on the political economy dynamics shaping governance and fiscal policy of the Palestinian Authority, political rentierism, aid effectiveness, and the political economy of the wider region. He has previously worked in Palestine with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Oxfam, and the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and served as a Research Fellow at Birzeit University in 2017. He also holds a master’s degree in international development policy from Seoul National University.

Amjad Iraqi

Al-Shabaka Member Amjad Iraqi is an editor and writer at +972 Magazine, based in Haifa. He was previously an advocacy coordinator at Adalah - The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. In addition to +972, his writings have appeared in the London Review of Books, The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and The Hill, among others. 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.

Zaina Jallad

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Zaina Jallad is a Palestinian lawyer and lecturer, currently pursuing an J.S.D at Columbia Law School. Zeina completed her law degree in 2004 at the University of Jordan and is admitted to practice law in Palestine. She has served as the Faculty of Law and Public Administration at Birzeit University - the first woman lecturer-in-law. In 2009, she managed the project to develop the Palestinian Bar Association for the European Union. She rejoined Columbia University in 2012 as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, where she was affiliated with the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. In the Spring of 2013, she co-taught a course titled "Occupation: Law, Politics, Morality.

Hazem Jamjoum

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Hazem Jamjoum is a graduate student in Modern Middle East History at New York University. His writing has focused on political-economy approaches to Israeli colonialism and Palestinian elite formation, and critiques of partition-based conflict management "solutions," among other areas.

Mousa Jiryis

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Mousa Jiryis is a Palestinian from Galilee. He holds a Masters in International Relations from the University of Westminster (with Merit), part of which consisted of a research grant from the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue. He also holds a Bachelors degree in Economics and Economic History from the London School of Economics. He is a skilled proposal writer, researcher and documentation specialist. His varied career has included donor fundraising, documentation quality assurance and business development for organizations in Palestine, Israel and the UK.

Nour Joudah

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Nour Joudah holds MA degree in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and wrote her MA thesis on the role and perception of exile politics within the Palestinian liberation struggle, in particular among politically active Palestinian youth living in the United States and Occupied Palestine. She has taught at American University and is currently Associate Producer of Status Hour and Grants Officer for the Hassib Sabbagh Foundation. Nour is pursuing a PhD in Geography with a research focus on the spatial relations of decolonization in former settler colonies.

Safa Joudeh

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Safa Joudeh is an Egypt-based political and security analyst working for an international strategic advisory consulting firm. She advises government and private sector clients on security, political and geopolitical developments affecting investments and operations in Egypt and the MENA region. She is also a multimedia journalist with experience covering Egypt and Palestine focusing on conflict, security and governance. She holds a Masters in Public Policy from Stony Brook University in New York.

Andrew Kadi

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Andrew Kadi is a human rights activist and occasional contributor to the Guardian's Comment is Free, The Electronic Intifada, MondoWeiss, Left Turn, and other publications.

Remi Kanazi

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Remi Kanazi is a poet, writer, and editor. He is the author of Poetic Injustice: Writings on Resistance and Palestine and the editor of Poets For Palestine. His political commentary has been featured by news outlets throughout the world, including Al Jazeera English, GRITtv with Laura Flanders, and BBC Radio. He is a recurring writer in residence and advisory board member for the Palestine Writing Workshop and he is on the organizing committee of USACBI (the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel).

Salma Karmi-Ayyoub

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Salma Karmi-Ayyoub is a barrister specialising in criminal law. She provides legal consultancy and advice services to individuals, non-governmental organizations and solicitors’ firms on issues related to criminal and human rights law. From 2009 until 2012 she headed an international litigation project at the Palestinian human rights organisation Al Haq where she is currently a legal consultant focusing on issues related to corporate responsibility for human rights violations. Salma is Chair of the legal charity, Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights. Her articles have appeared in  the London Review of Books, The Huffington Post and The Nation, among other publications.

Majd Kayyal

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Majd Kayyal was born in Haifa in 1990 to a displaced family from Barwa village. He studied philosophy and political science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kayyal writes for Al-Safir's supplement printed in Beirut. He has published political and literary articles in several publications and newspapers, and has maintained a personal blog since 2010. His first novel, "The Tragedy of Mr. Matar," won the Abdel Mohsin Al-Qattan Foundation's Young Writer Award for 2015.

Mohammed al-Khaldi

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Mohammed Al-Khaldi is from the Gaza Strip and holds a Master of Health policy and Management from Al-Quds University-Abu Dis in 2012. He has been in Switzerland working on his PhD in Health Policy and Research at the Swiss TPH since September 2014. He previously worked as a lecturer and researcher at colleges and research institutes in Palestine and Switzerland and is also a consultant on different programs in development and relief, and training and research projects for the governmental, NGO and international agencies sectors.

Ahmad Khalidi

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ahmad Samih Khalidi is currently an Academic Visitor at St Antony’s College, Oxford and an Associate Fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy, Geneva. He is the co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies (Arabic edition) published by the Institute for Palestine Studies (Beirut), and served as advisor to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid/Washington and Cairo-Taba talks from 1991-1993. He was co-chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences project on Israeli-Palestinian security from 1993-1995 and Associate Fellow of the Middle East program at Chatham House, London from 1995-96. He has been active in Palestinian politics for over thirty-five years ans has written widely on Middle Eastern political and strategic affairs in both English and Arabic.

Ismail Khalidi

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ismail Khalidi's writing on Palestinian history, culture and politics range from plays and poetry to op-eds and commentary. He holds an MFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and authored the award-winning play Tennis in Nablus, which explores the Palestinians' 1936-39 revolt against British Colonial rule. His work has been produced and read at theatres and Universities around the country including Atlanta's Tony Award-winning Alliance Theatre, which premiered Tennis in Nablus, and the Culture Project, which will produce the New York premiere in 2013. Khalidi's writing has also appeared in The Daily Beast, American Theatre Magazine, The Nation, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Asem Khalil

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Asem Khalil is a professor of Public Law and the H.H. Shaikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor of Constitutional and International Law, Birzeit University. He is the former Vice President for Community Affairs (2016-2020), Dean of the Faculty of Law and Public Administration (2012-2015), and of the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies (2010-2012). Dr. Khalil holds a Ph.D. in Public Law, Fribourg University, Switzerland, a Masters in Public Administration from the National School of Administration, France, and a doctorate in Utriusque Juris, Lateran University, Italy. He was a visiting researcher at the NYU School of Law (2009-2010 and 2015-2016) and at the Max Planck Institute, Germany (Summer of 2015). A full list of his publications is available at: https://asemkhalil.com/

Abir Kopty

Al-Shabaka policy member Abir Kopty, holds an MA in Political Communication from the City University, London, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include power dynamics in online communities and the use of social media networks for social and political activism.

Nora Lester Murad

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Nora Lester Murad is an adjunct associate professor at Fordham University. She is also the co-founder of Dalia Association, Palestine's first community foundation; and Aid Watch Palestine, a community-driven aid accountability initiative. She has published widely on the subjects of international aid and community philanthropy, including in The Guardian, Aljazeera, Huffington Post, OpenDemocracy, Counterpunch, and Mondoweiss, and on her blog: www.noralestermurad.com. Her first book, Rest in My Shade (November, 2018), is a poem about displacement featuring 18 Palestinian artists around the world.

Noura Mansour

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Noura Mansour is a Palestinian educator, writer, activist and community organizer, from Acre city. She studied Political Science and Education and received masters in International Relations from Haifa University. Noura has been involved in development and community work with NGOs in Jerusalem, West Bank and Palestine 48. She has worked with international NGOs and solidarity movements in Korea and Australia where she is now based and works in the Education sector. Noura is also a debate trainer and has taught and trained in many international forums in Asia, Middle East, Europe and Australia.

Mazen Masri

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Mazen Masri is a Senior Lecturer in law at the City Law School, City University London. His areas of research are constitutional law and public international law, and has published a number of articles and book chapters in these areas. Mazen holds degrees from the York University (Canada), the University of Toronto, and the Hebrew University. He is a qualified lawyer and has served in the past as legal advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Dina Matar

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Dina Matar is senior lecturer in political communication at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She works on the relationship between culture, communication and politics, with a special focus on Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. She is the author of “What it Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood” (Tauris, 2010); co-editor of “Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communication Practices in Palestine and Lebanon” (Taruis, 2013) and co-author of “The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication” (Hurst, 2014). Matar is also co-founding editor of the “The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication.”

Sami Miaari

Al-Shabaka Member Sami Miaari is a lecturer at the Department of Labor Studies at Tel-Aviv University, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A degrees in Economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with research focuses on labour economics, economic causes and consequences of conflict, including on the economic costs of political instability and the relationship between economic shocks and conflict, discrimination against ethnic minorities, economic inequality, and applied econometrics. Sami has served as an economic consultant for the World Bank, IMF and other international organizations, and founded the Arab Economic Forum in Israel in 2010.

Faysal Mikdadi

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Faysal is an author and educational consultant based in the United Kingdom. He has written extensively on education, literature and Palestine.  Faysal is the author of the novels Return and Tamra and a book of poetry, A Return: The Siege of Beirut, as well as two historical bibliographies on Gamal Abdel Nasser and Margaret Thatcher.

Tahani Mustafa

Al-Shabaka policy member Tahani Mustafa is currently an ESRC postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Economics’ (LSE) Department of International Relations. She is expanding her research on security governance in the Middle East. Based between the UK, Jordan and Palestine/Israel, she previously worked within the fields of development and security governance in the Middle East. She holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Raya Naamneh

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Raya Naamneh is a Palestinian student and activist from Arraba village in the Galilee. She is working on her B.A. in English Language and Literature at Haifa University and is deeply interested in colonial and post-colonial literature as well as intersectional politics as regards the experiences of women and the LGBTQ community around the world, with special focus on Palestinian society. She is an active member of al-Qaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society. She recently started working at Baladna – Association for Arab Youth in Haifa as a resources and project development coordinator.

Nadine Naber

Al-Shabaka policy member Nadine Naber is Associate Professor in the Gender and Women's Studies Program and the Global Asian Studies Program, and the founding faculty director of the Arab American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Nadine is author of Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (NYU Press, 2012). She is co-editor of the books Race and Arab Americans (Syracuse University Press, 2008); Arab and Arab American Feminisms, winner of the Arab American Book Award 2012 (Syracuse University Press, 2010); and The Color of Violence (South End Press, 2006). She has worked with groups like the Rasmea Odeh Defense Team, USACBI, AROC, and INCITE! Women of Color against Violence. She is currently an editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies; the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, and series within the University of Nebraska and the University of Washington Press. For more information, see: https://nadinenaber.com/.

Razi Nabulse

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Razi Nabulse is a political and social activist on Palestinian issues. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Haifa, and has worked in the field of journalism and media. Nabulse was editor of Israeli and international affairs, and has published a number of articles and policy papers on the Zionist project and the Palestinian national project in several journals and for different research institutions. He is currently a researcher and coordinator of the "Zionist Project" study program at the Palestinian Center for Policy Research and Strategic Studies (Masarat). He is an expert commentator on Israeli politics as well as the developments and transformations in the settler-colonial project.

Isra Namey

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Isra Namey is a journalist based in the Gaza Strip. Namey graduated from the Islamic university of Gaza in 2015, obtaining a degree in English Literature. She reports from Gaza and writes for Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, and al Jazeera English.

Nadim Nashif

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Nadim Nashif is the executive director and co-founder of 7amleh: The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media. Nadim is a committed Digital Rights Defender and long time community organizer, who has worked on youth and community development issues for over 20 years. Nadim founded and previously served as director of Baladna, The Association for Arab Youth. He founded and coordinated the youth wing of the Balad political party before becoming Director at the Committee for Educational Guidance for Arab students. He is also the co-founder of Wusol Digital Academy, a digital marketing educational center.

Maha Nassar

Al-Shabaka Member Maha Nassar is an assistant professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. She holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. Her book, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017) examines how Palestinian intellectuals in Israel have connected to global decolonization movements through literary and journalistic writings. Nassar is also a Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project. Her pieces have appeared in The Washington Post, The Conversation, Middle East Report and elsewhere.

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Basel Natsheh

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Basel Natsheh is an economist and the Head of Business administration department at Khawarizmi International Collage, UAE. He was the Dean of the Finance and Management Faculty at Hebron University. His main interests lie in developmental, labor, political and spatial economics. He is the author of several research papers about the informal economy and Palestinian labor.

Amal Nazzal

Dr. Amal Nazzal is Assistant Professor at the Business and Economics Faculty at Birzeit University, Palestine. She received her PhD from the University of Exeter, where she studied the relevance of Bourdieu’s theory of practice for relationally capturing various practices, mechanisms, and dynamics in socio-cultural organizations. In particular, she focused on politically-motivated social movements. She has also researched social capital, social networking theory, digital ethnography, and social media content analysis. She has worked closely with the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS) and 7amleh - the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media.

Moien Odeh

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Moien Odeh holds an LL.M degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and two Bachelor’s degrees from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Odeh has extensive experience in international humanitarian law, rule of law and human rights. Odeh conducted legal research and analysis of legal issues, focusing particularly on East Jerusalem neighborhoods and on planning and houses demolitions in Area C in the occupied West Bank.

Karam Omar

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Karam Omar is a legal researcher at the Institute of Law at Birzeit University. He has a masters in law from the University of Essex. Karam was also called to the English Bar by the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple in 2016.

Dina Omar

Dina Omar is a writer and a graduate student studying Anthropology at Yale. She is a founding member of Students for Justice in Palestine-National and serves on the National Executive Board of the Palestine Youth Movement.

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Fadi Quran

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Fadi Quran is a Senior Campaigner at Avaaz and a Popular Struggle community organizer. He previously served as UN Advocacy Officer with Al-Haq’s legal research and advocacy unit. Apart from his work in advocacy and international law, Fadi is also an entrepreneur in the alternative energy field, where he has founded two companies bringing wind and solar energy to Palestine and other countries in the region. Fadi holds degrees in Physics and International Relations from Stanford University.

Loubna Qutami

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Loubna Qutami is a Presidents Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a PhD from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Qutami is also the former Executive Director of the Arab Cultural and Community Center (ACCC) in San Francisco as well as a founder, member, and the former International General Coordinator for the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM).     

Kareem Rabie

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Kareem Rabie is a Senior Researcher and Marie Curie Fellow at the Center on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS), and Research Associate at the Oxford Program on the Future of Cities, University of Oxford. In September 2015 he will move to the University of Chicago as Harper Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences. Kareem received his PhD in anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is currently working on a manuscript based on dissertation research on new town development and the state building project in the West Bank, and beginning a new project on geographies of globalization under occupation, and the political economy of Palestine/China trade.

Tareq Sadeq

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Tareq Sadeq is a Palestinian refugee from Majdal Sadeq Village near Jaffa and currently lives in Ramallah. Tareq holds a Ph.D in economics from the University of Evry Val d’Essonne in France, where he was engaged in the Palestine solidarity movement and served as head of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS). Currently Tareq is assistant professor and director of the Applied Statistics program at Birzeit University. He has published on monetary policy, macroeconomics, econometrics, labour economics, income inequalities, and entrepreneurship. He is also a researcher in Palestine’s Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM).

Abaher El-Sakka

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Abaher El-Sakka is a sociologist with a PhD degree in Sociology, University of Nantes with distinction, 2005. He was a Researcher and lecturer at the University of Nantes from 1998 to 2006 and is currently a professor at Birzeit University at the department of social and behavioural sciences. He is also visiting professor at several universities in France and Belgium. His current research interest focuses on the social history and the historiography of the social sciences. He is currently writing on social history of Gaza under British colonisation.

Yasser Salah

Al-Shabaka Member Yasser Salah is a lawyer and researcher with a master's degree in democracy and human rights from Birzeit University. He has been a lawyer since 2004 as well as a legal consultant to Palestinian human rights organizations. Salah has worked with the Independent Commission for Human Rights since 2009. He served at the Palestinian Central Elections Commission, and took part with the Carter Center in monitoring Tunisian elections in 2011 and the Egyptian presidential elections in 2012. Salah is a trainer in the field of human rights, public freedoms and legislation.

Jamil Salem

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Jamil Salem is a legal scholar and the Director of the Institute of Law at Birzeit University. He gained his legal experience at different Austrian and international organizations, becoming fluent in English as well as his mother tongues of Arabic and German. He was recruited by Birzeit University in January 2005, where he started as an academic researcher and as the programs manager of the Institute of Law, before becoming director in August 2012. His research interests include the history of law, human rights, legal theory, socio-legal studies, law and politics, and rule of law studies and technologies of imperialism.

Zachariah Sammour

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Zachariah Sammour completed his undergraduate studies in law at the London School of Economics in 2012 and received his master's degree from Oxford University in 2013. He is particularly interested in international law, constitutional law, and constitutional theory.

Maxim Sansour

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Maxim Sansour is an elections specialist with a focus on electoral communications and media relations. Over the last nine years he has regularly advised election commissions in Palestine, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen. He also frequently works on media reform initiatives in the Middle East and most recently has been a communications advisor to the Libyan Constitutional Drafting Assembly. Maxim lives in London and holds an MBA from Baruch College in New York and an MA in Global Politics from the London School of Economics (LSE).

Jacqueline Sansour

Al-Shabaka Policy Member and Commissioning Editor Jacqueline Sansour is a writer and editor with extensive knowledge of the history, politics, and current affairs of the Middle East and North Africa. She has spent extended periods of time in the Arab world, including Palestine, Libya and Tunisia. Jacqueline holds an MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from SOAS in London.

Sherene Seikaly

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the editor of the Arab Studies Journal, co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine, and a member of the Journal of Palestine Studies Editorial Committee. Seikaly's Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body. She has published in academic journals such as International Journal of Middle East Studies and Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies as well as in online venues including Jadaliyya, Mada Masr, and 7iber.

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Aimee Shalan

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Aimee Shalan is Chief Executive of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). She was formerly Director of Fobzu (Friends of Birzeit University), a UK-based charity supporting the right to education for Palestinians, and Co-founder and Director of Pressure Cooker Arts, a not-for-profit arts and advocacy organisation. Before that she was Director of Advocacy at MAP and Head of Education at the Council for Arab British Understanding. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian and has written for a variety of media outlets. She taught at City University and Queen Mary, University of London, and has a doctorate in the Politics of Palestinian Literature.

Refqa Nabil Shaqour

Al-Shabaka Member Refqa Nabil Shaqour is a Belgium-based political scientist and writer. Born in Nablus, she holds a BA in political science, a master's degree in planning and political development from An-Najah National University in Palestine, and a master's degree in media and public relations from Cairo University. In addition to publishing political and cultural research papers in Arabic periodicals, her book "The Influence of Hezbollah in the Evolution of Resistance Ideology and Methods in the Arab Region" was published in 2010. She is a regular contributor to Al-Arab newspaper and Al-Jadid cultural magazine, and is a member of PEN International, the Flemish Branch in Belgium, as well as a researcher at the Egyptian Institute for Political and Strategic Studies in Turkey. Shaqour is currently pursuing her doctorate degree.

Omar Yousef Shehabi:

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Omar Yousef Shehabi is the founder of Palestine Works, a nonprofit organization which produces alternative and effective advocacy for Palestinian rights. He has served as a legal officer with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), a legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team, and an adjunct lecturer in international law at Birzeit University. Previously, he worked as a labor lawyer in the United States, representing labor unions and employees. His current research interests include historical and contemporary Palestinian diplomatic and consular practice.

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Ibrahim Shikaki

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Ibrahim Shikaki is an Economics PhD Student at the New School for Social Research in New York. He was previously lead economic researcher for Diakonia’s International Humanitarian Law Research Center  and instructor of economics at the universities of Birzeit and Al Quds. He also worked as a research associate at the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS). His recent writings include work on UNCTAD’s The Palestinian economy in East Jerusalem: Enduring annexation, isolation and disintegration; “Between Marshall and Kerry: economic plans with political engines” in Al Hadaf Magazine; and development as a tool for resistance with Alaa Tartir in Bisan Research Center’s “Critical studies of development in Palestine.”

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Belal Shobaki

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Belal Shobaki is the Head of the Department of Political Science at Hebron University, Palestine. He is a member of the American Political Studies Association and has published on Political Islam and identity. Shobaki is the former Editor-in-Chief of Alwaha Newspaper in Malaysia. He was also a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at An-Najah National University and the Head of the studies Unit at the Palestinian Centre for Democracy and Studies.

Maisa Shquier

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Maisa Shquier is an activist and D.Phil candidate at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex/UK. Her ethnographic research investigates the intersection between gender, sexuality, nation, body politics and embodiment. Specifically, it examines the gendered and sexualized representations of Palestine, through a discourse analysis of the “New Historians” and the visual images of Palestine. She has 10 years of development experience with local and International NGOs in monitoring and evaluating projects in gender, disability, health, food security, water and sanitation and civil society. She has worked on policy formation on gender, disability, sexuality, masculinity, and women’s political participation in the Middle East.

Zaid Shuaibi

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Zaid Shuaibi is the Arab World and Palestine Coordinator for the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). He holds an MA in International Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where his research focused on China and East Asia relations with Israel and its effect on the region, as well as a BA in Public Administration from Birzeit University. Zaid previously served as the BDS National Committee Outreach Officer in Palestine and the Arab World.     

Nidal Sliman

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Nidal Sliman has more than 15 years of experience in international law, human rights, and international trade and development. He received his LL.B and LL.M degrees in law from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1996 and 1999, and completed a PhD in law summa cum laude from Notre Dame University in 2008. He worked as a legal advisor at the Negotiations Support Unit and advised UNESCO and the Palestinian Authority on legislative reforms to protect Palestinian cultural heritage. He is the Policy Reform Team Leader on the Palestinian Investment Climate Improvement Project focusing on business-enabling environment and trade reforms.

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Joanna Springer

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Joanna Springer is a researcher on development policy and governance reform in the Middle East.  She has carried out research and worked for local organizations in Morocco, Qatar and the West Bank.  Currently, Joanna is research advisor for a rule of law advancement project in the Arab Gulf.  She holds a Master’s of Public Policy and Administration from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst with a focus in economic development.

Photo of Mayssun Succarie
Mayssun Succarie

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Mayssun Succarie is a postdoctoral scholar in the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University. Her research covers the Political Culture of Development in the Global South with a focus on the Arab region. She taught for three years at the American University of Beirut in the departments of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies as well as the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies. In 2012, she was the ARCAPITA visiting Professor at the Middle East, South Asia and African Studies-MESAAS at Columbia University. Mayssun has a doctorate in Anthropology and Education from the University of California, Berkeley.

Tamara Tamimi

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Tamara Tamimi is a Palestinian born in Jerusalem. Tamara holds a B.Sc in Biology with a minor in English Literature from Birzeit University, and an MA in Human Rights Law from SOAS, University of London, where she focused on women’s empowerment and the Palestine question. Tamara currently works as a project coordinator at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy - MIFTAH, where she handles projects and activities relevant to fiscal policy and social justice, and the dissemination of the Palestinian narrative. She has previously worked with a number of civil society organisations, including the Teacher Creativity Centre, Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development, Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, Palestinian Vision Organisation, and Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.

Osama Tanous

Al-Shabaka Member Osama Tanous is a specialized pediatrician based in Haifa. He is currently pursuing a Masters in Public Health and is a researcher for the Galilee Society: The Arab National Society for Health, Research and Services. Osama is a 2020 candidate for the Fulbright Hubert Humphrey fellowship in public health and health policies. His research interests include structural violence and health disparities.

Hala Turjman

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Hala Turjman holds a BA in Political Science from Birzeit University and Sciences Po Rennes, and an MA degree in EU International Relations and Diplomacy Studies from the College of Europe, specialized in Security and Justice. Her dissertation was a critique of EU development aid policy, gender mainstreaming and the implementation of UNSCR 1325 in Palestine. Hala was a Schuman Fellow at the European Parliament in the Middle East Unit. She is currently a researcher at the European Institute of Peace, focusing on situations of conflict in the MENA region, mainly in Syria and Libya. In past years Hala has also taken part in a number of grassroots campaigns and community initiatives in Palestine.

Randa Wahbe

Al-Shabaka Member Randa Wahbe is a graduate student in anthropology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on how Palestinian dead bodies are exploited by the Israeli state to facilitate its settler-colonial expansion. Before starting her PhD, Randa coordinated international advocacy efforts for Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association in Ramallah for three years. She also holds an M.P.H. in Epidemiology from the Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a B.A. in International Development from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is a founder of Students for Justice in Palestine at both universities.

Jeremy Wildeman

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Jeremy Wildeman ​is a Research Associate at the University of Bath's "Department of Social and Policy Sciences" where he is carrying out research on donor policy towards the Palestinians. Previously he completed a PhD on Canadian and foreign development aid towards the Palestinians, and has collaborated on a number of past research projects on Palestinian development, economy and NGOs. He also has substantial past experience with the Palestinian NGO sector, including co-founding the Nablus-based youth ​development charity ​"Project Hope​.​"

Photo of Rena Zuabi
Rena Zuabi

Al-Shabaka Policy Member Rena Zuabi previously designed and managed development programs throughout historic Palestine focused on sustainable agriculture, rural livelihoods, and inclusive market systems for a range of community organizations, as well as international agencies and charities. Bridging her experiences in the private, public, and civil society sectors around the world, she now advocates for the researching and prototyping of social enterprise models and advocacy initiatives that create new trajectories towards durable community self-sufficiency and self-determination in local development. Rena holds an MBA, Cambridge University and a BA, UC San Diego.

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