Halah Ahmad
Halah Ahmad is a policy researcher, writer, and policy communications expert. Most recently, she led legislative affairs as VP for Policy at the Jain Family Institute, an applied social science research institute based in New York City. Halah also served as the US Policy Fellow for Al-Shabaka, and has conducted strategic policy research for government agencies and NGOs in Greece, Albania, Germany, Palestine, and the US. Halah received her Masters in Public Policy from Cambridge University as a Harvard-Cambridge scholar. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vox, The LA Times, The Hill, USA Today and other outlets.
Hani Faris
Hani Faris is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He previously served at various universities, including Kuwait, Harvard, McGill, and Simon Fraser. He has written many academic articles and his books include Beyond the Lebanese Civil War. He has written more than twenty book chapters and over forty academic articles on such topics as Arab nationalism, the Middle East in world politics, Zionism, Lebanese politics, history of the Palestinian issue, and Third World development. Faris serves on the editorial board of Contemporary Arab Affairs and is president of the Board of Trans Arab Research Institute, (TARI).
Fateh Azzam
Fateh Azzam is the Director of the newly established Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University in Beirut, and Senior Policy Fellow at AUB’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy. Previously, he directed al-Haq (1987-1995), was Human Rights Officer at the Ford Foundation (1996-2003), Director of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo (2003-2006) and Middle East regional Representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights until July 2012. He is co-founder and former Board Chair of the Arab Human Rights Fund.
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.
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).
Fadia Rafeedie Khoury
Fadia Rafeedie Khoury is a Palestinian living in Los Angeles, originally from El-Bireh and Birzeit. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Yale Law School, where she was engaged in activism promoting Palestinian and Arab causes.
Dalal Yassine
Dalal Yassine is a lawyer and advocate for gender and human rights for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Dalal has previously worked with several Palestinian NGOs in Lebanon and formerly served as coordinator for The Right to Work Campaign for Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon. She is the co-author of The Legal Status of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon (2007) and completed a multi-site study titled The Empowerment of Women in Refugee Camps in Lebanon.
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.
Awad Hamdan
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Awad Hamdan is National Programs Director for American Muslims for Palestine.
