In the first policy lab of 2022, Al-Shabaka’s Commissioning Editor, Nadim Bawalsa, is joined by Al-Shabaka's new Board President, Tareq Baconi, and Al-Shabaka’s Senior Analyst, Yara Hawari, to ponder these questions and more. 

Dr. Tareq Baconi serves as the president of the board of Al-Shabaka. He was Al-Shabaka's US Policy Fellow from 2016 - 2017. Tareq is the former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict at the International Crisis Group, based in Ramallah, and the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018). Tareq’s writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and the Washington Post, among others, and he is a frequent commentator in regional and international media. He is the book review editor for the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Dr. Yara Hawari is the Senior Analyst of Al-Shabaka. 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 a frequent political commentator writing for various media outlets including The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Al Jazeera English. She is also author of The Stone House, released in December 2021, a gripping novella that explores the power of intergenerational trauma in Palestine.

Nadim Bawalsa is Al-Shabaka’s Commissioning Editor. He is a historian of modern Palestine and has written on the emergence of Palestinian diaspora communities across Latin America in the early twentieth century.