The Gaza Lecture Series : Gaza, Israel's System of Domination and U.S. Complicity

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh

Description:
Join us for an important discussion with Nathan Thrall, 2024 Nonfiction Pulitzer Prize Winner, on how decades of failed U.S. policies and Israel’s system of domination have shaped this moment in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Situating Gaza in the context of Israel’s apartheid, Thrall will delve into what he describes as full U.S. complicity for ongoing war crimes and the paradigmatic shift needed among those who claim to support a peaceful and just resolution of the conflict.

Speaker:
Nathan Thrall received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Time, The Economist and fifteen other publications. Thrall is also the author of the critically acclaimed essay collection The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books and been translated into more than two dozen languages. Thrall’s writing has been cited in the United Nations Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council, as well as in reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. He has been described as “one of the best-informed and most trenchant observers of the conflict” (Financial Times), “an American analyst with a severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time), and the author of a series of articles “that have defined the new intellectual and political parameters for what is increasingly recognized as Israel-Palestine’s one-state (or post-two-state) reality” (The New York Review of Books). Thrall’s commentary is often featured in print and broadcast media, including the Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now!, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, PRI, Reuters, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College. He lives in Jerusalem.

Moderator:
Dr. Nader Hashemi is the Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and an Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He obtained his doctorate from the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and previously was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the UCLA Global Institute. Dr. Hashemi was previously the founding Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. While there, he was also Co-Director of the Religion and International Affairs certificate program, as well as the Political Theory Initiative. His intellectual and research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics and political theory, in particular debates on the global rise of authoritarianism, religion and democracy, secularism and its discontents, Middle East and Islamic politics, democratic and human rights struggles in non-Western societies and Islam-West relations. He is the author of Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (Oxford University Press, 2009) and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (Melville House, 2011), The Syria Dilemma (MIT Press, 2013), Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2017) and a four-volume study on Islam and Human Rights: Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies (Routledge, 2023). He is frequently interviewed by PBS, NPR, CNN, Al Jazeera, Pacifica Radio, Alternative Radio and the BBC and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Al Jazeera Online, CNN.com among other media outlets.