2024 Annual Conference: Gaza Genocide and the Continuation of the Nakba

Mustafa Barghouti (virtual)

Dr Mustafa Barghouti is the secretary general and co-founder of the Palestinian National Initiative (PNI) – also known as al-Mubadara. A physician by practice, he has been a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) since 2006 and is also a member of the Palestinian Central Council (PCC). In 2007 he served as minister of information in the Palestinian unity government. He ran for president in the 2005 presidential election, coming second after Mahmoud Abbas. Barghouti has worked extensively on defending human rights and internal democracy, and is the founder and chairman of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS).

Lily Greenberg Call

Lily Greenberg Call is a former Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff at the Department of Interior. She has nearly a decade of experience in politics, movement organizing, and domestic and international human rights work. She worked on Vice President Harris’ 2020 primary campaign and President Biden’s 2020 campaign and served in the Biden administration until May 15, 2024, when she became the first Jewish political appointee to resign in protest of US policy in Gaza. Lily grew up doing pro-Israel lobbying work with AIPAC in high school and college. She was the president of the AIPAC affiliate group at her undergraduate, UC Berkeley. Through her work in international human rights investigations, refugee aid, and time spent in Israel/Palestine, she became invested in Palestinian human rights and Jewish anti-occupation movements. Her resignation in protest from the Biden Administration came after months of attempting to use her experience as a Jewish person with both Israeli and Palestinian loved ones, who was impacted by the events of October 7th, to convince the administration to change course. Lily has appeared as a guest on MSNBC, CNN, NBC, and given commentary and written articles for The Washington Post, Politico, The Guardian, and Truthout. Lily resides in Washington, D.C. She is a runner, avid outdoorswoman, cook, and music and art connoisseur. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley.

Josh Paul

Josh Paul is a Director at A New Policy. He resigned from the State Department in October, 2023 due to his disagreement with the Biden Administration’s decision to rush lethal military assistance to Israel in the context of its war on Gaza. He had previously spent over 11 years working as a Director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, which is responsible for U.S. defense diplomacy, security assistance, and arms transfers. He previously worked on security sector reform in both Iraq and the West Bank, with additional roles in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, U.S. Army Staff, and as a Military Legislative Assistant for a Member of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee. Josh grew up between London and New York, and holds Masters degrees from the Universities of Georgetown and St Andrews, Scotland. He is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the organization Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) and a recipient of the 2023 Callaway Award for Civic Courage and 2024 MedGlobal Award for Courage.

Raz Segal

Dr. Raz Segal is an Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and he was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2023). His publications include Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2016), and he served as guest editor of the Hebrew-language special issue on Genocide: Mass Violence and Cultural Erasure of Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (2018). He is at work on a book on the distortion, weaponization, and mobilization of Holocaust history in the reproduction of white supremacy and state violence, including a focus on Israel’s assault on Palestinians from the 1948 Nakba to the current genocidal assault on Gaza. In addition to scholarly publications, he has published op-eds, book reviews, and larger articles on genocide, state violence, and memory politics in Hebrew, English, and German in The Guardian, LA Times, The Nation, Jewish Currents, +972 Magazine, Time Magazine, Forward, and Berliner Zeitung, and he has appeared on Counter Points, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English, Democracy Now! and ABC News.

Abdelhamid Siyam

Abdelhamid Siyam, concurrently, is a lecturer of Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University, in New Jersey. Siyam was an international staff of the United Nations (UN) for over 25 years, He served as Political Affairs Officer, Information Officer at the Office of the Spokesman for the Secretary-General, Spokesman for the UN Mission in Western Sahara, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Iraq and chief of Radio and News Centre at the “Department of Public Information.” He survived the bombing of UN HQ in Baghdad 2003 after which he decided to change course and quit the UN. Since 2014 Siyam became the Bureau Chief of Alquds Alarabi at the United Nations. He writes a weekly article in the same paper dealing with international affairs, UN-related crises and conflicts in the Middle East. In October 2010, he published his book called That Unforgettable Day ذلك اليوم العصيب, in memory of his colleagues killed in the bombing of UN Headquarters in Baghdad on August 19, 2003. In collaboration with the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, he just published three books on UN Mediations in the Crises of Libya, Syria and Yemen. He just completed a new book about his experience in 6 UN entitled: Walking Through Landmines- working for 6 UN field Missions.

Mustafa Barghouti (virtual)

Khaled Elgindy

Khaled Elgindy is a senior fellow and director of the Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute (MEI). He is the author of the new book, Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump, published by Brookings Institution Press in April 2019. Elgindy previously served as a resident scholar in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution from 2010 through 2018. Prior to arriving at Brookings, he served as an adviser to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah on permanent status negotiations with Israel from 2004 to 2009 and was a key participant in the Annapolis negotiations of 2007-08. Elgindy has held a number of political and policy-related positions in Washington, DC, both inside and outside of government, including as a professional staff member for the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee in 2002 and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) from 2000-2002. He has also held positions at the Arab American Institute (AAI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI). Elgindy holds an M.A. degree in Arab Studies from Georgetown University (1994) and a B.A. in Political Science from Indiana University-Bloomington (1991).

Laila Al-Arian

Laila Al-Arian is a Washington DC-based journalist and the executive producer of Fault Lines, an award-winning current affairs program on Al Jazeera English. She began her time on the program as a producer, making documentaries on subjects ranging from the Trump administration’s Muslim ban to the impact of the heroin epidemic on children and an investigation into factory conditions producing garments for Walmart and Gap in Bangladesh. Most recently, she was the executive producer and co-writer of The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza, a feature-length documentary produced by Al Jazeera English. For her work, she has been honored with two News and Documentary Emmys, a Peabody, George Polk, Robert F Kennedy Award in journalism, and Overseas Press Club award. She has been nominated for 21 News and Documentary Emmys. Prior to joining Fault Lines, Laila worked for the news department at Al Jazeera English, covering stories such as Guantanamo Bay’s youngest detainee and the re-settlement of Iraqi refugees in the U.S. She received a BA in English literature from Georgetown University and an M.S. from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. 

Katie Halper

Katie Halper is a journalist, filmmaker, and podcast host. She hosts the podcast, YouTube show and radio show, The Katie Halper Show, and co-hosts the podcast and YouTube show, Useful Idiots. Katie was fired from The Hill’s Rising, where she had been a weekly guest and occasional host for over two years, after writing a monologue arguing that Israel is an apartheid state. She is working on a documentary about Jewish Holocaust survivors speaking out against the genocide in Gaza.

Ryan Grim

Ryan Grim is a longtime D.C. reporter, breaking news from the halls of Congress and leading the Washington bureaus for The Intercept and HuffPost. At HuffPost, he led a team that was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won once. Grim has spent years chronicling the rise of progressives in Congress, and his most recent book is The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution, which followed his best-selling We’ve Got People. He’s also the author of the 2009 book This Is Your Country On Drugs.

Said Arikat

Said Arikat is a Member of the Palestine Center Committee and the Washington bureau chief for the Palestinian newspaper al-Quds, a daily for which he is a writer, columnist, and analyst. He previously served as spokesman and director of public information for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq and currently teaches as an adjunct professor at American University in Washington, DC.