Speakers for the Palestinian Israeli Conflict

Speakers Continued

U.S. Policy
Feburary 19, 2004

Naseer Aruni (University of Massachusetts)
Dr. Naseer Aruri is Chancellor Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.  He is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Trans-Arab Research Institute (Boston), a member of the Executive committee of the Center for policy Analysis on Palestine (Washington, D.C.), and a member of the Board of Directors of the newly- established international Institute of Criminal Investigations (The Hague). He is a member of the Independent Palestinian Commission for the Protection of Citizens Rights (Ramallah) since its inception in January l994, a Founding Member of the Arab Organization for Human Rights, Cairo and Geneva in 1982, and a member of the editorial board of Third World Quarterly (London). He was also a member of the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch/Middle East, 1990-1992, and a three - term member of the Board of Directors of Amnesty International, USA, 1984-1990.

Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, he holds a Ph.D from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and he served on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (1965-1998). He appeared on radio and television including PBS, U.N. Radio, Monitor Radio, National Public Radio, CNN (Crossfire), Lehrer News Hour, Pacifica, ABC News, the BBC World Service, al-Jazeera, Radio Cairo, Radio Algeria, Radio Monte Carlo, and is often interviewed on several news outlets (such as the BBC) dealing with the Middle East throughout the world. He writes frequently for Middle East International (London), al-Hayat (London), al-Mustaqbal, (Beirut) and other dailies and weeklies.

His many publications include The Palestinian Resistance to Israeli Occupation (1970), Enemy of the Sun : Poems of Palestinian Resistance, with Edmund Ghareeb (1970),  Occupation : Israel Over Palestine (1983), The Obstruction of Peace : The U.S., Israel and the Palestinians (1995), and Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return ( Pluto, 2001). His next book, Dishonest Broker: The U.S. Role In Israel and Palestine, published (March, 2003) by South End Press in Cambridge, MA. He published numerous articles in scholarly journals and magazines, which appear in various languages.

Stephen Zunes (University of San Francisco)
Dr. Stephen Zunes is an associate professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. He also serves as a senior policy analyst and Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project and as a research associate at the Center for Global, International and Regional Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  A native of North Carolina, he received his PhD. from Cornell University, his M.A. from Temple University and his B.A. from Oberlin College.  He has taught and lectured widely, holding faculty positions at the Ithaca College, University of Puget Sound, and Whitman College.  He is an associate editor of Peace Review and is on the governing council of the International Peace Research Association.  He won the 2002 award as Peace Scholar of the Year from the Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Dr. Zunes is the author of scores of articles for scholarly and general readership on Middle Eastern politics, U.S. foreign policy, international terrorism, social movements, and human rights.  He is the principal editor of Nonviolent Social Movements (Blackwell Publishers) and the author of the recently-released Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press) and the forthcoming Western Sahara: Nationalism and Conflict in Northwest Africa (Syracuse University Press.)

The Israeli Right, Hamas, and Obstacles to Peace
February 26, 2004

Ilan Plege (Lafayette College)
Dr. Peleg earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from Tel Aviv University, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern University. He has been the Charles A. Dana Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College since 1990 and Chairman of the Department of Government and Law since 1985. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Berman Center for Jewish Studies. He has held appointments as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, Research Fellow at Princeton University, and Fellow-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Begin's Foreign Policy 1977-1983 : Israel's Move to the Right (1987); The Emergence of a Binational Israel: The Second Republic in the Making (1989); Patterns of Censorship Around the World (1993); Human Rights in the West Bank and Gaza: Politics and Legacy (1995), and many articles. He is frequently heard as a political commentator for CNN, Voice of America, and National Public Radio

Steve Niva (The Evergreen State College)
Steve Niva teaches international politics and Middle East Studies at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University and is an editorial associate of The Middle East Research and Information Project (merip.org), writes regularly for its magazine Middle East Report.   He frequently writes about and comments on current events and has had articles recently published in Middle East International , the Egyptian English language publication Al-Ahram Weekly, Counterpunch, Common Dreams, The Jordan Times and Peace Review .  He is currently working on a book length research project tracing the history of Palestinian suicide bombings in the cycle of violence and has published a number of articles on this topic.  He is also working on a research project on the relationship between the Middle East and globalization and wrote several articles related to the impact of the WTO on the region.  In addition to extensive travel in the region, he has lived and worked in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories on numerous occasions over the past two decades and has led political study tours to the region several times.  He works very closely with both Israeli and Palestinian peace and activist organizations.  He traveled to the region last summer as part of a tour organized by Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (ffipp.org) for which he is a regional representative.  The group met with many key players involved in this conflict, including one of the Israeli Knesset's very few Arab members, the former Israeli Intelligence Chief, Shlomo Gazit, and Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi as well spending considerable time with Palestinian and Israeli academics and peace activists. 

The title of my talk will be:
Palestinian Suicide Bombings in the Cycle of Violence:  Context, Ideology and Strategy

The organizations that Steve Niva spoke of are located here

Women's Movements and Peace Movements in Israel and Palestine
March 4, 2004

Therese Saliba is faculty of Third World feminist studies at The Evergreen State College and former Senior Fulbright scholar at Bethlehem University, West Bank.  She is co-editor of two recent collections, Gender, Politics, and Islam (Univ. Chicago Press, 2002) and Intersections:  Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women's Novels (Syracuse UP, 2002).  Her essays on Arab and Palestinian feminisms, postcolonial literature, media representations, and Arab American experience have appeared in numerous journals and collections, including Signs:  Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Arabs in America:  Building a New Future, Going Global:  The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, and Food for Our Grandmothers:  Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists.  She is also producer, with Tom Wright, of Checkpoint:  The Palestinians after Oslo (1997). 

Simona Sharoni (The Evergreen State College)
Simona Sharoni is currently the Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA), which is based at Evergreen State College.  She is also a founding member of Olympians for Peace in the Middle East and United for Peace -- Thurston County.

Sharoni holds a Ph.D. in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University and is the author of Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women's Resistance, Syracuse University Press, 1995. Dr. Sharoni has lived most of her life in Israel and has been involved in advocacy work on behalf of Israeli women's peace groups that struggled to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and in solidarity work with  Palestinian women in Israel, Palestine, and North America. She has written extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, gender and Middle East politics, and new directions in peace and conflict resolution studies. Her current research centers on the contribution of Republican political prisoners in peacebuilding in the North of Ireland and on the interplay between masculinity and militarization in Israel/Palestine, the North of Ireland and the United States.

Simona's research has been supported by grants from the American Association of University Women (AAUW), The United States Institute for Peace (USIP) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur  Foundation. She has served on the Board of Directors of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), and the Peace Studies Association (PSA) and the Consortium of Peace Research, Education and Development (COPRED).

The organizations that Simona Sharoni spoke about are located here

Local Peace Initiatives
Representatives from Local Organizations

Speakers 1

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