Can We Talk About Israel/Palestine?

Marsin Alshamary is a scholar of Middle Eastern politics, with a primary focus on religious institutions, civil society, and protest movements. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled: A Century of the Iraqi Hawza: How Clerics Shaped Protests and Politics in Modern Day Iraq, which explores the historical and contemporary interactions between the Shi’a religious establishment and protest movements. Her research has been published in academic journals, including The Journal of Democracy, and she has provided commentary to various media outlets such as Agence France-Presse, Al Jazeera, BBC, The Associated Press, Vox Media, The Washington Post, and Reuters. Alshamary has also consulted for organizations like the United Nations, USAID, and the World Bank. She is a faculty associate in the Islamic Civilization and Societies Program at Boston College. She is also a research affiliate with the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. She holds a doctorate in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Dr. Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski is the Kraft Family Professor and Director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning. He is a scholar of Jewish-Christian relations and comparative theology and the author of The More Torah, The More Life: A Christian Commentary on Mishnah Avot and Christian Memories of the Maccabean Martyrs. His research interests include Jewish-Christian relations ancient and modern, comparative theology, the intersection of anti-Judaism and racism, and Anglican theologies of religion.

Peter Krause is an Associate Professor of political science at Boston College and a Research Affiliate with the MIT Security Studies Program. He is the author of Rebel Power: Why National Movements Compete, Fight, and Win (Cornell University Press, 2017), and co-editor of Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (Columbia University Press, 2020). His research and teaching focus on Middle East politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rebels and revolution, national movements, and peace-building. He is a former Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, and Uppsala University.  

Jonathan Laurence received a B.A., summa cum laude, from Cornell University, a C.E.P. at Sciences Po, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. His principal areas of teaching and research are comparative politics and religion and politics in Western Europe, Turkey, and North Africa. Laurence's latest book is Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism and the Modern State (Princeton University Press, 2021). Previously, The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims, was published by Princeton University Press in 2012, and received awards for Best Book in religion and politics and migration and citizenship from the American Political Science Association. His first book, Integrating Islam: Religious and Political Challenges in Contemporary France, co-authored with Justin Vaïsse, was published by Brookings Institution Press (2006) and Odile Jacob (2007) and named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine. Laurence is an affiliate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard. His Ph.D. thesis in political science (Harvard, 2006) was awarded the American Political Science Association's Harold D. Lasswell Prize in 2006, as the best dissertation in public policy completed in 2004 or 2005. He is a former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, Wissenchaftszentrum Berlin, Transatlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund, Fafo Institute/Norwegian Research Council, LUISS University-Rome, Sciences Po-Paris and the Brookings Institution (nonresident, 2003-2018).