U.S. President Joe Biden is in Israel today, where he pledged support for the U.S. ally amid its war against Hamas and announced plans for an aid package to Israel and humanitarian aid to Gaza and the West Bank. The announcement and trip comes one day after a deadly strike on a Gaza hospital, which killed 471 people, injured hundreds more and renewed calls from humanitarian organizations to protect civilians.
Faculty experts at the George Washington University are available to provide context, historical analysis and explanation to the conflict and war between Israel and Hamas as well as the humanitarian, medical, and human rights concerns that are intensifying in the region. If you would like to speak to an expert, please contact GW Media Relations at [email protected].
Humanitarian and Medical Crisis
Ilana Feldman is a professor of anthropology, history, and international affairs. Her research has focused on the Palestinian experience, both inside and outside of historic Palestine, examining practices of government, humanitarianism, policing, displacement, and citizenship. She is the author of Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-67, Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule, Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics; and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care.
Ramin Asgary, professor of global health and director of Humanitarian Health MPH, is a health services researcher and public health educator and practitioner. Asgary started working in humanitarian settings and complex emergencies with multiple humanitarian agencies and Doctors Without Borders-MSF in the mid 90s as field physician, medical coordinator, director, and senior health and research advisor in more than two dozen projects and missions in regions including Eurasia/Former Soviet States, Sub-Saharan/East/South Africa, South/Central America, and often in conflict or refugee settings.
Michael Barnett, University Professor of International Affairs and Political Science, is an expert on international affairs, global governance, global ethics, humanitarianism, the Middle East and the United Nations. Barnett’s current research projects include an edited volume and the changing forms of global governance; hierarchies in humanitarian governance; the end of the two state-solution and the rise of the one-state reality in Israel and Palestine; and the relationship between suffering and progress in the liberal international order.
Historical and Conflict Context
Walter Reich is the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior as well as a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. A champion of the protection of global human rights for fifty years, Reich is a leading scholar who has written and lectured on the Holocaust and genocide, antisemitism, terrorism, human rights, national memory, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, medical ethics and national and international affairs.
Ned Lazarus is a full-time professor of International Affairs and an Israel Institute Teaching Fellow. Lazarus is an expert in Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Conflict Analysis and Resolution, Dialogue, Evaluation and Peace Education. Lazarus has conducted evaluative studies of peace building initiatives on behalf of USAID, USIP, the EU and the US Department of State. He previously served as the Middle East Program Director for Seeds of Peace in Jerusalem.
Arie Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies and an associate professor of history. Trained in Israel and the U.S., he is a historian of twentieth century Jewish and Israeli history, with emphasis on the history of political thought, the study of nationalism, decolonization and partition politics, and with a subsidiary interest in the history of Israeli popular culture.
Iran and Middle East Relations
Sina Azodi is a professorial lecturer at the GW Elliott School of International Affairs. His research interests include international security, nuclear nonproliferation, and U.S.-Iranian relations. Specifically, Azodi’s areas of expertise include international relations of the Middle East, Iranian foreign policy, U.S.-Iranian relations, and Iran's nuclear program.
U.S. Foreign Policy
Gordon Gray, Kuwait Professor of Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Affairs is a retired Ambassador. Gray is an expert in Diplomacy and Statecraft and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Gray served the US government for 35 years with many foreign assignments.
Misinformation
David Broniatowski is an associate professor of engineering management and systems engineering and the associate director for the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politic at the George Washington University. Broniatowski is also GW’s lead principal investigator of a newly launched, NSF-funded institute called TRAILS that explores trustworthy AI. Recently, he published a study in Science Advances surrounding misinformation and effective policies related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The research team analyzed Facebook’s efforts to combat Covid-19 vaccine misinformation during the pandemic and found that not only were Facebook’s policies not effective in combating misinformation, but that Facebook’s efforts were undermined by the core design features of the platform itself. Broniatowski can discuss a number of topics related to combating misinformation online, including the challenges of tackling misinformation and how messages spread.
Impact of Media & Images
Babak Bahador is an associate research professor and director of the Media and Peacebuilding Project at GW. Bahador has taught and researched in the areas of media, peace and conflict, political communication and public diplomacy since 2006. He can discuss how media coverage and images are playing an important role in the Israel-Hamas.
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