“6 Days, 50 Years: 1967 and the Politics of Time” at UC Berkeley

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Middle East war, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley is hosting a panel discussion, keynote address, and reception on April 28, 2017 to address this significant milestone through the meta narrative of “6 Days, 50 Years: 1967 and the Politics of Time.”

PANEL DISCUSSION
April 28, 2017, 10 am-1 pm
340 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley

A panel of experts will reflect on how horizons of the future were differently produced after ’67 across different disciplines.

Joel Beinin (Stanford University)
Smadar Ben Natan (UC Berkeley, Tel Aviv University)
Leena Dallasheh (Humboldt State University)
Sreemati Mitter (Brown University)

Moderated by Emily Gottreich, Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University. He received his A.B. from Princeton University and his M.A. from Harvard University, and his A.M.L.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He also studied at the American University of Cairo and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has lived in Egypt and Israel. He has taught Middle East history at Stanford University since 1983. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. His research and writing focuses on workers, peasants, and minorities in the modern Middle East and on Israel, Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Beinin has written or edited nine books, most recently Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa and The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt. His articles have been published in leading scholarly journals as well as The Nation, Middle East Report, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Le Monde Diplomatique, and others. He has appeared on Al-Jazeera TV, BBC radio, National Public Radio, and many other TV and radio programs throughout North America, and in France, Egypt, Singapore, and Australia, and has given frequent interviews to the global media. In 2002 he served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.

Smadar Ben Natan is a prominent lawyer in the fields of human rights, criminal law, and public law, and specializes in human rights litigation, political trials, immigration and asylum, torture, prisoners’ rights, and feminist litigation. She is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society, and a Ph.D. candidate at the Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law. Her current research is titled “Models of Criminal Enemy Adjudication: Armed Conflict, Martial Law and Criminal Law.” Ben Natan received her LLB from Tel Aviv University and her MSt in International Human Rights Law from University of Oxford, with distinction. Her recent publications include The Applicable Law in Israeli Military Courts, a sourcebook for practicing lawyers (Arabic, Hebrew 2008; English 2010) and “Are There Prisoners in This War?” (in Baker and Matar, eds., Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel. Pluto Press. 2011).  

Leena Dallasheh is Assistant Professor of History at Humboldt State University, where she teaches the history, politics and geography of the Middle East, colonialism, and settler-colonialism. Dallasheh received her PhD from the joint History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies program at New York University. Her forthcoming manuscript, Contested Citizenship in Nazareth: Palestinians’ Transition from the Mandate to Israel, focuses on the social and political history of Nazareth from 1940 to 1966, tracing how Palestinians who remained in Israel in 1948 negotiated their incorporation in the state, affirming their rights as citizens and their identity as Palestinian. Dallasheh also holds a law degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Sreemati Mitter is the Kutaiba alGhanim Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She is completing her first book, A History of Money in Palestine: From the 1900s to the Present. Her work examines the economic and monetary dimensions of statelessness. Her broader academic interests include the economic, social, and political history of the modern Middle East. Mitter was a post-doctoral research fellow in history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, at the Toulouse School of Economics in Toulouse, France. She received a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, a Master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA in Economics from Middlebury College. She previously worked for the Palestine Investment Fund in Ramallah, Palestinian Territories and at Credit Suisse in New York, for the Energy and Project Finance Group of its Investment Banking Division.

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
April 28, 2017, 3:30-5:00 pm
340 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley
Reception to follow

“Taking the Land Without the People: International Law and the 1967 War”
Keynote Address by Noura Erakat

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and Assistant Professor at George Mason University. Her research interests include the laws of war, human rights law, refugee law, national security law, social justice, Palestine, the Palestinian-Israel conflict, and the Middle East in general. She is a Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and an Editorial Committee member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Prior to joining GMU’s faculty, she was a Freedman Teaching Fellow at Temple Law School and has taught International Human Rights Law and the Middle East at Georgetown University since 2009. She served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, chaired by Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich. Her scholarly publications include: “U.S. vs. ICRC-Customary International Humanitarian Law and Universal Jurisdiction” in the Denver Journal of International Law & Policy, “New Imminence in the Time of Obama: The Impact of Targeted Killings on the Law of Self-Defense” in the Arizona Law Review, and “Overlapping Refugee Legal Regimes: Closing the Protection Gap During Secondary Forced Displacement,” in the Oxford Journal of International Refugee Law . Noura’s media appearances include CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, PBS NewsHour, BBC World Service, NPR, Democracy Now, and Al Jazeera. She has published in The Nation, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, IntlLawGrrls, The Hill, and Foreign Policy, among others. Noura is the co-editor of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures, an anthology related to the 2011 and 2012 Palestine bids for statehood at the UN. Most recently, Noura released a pedagogical project on the Gaza Strip and Palestine. The centerpiece of the project is a short multimedia documentary, Gaza In Context, that rehabilitates Israel’s wars on Gaza within a settler-colonial framework. She is also the producer of the short video, Black Palestinian Solidarity. Noura is currently working on a book project tentatively titled, Law as Politics in the Palestinian-Israel Conflict.