Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir

Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University. He is a columnist for al-Jazeera English and the author, most recently, of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (Random House, 2008), Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2009) and co-editor, with Gershon Shafir, of Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel (University of California, 2012).

Gershon Shafir is a professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego, where he is also the Director of the Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies and the Director of the UCSD Human Rights Minor. He is the author of Immigrants and Nationalists: Ethnic Conflict and Accommodation in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Latvia and Estonia and Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914, and co-author (with Yoav Peled) of Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenships.