Questioning Power: State Department Briefings on Palestine
Said Arikat: In Conversation with Bassam Haddad and Noura Erakat
Al-Quds Correspondent in Washington DC, Prominent Presence at State Department Briefings
Said Arikat has been the Washington Bureau Chief of the prominent Al Quds Daily Newspaper and an adjunct professor at American University. Currently, his reporting centers around the United States Department of State. He is a frequent guest on Arab Satellite TV as commentator on U.S politics, and its foreign and security policies.
From the summer of 2005, he served as the United Nations Chief Spokesman for Iraq and was based in Baghdad 2005-2010. He traveled and worked in every region/city in Iraq and became intimately involved with the Constitution and the 10 different national and regional elections that occurred during his tenure there. Said holds a B.S degree from the University of San Francisco and an M.S degree from California State University in Long Beach.
In this conversation, Said addresses comparatively his years of experience during foreign policy briefings, notably on Palestine, at the US State Department and White House, with focus on the current war on Gaza. We will feature heated exchanges with DOS representatives that became emblematic of strategies of evasion, double standards, and misinformation.
Moderators
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick Department of Africana Studies. Her research interests include humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, and critical race theory. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law As Politics in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). She is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and an Editorial Committee member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, as a Legal Advocate for the Badil Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as the national grassroots organizer and legal advocate at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura is the coeditor 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. More recently, Noura released a pedagogical project on the Gaza Strip and Palestine, which includes 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." She is a frequent commentator, with recent appearances on CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, among others, and her writings have been widely published in the national media and academic journals.
Bassam Haddad is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding the Syrian Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).
