Palestine, The Cause of Our Time

France and Israel‘s Genocide in Gaza

Alain Gresh in Conversation with Bassam Haddad

Friday, 31 October, 2025
1:00 PM EST | 8:00 PM Palestine

In this yearly sit-down interview in Paris (October 2025), Alain Gresh discusses Israel’s Genocide in Gaza and its reverberations in Europe, with a focus on France. Alain addresses Islamophobia, Antisemitism smears, “Palestinian State Recognition, and the trajectory of the French position on Palestine.

Gaza in Context Collaborative Teach-In Series

We are together experiencing a catastrophic unfolding of history as Gaza awaits a massive invasion of potentially genocidal proportions. This follows an incessant bombardment of a population increasingly bereft of the necessities of living in response to the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7. The context within which this takes place includes a well-coordinated campaign of misinformation and the unearthing of a multitude of essentialist and reductionist discursive tropes that depict Palestinians as the culprits, despite a context of structural subjugation and Apartheid, a matter of consensus in the human rights movement.

The co-organizers below are convening weekly teach-ins and conversations on a host of issues that introduce our common university communities, educators, researchers, and students to the history and present of Gaza, in context. 

Featuring

Alain Gresh is Publication Director of Orient XXI. A specialist in the Near East, he is the author of several books, including De quoi la Palestine est-elle le nom ?, Les Liens qui libèrent, 2010 and et Un chant d’amour. Israël-Palestine, une histoire française, with Hélène Aldeguer, éditions La Découverte, updated in 2023 by Liberalize. Among his latest books that have been translated in Arabic are الإسلام والجمهورية والعالم (Dar al Saqi: Beirut) and علام يطلق اسم فلسطين ؟ (الدوحة : المركز العربي للأبحاث ودراسة السياسات، 2012. He worked for Le Monde Diplomatique until 2015 and was his editor in chief from 1995 to 2005. Gresh is the author of the recent book, 7 octobre.: Palestine, un peuple qui ne veut pas mourir (2024).

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 is Executive Producer of Status Podcast Channel 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 Tragedy: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).