The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies presents: Professor Joel Beinin on "War Crimes and Historical Context: Understanding the 2023 Hamas-Israel War."

Confronting unexpected events of great magnitude, people often resort to historical comparison to understand what they are witnessing or experiencing. Are Hamas Nazis, ISIS (Da’esh), or “human animals” as Israeli political and military leaders have asserted in explaining Hamas’s mass slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023? Has Israel illegally inflicted collective punishment on the people of the Gaza Strip by imposing a siege after Hamas won a democratic election for the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006? Historical context allows us to understand terrorism and war crimes without justifying them. But what is the appropriate context?

Speaker: Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1982 before coming to Stanford in 1983.  From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo.  In 2002 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.

Beinin’s research and writing focus on the social and cultural history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel and on US policy in the Middle East. He has written or edited twelve books, most recently A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa (Stanford University Press, 2020) co-edited with Bassam Haddad and Sherene Seikaly; Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2015); and Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, 2nd edition (Stanford University Press, 2013) co-edited with Frédéric Vairel.

His articles have been published in leading scholarly journals in English and French as well as South Atlantic Quarterly, Socialist Register, Carnegie Papers, The Nation, Le Monde Diplomatique, Middle East Report, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He has been interviewed on Al-Jazeera TV, BBC radio, Skye TV, Radio France International, Australian and US National Public Radio, and many other TV and radio programs throughout the world as well by the global print media.