Ghada Karmi is Founding Patron of the Palestinian History Tapestry Project. She is a Palestinian, born in Jerusalem, who grew up in London after the 1948 Nakba. Ghada is a doctor of medicine, a writer, and academic. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, Exeter University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her articles on Palestine have appeared in a wide variety of publications. Her books include In Search of Fatima: a Palestinian story (2002), Married to another man: Israel’s dilemma in Palestine (2007), and Return: a Palestinian memoir (2015). [London]
Salman Abu Sitta, Founder and President of Palestine Land Society (www.plands.org), is dedicated to the documentation of Palestine’s land and people. He has authored six books on Palestine, including the compendium Atlas of Palestine 1917- 1966 (2010) (editions in English and Arabic), the Atlas of the Return Journey (editions in English, Arabic, English and Hebrew), and Mapping my Return: A Palestinian Memoir. He has authored over 300 papers and articles on Palestinian refugees, the Right of Return, the history of the Nakba, and human rights. Dr Abu Sitta is active in many academic, legal and human rights groups. [London]
Rita Giacaman is professor of public health at the Institute of Community and Public Health, Birzeit University, West Bank, occupied Palestinian territory. She founded the Institute in which she continues to work, currently on the development of measures which are relevant and appropriate for context in assessments of psycho-social health. She is also identifying ways in which interventions can generate active and positive steadfastness and resistance to ongoing war-like conditions, especially among children and young people. [Ramallah]
Akihiro Seita has been the WHO Special Representative at UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) HQ in Amman, Jordan, and Director of UNRWA’s the Health Programme since 2011. UNRWA provides primary health care to 5.5 million Palestine Refugees in five different locations (fields): Gaza, West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. UNRWA has 144 health centres with 3500 staff to respond to 9 to 10 million visitors every year. Dr Seita is in charge of this extensive provision of primary health care for Palestine refugees. [Amman]
Gil
l Yudkin is a retired General Practitioner who worked in inner London. In the 1960s, Gill worked in Tanzania as a VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) volunteer and went on to become a VSO volunteer selector. Work in the charitable sector continued after she retired from general practice, and Gill joined a small Jewish grant-giving charity – the British Shalom-Salaam Trust (BSST – www.bsst.org.uk) in 2008. Later that year, a visit to Israel/Palestine under the aegis of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions confirmed her determination to support Palestinian people living under the yoke of the Israeli occupation. She became chair of BSST in 2009. [London]
Naomi Klein is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker, known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization and of capitalism. Her books include No Logo (1999), The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate (2014), No is not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World we need (2017), and On Fire: The Burning case for a Green New Deal (2019). She is currently the Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. [USA]
Mazin Qumsiyeh teaches science at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities in occupied Palestine. He is founder and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and the Institute for Biodiversity Research at Bethlehem University (http://palestinenature.org). His books include Mammals of the Holy Land (1996), Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli/Palestinian Struggle (2004) (English, Spanish, and German), and Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of Hope and Empowerment (2011) (Arabic, English, French, forthcoming in Italian). Listen to Mazin’s 12 recommendations for good health. [Bethlehem]
Jon Snow: “The Palestinian History Tapestry represents a beautiful counterbalance to the images of Palestine and struggle that the modern world associates with the region. As a journalist I have reported often from the region and have never been left unaware of the rich Palestinian culture, together with the beauty of the land. I am proud to have become a Patron of the PHT Project and hope most fervently that it will play an ever-bigger part in widening the understanding of the culture and creativity of the Palestinian people.” [London]
Miriam Margolyes OBE, a well-known British-Australian actress and voice artist. She is a pro-Palestinian activist, having been a member of the British-based ENOUGH! coalition that seeks “a just settlement between Israelis and Palestinians”. She is also a signatory of Jews for Justice for Palestinians. Her many acting roles are in theatre, in film and television. She won a BAFTA Award for her role in The Age of Innocence and went on to take the role of the endearing Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter film series. [London/Australia]
Mary Nazzal-Batayneh is a barrister and social entrepreneur, whose career has focused on social justice. Named as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (WEF), and one of Forbes magazine’s “Most Powerful Arab Women”, she has been recognised for her legal activism, business success, and community impact. Mary is the founder of Landmark Hotels and founding partner of 17 Asset Management, which seeks to advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She is also one of the founders of the Palestine Legal Aid Fund (watch video here.) [Amman]
Ilan Pappé is the Director of the European Center for Palestine Studies and a fellow of the Institute of the Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. He was born in Haifa and received his BA from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and taught in the University of Haifa until 2007. In those years he was also the chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa. Since 2007, he teaches at the University of Exeter. Pappé is the author of twenty books and of many articles on the history of the Middle East in general and of Palestine in particular. Among his works are A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (2003); The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007); On Palestine (with Noam Chomsky) (2014). His most recent book is The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Israeli Occupation (2018). [Exeter]
Avi Shlaim is an Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Middle East Center at St Antony’s College. He has been at Oxford since 1987. He was born in Baghdad and grew up in Israel. He studied History at Cambridge and International Relations at the London school of Economics. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2006 and he was awarded a British Academy Medal for lifetime achievement in 2017. His books include Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988); War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History (1995); The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2014); Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (2007); and Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009). He is co-editor of The Cold War and the Middle East (1997); The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (2001, 2nd ed. 2007); and The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences (2012). Professor Shlaim is a frequent contributor to newspapers and commentator on radio and television on Middle Eastern affairs. [Oxford]
Mads Gilbert has worked extensively with solidarity medicine in Lebanon and occupied Palestine, in particular Gaza. He has joined the staff at al-Shifa Hospital during the Intifadas and during Israeli attacks on Gaza in 2006, 2008/09, 2012, 2014, and 2019. He has participated in and published numerous scientific papers on the medical consequences of military attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. He is a specialist in anesthesiology and Medical Director of the emergency medicine department at the University Hospital of North Norway, and Professor of emergency medicine at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. He is the author of the books ‘Eyes in Gaza‘ (2009) and ‘Night in Gaza’ (2014). [Tromsø]
Swee Ang was born in Penang, Malaysia, and studied medicine at the University of Singapore. She became a political refugee in 1977 and joined her husband in exile in the UK. She is the first woman orthopaedic consultant appointed to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, which was founded in 1123. In the 1980s and early 1990s , she took time out to work as a trauma surgeon in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. She co-founded the British charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. Dr Ang is co-author of ‘War Surgery ‘and ‘Acute Care of the War Wounded’. In ‘From Beirut to Jerusalem’ she documented her experiences working in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. A brief account of her personal story is told in her TED talk entitled ‘Making a small difference’ [Ang Swee Chai/TEDxUCLWomen] [London]
Nur Masalha is a Palestinian historian, former Director of the Centre for Religion and History at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, UK, and currently Professor and member of the Centre for Palestine Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He is Editor of the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies: http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/hls, and the author of many books on Palestine-Israel, including: Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (2018); An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba (2018, with Nahla Abdo); Theologies of Liberation in Palestine: Contextual, Indigenous and Post-Colonial Perspectives (2014); The Zionist Bible: Biblical Precedent, Colonialism and the Erasure of Memory (2013); The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (2012); The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-colonialism in Palestine-Israel (2007); Catastrophe Remembered: Palestine, Israel and the Internal Refugees (2005); The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem (2003); A Land Without a People (1997); Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (1992). [London]
Eugene Rogan is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford and Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He took his B.A. in economics from Columbia University, New York, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Middle Eastern History from Harvard University, Boston. He taught at Boston College and Sarah Lawrence College before taking up his post in Oxford in 1991. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He is author of The Arabs: A History (2009, 2017) and The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (2015). With Avi Shlaim he edited The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (2001, 2007). His books have been published in 18 languages. [Oxford]
Ramzy Baroud was born in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza Strip. He is a Palestinian-American journalist, an internationally syndicated columnist, media consultant. He has taught mass communication in Australia’s Curtin University of Technology, Malaysia Campus. He has authored or edited six books and has contributed to many more. His books include My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story, and The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story. He co-edited with Ilan Pappé Our Visions for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out. Ramzy holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in Palestinian Studies from the European Centre for Palestinian Studies at the University of Exeter. He was a non-resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara. Ramzy is currently a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at Istanbul Ziam University’s Centre for Islam and Global Affairs, and editor of the Palestine Chronicle https://www.palestinechronicle.com/about/. [USA]