Gaza and U.S. Complicity: Gaza Lecture Series

We here at Busboys and Poets Books have been watching with horror as the siege on Gaza continues and the civilian death count rises day by day. In partnership with the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, African Studies Program & Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding of Georgetown University, we present The Gaza Lecture Series of 2024. We invite everyone to come and learn more about the history of settler colonialism, violence, and genocide in Palestine. Join us for this session to learn about the complicity of the United States in its foreign policy regarding Palestine. 

Award winning author, essayist, and journalist Nathan Thrall is joining us on the Busboys stage to share his scholarly and personal experiences surrounding Israeli mass violence in Palestinian territories. He’ll be joined by Dr. Nader Hashemi, Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at Georgetown University. 

This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of A DAY IN THE LIFE OF ABED SALAMA and THE ONLY LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is IN PERSON and will be livestreamed. 

We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books

Nathan Thrall received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for A DAY IN THE LIFE OF ABED SALAMA. The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Time, The Economist and fifteen other publications. Thrall is also the author of the critically acclaimed essay collection THE ONLY LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND: FORCING COMPROMISE IN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books and been translated into more than two dozen languages. Thrall’s writing has been cited in the United Nations Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council, as well as in reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. He has been described as “one of the best-informed and most trenchant observers of the conflict” (Financial Times), “an American analyst with a severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time), and the author of a series of articles “that have defined the new intellectual and political parameters for what is increasingly recognized as Israel-Palestine’s one-state (or post-two-state) reality” (The New York Review of Books). Thrall has received grants and fellowships from the Open Society Foundations, Middlebury College Language Schools, and The Writers’ Institute. His commentary is often featured in print and broadcast media, including the Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now!, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, PRI, Reuters, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College. He lives in Jerusalem.

Dr. Nader Hashemi is the Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and an Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (Oxford University Press, 2009) and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (Melville House, 2011), The Syria Dilemma (MIT Press, 2013), Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2017) and a four-volume study on Islam and Human Rights: Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies (Routledge, 2023). His next book project is entitled: “The Global Divide over Israel and Palestine.” He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).

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