One Year after October 7

Experience the Event

Presented by

Tuesday, December 3, 2024 12:00 pm

Listen in to conversation from a multi-lens perspective on the lead-up to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, and the Israeli response in Gaza. Only four years earlier, The Abraham Accords were signed, heralding a new era in relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors. While the Accords were seen by supporters as only a first step in regional normalization, they ignored the Palestinian question. 

In addition to offering historical insight, the conversation will also address where the rapidly unfolding events in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran might be heading in the future.

This September 25, 2024 conversation was part of the 2024-25 Notre Dame Forum that answers the question “What Do We Owe Each Other?”

Since its establishment in 2005, each year the Notre Dame Forum invites campus-wide dialogue about issues of importance to the University, the nation, and the larger world. This year’s theme, chosen by Father Dowd, invites reflection on our responsibilities to one another. In a world where ideological and cultural divisions seem to have deepened, the Forum aims to bring people together across differences to face the most pressing challenges of our time.

Meet the Moderator: Maura Policelli

Maura Policelli is executive director of the Keough School’s office in Washington, D.C. She provides strategic direction for the office, including its programming and outreach. 

Before coming to Notre Dame, Policelli was chief of staff for Oxfam America. She has extensive experience in national politics, public policy, and communications, and has spent more than 20 years working in Washington on and off Capitol Hill. In the U.S. House of Representatives, Policelli led a new member program in the office of Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt and served as chief of staff for Congresswoman Jane Harman who, as the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, led efforts to respond to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

In addition, as chief of staff for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Policelli developed and implemented strategies to establish Giffords as a leader on renewable energy and immigration reform. Policelli also has worked at the Center for American Progress and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where she implemented new policy initiatives, led issue campaigns and directed media operations.

In the Obama Administration, Policelli was appointed to the U.S. Department of Education as senior advisor to the deputy secretary and later served as the senior vice president of communications at the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Policelli was previously an adjunct professor for Boston University’s Washington, D.C. political science program. She holds a J.D. from Georgetown University and a B.A. from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Meet the Speaker: Hussein Ibish

Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. He is a weekly columnist for The National (UAE), former columnist for Bloomberg, regular contributor to The Atlantic and The Daily Beast, and frequent contributor to many other U.S. and Middle Eastern publications. He has made thousands of radio and television appearances and was the Washington, DC correspondent for the Daily Star (Beirut). Many of Ibish’s articles are archived on his Ibishblog website.

His most recent book is What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda? Why Ending the Occupation and Peace with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal (ATFP, 2009). Ibish was included in all three years (2011, 2012, and 2013) of Foreign Policy’s “Twitterati 100,” the magazine’s list of 100 “must-follow” Twitter feeds on foreign policy.

Ibish is the editor and principal author of three major studies of Hate Crimes and Discrimination against Arab Americans 1998-2000 (ADC, 2001), Sept. 11, 2001-Oct. 11, 2002 (ADC, 2003), and 2003-2007 (ADC, 2008). He is also the author of “At the Constitution’s Edge: Arab Americans and Civil Liberties in the United States” in States of Confinement (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), “Anti-Arab Bias in American Policy and Discourse” in Race in 21st Century America (Michigan State University Press, 2001), “Race and the War on Terror,” in Race and Human Rights (Michigan State University Press, 2005) and “Symptoms of Alienation: How Arab and American Media View Each Other“ in Arab Media in the Information Age (ECSSR, 2005). He wrote, along with Ali Abunimah, “The Palestinian Right of Return” (ADC, 2001) and “The Media and the New Intifada” in The New Intifada (Verso, 2001). He is the editor, along with Saliba Sarsar, of Principles and Pragmatism (ATFP, 2006).

Ibish previously served as a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, and executive director of the Hala Salaam Maksoud Foundation for Arab-American Leadership from 2004-09. From 1998-2004, Ibish served as communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He has a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Meet the Speaker: David Myers

David N. Myers is Distinguished Professor and holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History.  As of fall 2017, he serves as the director of the Luskin Center for History and Policy (http://luskincenter.history.ucla.edu/); he also directs the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate.  He previously served as chair of the UCLA History Department (2010-2015) and as director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies (1996-2000 and 2004-2010).  He received his A.B. from Yale College in 1982 and undertook graduate studies at Tel-Aviv and Harvard Universities before completing his doctorate at Columbia in 1991. He has written extensively in the fields of modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history. He has authored six books: Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (Oxford: 1995), Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2003), Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz (Brandeis University Press, 2008), Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction  (2017), The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life  (2018), and with Nomi M. Stolzenberg, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (2022), which won the 2022 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies.  Myers has edited or co-edited twelve books, including The Eternal Dissident: Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman and the Radical Imperative to Think and Act (2018), with Benjamin C.I. Ravid, Simon Rawidowicz: Between Babylon and Jerusalem: Select Writings.  Together with Michael Berenbaum, he brought to publication the monumental book of the late Steven Lowenstein, The Population History of German Jewry, 1815-1939 (2023). 

Myers has taught at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Russian State University for the Humanities, visited at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Jerusalem), and been a fellow on three occasions at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (Philadelphia). Since 2003, he has served as co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. Myers is an elected fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities.  At UCLA, he teaches courses on Jewish history and the history of history.