Experts available on the Israel-Hamas war

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Northwestern University experts are available to discuss the evolution of the conflict between Palestine and Israel, hostage recovery and the ethics of war. 

Connect with faculty using their contact information below or reach out to media relations for assistance.   

Sociocultural anthropologist Jessica Winegar can speak to views of the conflict in other countries of the Middle East, U.S. media bias in covering the events, activism in support of Palestinian rights in the U.S. and the general situation in Gaza under Israeli occupation.

Quote from Professor Winegar
“The current spate of pro-Palestinian protests around the world show that the conversation on Israel/Palestine has shifted considerably in the past decade.”

Winegar is a professor of anthropology and the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Chair in Middle Eastern Studies at Northwestern. She can be reached at j-winegar@northwestern.edu.

Political scientist Danielle Gilbert’s research explores the causes and consequences of hostage taking in international security. She can discuss why and how rebels kidnap, hostage diplomacy and state-led hostage taking and the organizational dynamics of armed groups.

Quote from Professor Gilbert
“The recent kidnappings and ongoing hostage crises are both familiar to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and wholly unprecedented: familiar in that Palestinian groups have long used hostage-taking violence to coerce concessions from the Israeli government, and unprecedented in the sheer scope and variety of the hostage-taking violence of the last few days.

“In the 1970s, Palestinian militants popularized hostage-taking tactics with a spate of airplane hijackings to coerce concessions from the United States and Israel. More recently, Hamas has captured individual Israeli soldiers to coerce enormous prisoner exchanges. But two features of this weekend’s kidnappings depart in meaningful ways from prior attacks. First, Hamas’s statement that they will kill a hostage for each surprise Israeli missile strike implies that these Israeli hostages are being used as human shields, not to coerce specific concessions. Second, Hamas’s kidnapping of women and children diverges meaningfully from past targeting of adult men. On a separate note, given that American citizens are also thought to be among the hostages, the U.S. hostage recovery enterprise (from policymakers to military Special Forces) will likely be supporting the Israelis to bring hostages home.” 

Gilbert is an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern. Her current book project examines why and how armed groups kidnap during civil war. She can be reached at danielle.gilbert@northwestern.edu or by contacting Stephanie Kulke at stephanie.kulke@northwestern.edu.

Political scientist Shmulik Nili can discuss ethics, power and political violence as it relates to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, the comparison between U.S. and Israeli politics and the ethics of hostage situations.

Quote from Professor Nili
“The most fundamental point is that, for a very long time, the real conflict has not been between Israelis and Palestinians. The real conflict has been between the sane people, and the fanatics who believe that the land is more sacred than the people who walk on it. In Israel, the latter have had too much power, for too long. In Gaza, the fanatics have been in power, culminating in atrocities of the sort they perpetrated on Saturday.” 

Nili is an associate professor of political science whose research in applied ethics focuses on domestic and global injustice, especially moral issues surrounding corporate agency, corruption and the abuse of power. He can be reached at shmuel.nili@northwestern.edu.

Religious studies professor and chair Elizabeth Shakman Hurd can speak to questions about the politics of religious diversity and the politics of the Middle East.

Quote from Professor Hurd
“At its core this is a conflict about a shared homeland. It will not be resolved unless there is respect for that historical and contemporary reality. The idea of a ‘religious’ war is a distraction from this fact. At the same time, religion is ubiquitous in the conflict, and its roles are multi-faceted: religious traditions, texts and practices serve as markers of difference, sources of inspiration, languages in which to express territorial and material interests, modes of escape from the realities of the horrific violence, and as points of connection and solidarity in communities undergoing trauma. Religions do not stand apart from the conflict; neither do they single-handedly motivate it.”

Hurd is professor and chair of religious studies and professor of global politics at Northwestern. She studies religion in U.S. foreign and immigration policy, the global politics of secularism and religious freedom, religion and American borders, and international relations between the U.S. and the Middle East. She can be reached at eshurd@northwestern.edu.

Journalism instructor Storer H. Rowley can discuss reporting on the Middle East, war correspondence and media ethics.

Quote from Professor Rowley
“With Hamas using civilian hostages as human shields in Gaza, Israel has two agonizing options, and they are both bad and worse. They can either hold off on the full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is building toward in response to the atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists and try to use third-party countries like Qatar and Egypt to mediate some kind of prisoner exchange of Israeli hostages for Hamas and other Palestinians held in Israeli jails. Or they can launch the invasion and get involved in deadly urban warfare in the narrow streets, sandy alleyways and cinder block warrens of Gaza’s densely populated cities and refugee camps. The cost of that warfare will be brutal and high in the lives of Israeli soldiers and even higher in the prospect of civilian casualties among Gaza’s 2.3 million people who will be caught in the crossfire.

“The bottom line should be to save the hostages, but Hamas has very likely distributed them across the narrow strip in basements, tunnels and hiding places, making it extraordinarily difficult to find them — and always with the risk that they might die in the effort and fighting designed to save them. It’s a terrible choice, and Hamas knew what it was doing in taking them back to shield their fighters among the civilian population of Gaza. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear in his conversations with President Joe Biden that he believes Israel must go into Gaza to wipe out the terrorists that continue to threaten Israel. But the options are few, and the choices are dark and dangerous.”   

Rowley is an adjunct lecturer at Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing and Communications where he teaches a journalism in practice class on Israel. He is a former national editor and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. He can be reached at storer.rowley@northwestern.edu.