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Avi Shlaim

Avi Shlaim is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Avi Shlaim is a globally renowned historian of the modern Middle East. He held a British Academy Research Readership between 1995-1997; a British Academy Research Professorship between 2003-2006; he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2006; and he was awarded a British Academy Medal for lifetime achievement in 2017.

An Arab Jew, he was born in Baghdad in 1945; grew up in Israel; served in the Israel Defence Forces; and received his university education at Cambridge and the London School of Economics. He is based at the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, where his main research interest continues to be the Arab-Israeli conflict, most recently the genocide in Gaza. He became widely known as one of the “New Historians,” a small group of Israeli scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel, from the late 1980s onwards.

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 (2000); Lion of Jordan:  King Hussein’s Life in War and Peace (2007); Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009); and Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (2023).

Shlaim is a believer in the subversive function of history, in using archival sources to challenge the received wisdom and to dispel national myths. He believes that “The historian’s most fundamental task is not to chronicle but to evaluate … to subject the claims of all the protagonists to rigorous scrutiny and reject all those claims, however deeply cherished, that do not stand up.”

Professor Shlaim is a frequent contributor to the print media and commentator on radio and television on Middle Eastern affairs. He has lived in the United Kingdom since 1966; he holds dual British and Israeli nationality; and he lives in Oxford.

Francesca Albanese

Francesca Albanese is an Italian legal scholar and expert on human rights who has served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories since May 2022. Initially appointed for a three-year term, in April 2025 she was confirmed for another three years. She is the first woman to hold the position.

She holds a law degree from the University of Pisa and a Master of Laws in Human Rights from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, and a senior advisor on Migration and Forced Displacement at the non-profit Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development.

As part of her current position as UN Special Rapporteur, Albanese has been highly critical of Israel’s Occupation of the Palestinian Territories and recommended in her first report that UN member states develop a plan to end the Occupation and apartheid. After the Israeli invasion of Gaza, she called for an immediate ceasefire and warned that Palestinians in Gaza were at risk of ethnic cleansing . On 26 March 2024, Albanese reported to the UN Human Rights Council that Israel’s actions already mounted to genocide. A week ago she was sanctioned by the Trump Administration, including especially for her direct engagement with the International Criminal Court, “in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel.

Chris Agee

Chris Agee is a poet, essayist, photographer, editor and publisher. He was born in San Francisco and grew up in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. After high school and a year in Aix-en-Provence, France, he attended Harvard University and since graduation has lived in Ireland. His third collection of poems, Next to Nothing, was shortlisted in Britain for the 2009 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and its sequel, Blue Sandbar Moon, appeared in 2018. He is the Editor of Irish Pages and The Irish Pages Press, and edited Balkan Essays, the sixth volume of Hubert Butler’s essays, published simultaneously in Croatian by the Zagreb publishing house Fraktura. His “poetic work of non-fiction” on the President’s first term, Trump Rant, was published in 2021. He lives in Belfast, and divides his time between Ireland, Scotland and Croatia.