Just World Ed president Helena Cobban has been on the road some more, taking part in in-person conversations (and some virtual events) on the themes of the super-timely book that she and fellow JWE board member Rami G. Khouri co-authored for JWE, Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters.
Since we last reported on her activities on October 18, she has headlined in-person events in New Bedford and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington DC (twice)… And along the way she also participated in all-virtual discussions of the book’s themes with organizations based in both the United Kingdom and Australia.
This present round-up of her activities contains links to several of the video-recordings of her events. (We may later share transcripts of some of the discussions she and her interlocutors engaged in.)
But it’s also key to note that there is one additional, all-virtual event on the “Understanding Hamas” calendar for December– and in this one Ms. Cobban will be taking part alongside her great co-pilot on the project, Mr. Khouri.
This upcoming conversation will be presented by the Worcester, Mass.- based Center for Nonviolent Solutions on Thurs., December 5, at 7:30 pm. Register for this webinar here. (Their event description implies that the five experts whose work we featured in our book might also be taking part in the webinar. Sadly, that is unlikely to be in the plan…)
Anyway, here’s the quick recap on the “Understanding Hamas” events of recent weeks:
Week of October 21: Georgetown Univ., and Balfour Project
During this week, Ms. Cobban gave a hybrid (online and in-person) talk about the Understanding Hamas book that was hosted by Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. The talk was well-attended and the discussion lively. Sadly, though, we can’t find a recording of the online version of it.
She was also the featured guest on a webinar hosted by the U.K.-based Balfour Project. In this event, her interlocutor was the BBC’s longtime Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn. (The two had had a longstanding relationship of collegiality and mutual respect, dating back to when both were both covering the civil war in Lebanon, in the late 1970s.)
You can find the Balfour Project’s recording of this 64-minute conversation here.
Mid-November through December 1: Australia, Massachusetts, and Washington DC again
On November 16, Ms. Cobban was the (virtual) guest of Palestine Justice Movement Sydney at a webinar hosted by PJMS’s Ahmed Alabadla. This was another great conversation. And though Rami G. Khouri could not be part of the “live” discussion, he had pre-recorded a very informative short contribution to it.
After this 87-minute webinar, Mr. Alabadla posted a helpfully “chapter-ized” version of it to Youtube— and also, audio versions of it to Apple, Spotify, and other podcast platforms. (Search on those platforms for “Red Inverted Triangle Podcast.”)
We’ve been thrilled to note that 1.6K people have already viewed the archived video of this conversation! Clearly, Mr. Alabadla has been doing some very productive networking across many parts of Australia.
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A few days later, Ms. Cobban was on her way to Massachusetts, where the Southeastern MA Coalition for a Free Palestine hosted her in-person book talk in the historic New Bedford Unitarian Universalist Church. (She commented afterwards that she had never before spoken from such a lovely pulpit– or indeed, from any pulpit!)
This was a very engaged and intellectually curious audience– and once again the Q&A part of the discussion was very rich and informative.
You can see the whole of this session in this 87-minute video.
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The next day, Ms. Cobban was speaking in Cambridge, MA, at an event hosted by Massachusetts Peace Action, MAPA. This time, the weather did not cooperate, as a cold rain sliced mercilessly across that whole part of Massachusetts.. Nonetheless, 25 or so people braved the elements and turned out for a rich conversation that was very ably steered by Dr. Valentine Moghadam.
MAPA has posted the video of this event in two sequential portions: here (65 minutes) and here (37 minutes.)
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Most recently, Ms. Cobban gave a talk about the book and about Palestinian resistance more generally on December 1 in her home congregation: Friends Meeting of Washington (Quakers.) This conversation was hosted by two of FMW’s committees: the Peace and social Concerns Committee and the Library Committee, and was extremely well attended.
In this talk, in addition to covering many of the same topics she had covered in earlier book talks, she talked a little about the historic role that the service bodies of both U.S. and British Quakers played back in 1948-49, when these Quaker organizations were the only non-local body that provided the relief services that were so urgently needed by the scores of thousands of Palestinian refugees whom the fighting forces of the infant Israeli state was expelling from all the (very nearby) areas that they were grabbing control of. It was not until around a year later that the U.N. finally got around to creating the dedicated relief body, UNRWA, that was able to provide those services on a more sustained and better funded basis.
We don’t have a recording of this talk, but our friend Lora Lucero took some lovely still photos. One of those, that shows Helena second from right and the Peace and Social Concerns Committee Clerk Barbara Briggs (far right) during the course of the conversation. Here are a couple more photos from the event:
