What Do They Know? A Portrait of Perpetration and Complicity in the Gaza Genocide
Friday, Feb 20, 2026 | 12:30pm - 2:00pm EST | 3700 O St. NW, CCAS Boardroom, ICC 241, Washington, D.C.
There have long been debates about bystanders to genocide and other forms of mass violence. What did they know? How did they just “go along”? If Hannah Arendt famously argued that, in Nazi Germany, there was “nothing but propaganda”, can the same be said with respect to a very different political regime and media environment in contemporary Israel? In this lecture, Nadia Abu El-Haj explores practices of denial, disavowal and impunity that characterize Israeli society amid the genocide in Gaza.
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington, DC. Prof. Abu El-Haj is the recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Among other publications, she is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002; The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America (Verso, 2022). She is currently working on a book of essays on the Gaza Genocide.
Fida Adely (moderator) is an Associate Professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Clovis and Hala Salaam Maksoud Chair in Arab Studies. She is also currently serving as the Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown.
