Nadia Hijab, Kareem Dennis (Lowkey) and Malaka Shwaikh will be speaking at this event to mark the 70th commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba, the catastrophe in 1948 in which 13,000 Palestinians were killed and 750,000 were driven from their homes. More than 500 Palestinian villages were razed to the ground. Since then the Palestinian refugees, defined as people displaced in 1948 and their descendants, have grown to 7million. They are in camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and scattered around the world. The forced dispossession continues to this day as more and more Israeli settlements are built on stolen Palestinian land. Come and hear our speakers discuss the history and the future of the Palestinian people and how we can support them.

Nadia Hijab
will speak on Justice without Prejudice, identity without intolerance. She is co-founder and president of Al-Shabaka: the Palestinian Policy Network. She is a writer, public speaker and media commentator . Her first book, Womanpower: The Arab debate on women at work was published by Cambridge University Press and she co-authored Citizens Apart: A Portrait of Palestinians in Israel (I. B. Tauris). She was Editor-in-Chief of the London-based Middle East magazine before serving as at the United Nations in New York. She is a co-founder and former co-chair of the US Campaign for Human Rights and now serves on its advisory board.

Kareem Dennis (Lowkey)
rapper, poet, playwright and activist will discuss how the international community should respond

Malaka Shwaikh
will speak about the evolution of resistance in the prison system: finding answers to injustice. Malaka is a Palestinian from Gaza. She is a third-year PhD candidate in Palestine Studies at Exeter University. Her main research interests are the Palestinian struggle, power relations and resistance, hunger strikes and political anatomy, and the prison system.