Palestinian Studies

2018 Workshop

Participant One

Professor of History, University of Arizona

Mr. Joost Hiltermann is the Middle East North Africa Program Director for The International Crisis Group, and was formerly its Chief Operating Officer. Mr. Hiltermann is an Iraq specialist. For five years he was based in Amman, Jordan, as deputy director for Middle East and North Africa where he managed a team of analysts to conduct research and write policy-focused reports on factors that increase the risk and drive armed conflict. He was based in Istanbul and Washington as project director for the Middle East. He served with Human Rights Watch from 1992 to 2002, serving as executive director for the arms division for eight years. He was director of the Iraq Documents Project. Mr. Hiltermann has written for The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Financial Times, The National Interest, Middle East Report, and other publications. He is the author of two books: A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja (Cambridge, 2007), and Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women’s Movements in the Occupied Territories (Princeton, 1991). Mr. Hiltermann received his Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz in 1988.

Paper Title:
Halabja and Khan Sheikhoun: A Tale of Two Fictions

In March 1988, the Iraqi regime killed thousands in a sarin attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja. The attack came on the heels of five years of escalating chemical weapons use in which Iraq acted with apparent impunity. Only after the war did the international community, including Iraq’s sponsor the U.S., make concerted efforts to restore the post-World War I norm against chemical weapons. That norm eroded again in the Syrian civil war, which has seen repeated use of gas by both the regime and the Islamic State. The most recent egregious example was the sarin attack on Khan Sheikhoun in April of this year, in which at least a hundred people died.