Bassem Eid is a Jerusalem-based political analyst, human rights pioneer and expert commentator in Arab and Palestinian affairs.  Bassem was born in the Jordanian-occupied Old City in East Jerusalem, whose place of residence became the United Nations Refugee Works Agency (UNRWA) refugee camp of Shuafat. He rose to prominence during the first Intifada, the Palestinian uprising and was a senior field researcher for B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

In 1996, he founded the Jerusalem based Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. In 2016, Bassem assumed the role of chairman of the Center for Near East Policy Research. Bassem Eid has spent 26 years researching UNRWA policies and has written extensively on the subject of UNRWA reform. He also is an outspoken critic of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, otherwise known as BDS.

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Sponsored by the Global Voices Lecture Series, UChicago Hillel, JStreet UChicago, the Center for Human Rights, and the Department of International Studies.