The New Yorker Festival - The Middle East Conflict

Jeffrey Goldberg joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2000. His piece "The Great Terror", about the Iraqi use of chemical and biological weapons against the Kurdish population, won the Overseas Press Club Award for human-rights journalism. "In the Party of God", about the terrorist organization Hezbollah, won the 2003 National Magazine Award for Reporting. His most recent article, about Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, appeared in the May 31 issue. He is currently at work on a book about the possibility of reconciliation in the Middle East.

Rashid Khalidi is the author of British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, 1906-1914, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, and, most recently, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East. He is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, and the director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, and the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Benny Morris teaches Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. He is the author of several books, among them The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, and The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine, and the Jews.

Ari Shavit is a columnist for the Jerusalem daily newspaper Ha'aretz. His article "No Man's Land", about the Israeli exodus from Jerusalem in the face of the current intifada, appeared in the December 9, 2002, issue of The New Yorker.

Michael Tarazi is a legal adviser to the Negotiations Support Unit, part of the Negotiations Affairs Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Before becoming an adviser to the P.L.O., he worked as a corporate lawyer in the United States and abroad.