Diana Buttu, who teaches courses on negotiation skills and female leadership, has praised Hamas in the past
A Harvard lecturer who writes a column for Zeteo, the anti-Israel blog of former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, is slated to speak at a conference in Qatar next month with a top Hamas official and Iran’s foreign minister, who has denied the regime’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.
Diana Buttu, who teaches courses on negotiation skills and female leadership at Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, is slated to appear at the Al Jazeera Forum in Doha on Feb. 9 on a panel about “leveraging influence to achieve tangible change across issues intersecting with Palestine,” according to an itinerary.
The forum convenes executives from Al Jazeera, the Qatar-funded news outlet, foreign journalists, think tank scholars, and government leaders from Turkey, Somalia, and Qatar. Its marquee speakers are Khaled Meshaal, the Doha-based leader of Hamas’s operations outside of Gaza, and Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi.
Meshaal, who was targeted in an Israeli airstrike on Hamas leadership in Doha in September, will speak on a panel entitled “Gaza after Two Years of War: The Resistance Project, Occupation Plans and Prospects for Internationalisation.” The description of the talk notes that “the resistance retains its weapons and brigades.”
Araghchi will give a keynote address for the forum, one of his first public appearances since being disinvited from the World Economic Forum in Davos over Iran’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. Anti-regime activists say more than 6,000 people have been killed in the uprising. Araghchi claimed in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that the regime has dealt peacefully with the protesters, but that Israel’s Mossad has stoked violence in order to “drag the U.S. into fighting another war on behalf of Israel.”
No representatives from Israel, the United States, or other Western governments are slated to speak at the Al Jazeera Forum, according to a review of the itinerary.
Buttu’s appearance at the event comes as Harvard continues negotiations with the Trump administration over the terms of a $500 million settlement over the school’s failures to curb the anti-Semitic activity prevalent at many of Harvard’s anti-Israel protests. Harvard acknowledged those failures in a report last April that detailed the “politicized instruction” in four Harvard schools that “mainstreamed and normalized what many Jewish and Israeli students experience as antisemitism,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Buttu’s course on women’s leadership, which starts in September and costs $6,450 a student, teaches female executives “to create environments where women can succeed and flourish, ultimately strengthening an organization’s leadership pipeline.” That’s in stark contrast to many of the entities represented at the Al Jazeera forum.
Iran, for example, has compulsory laws that require females over 13 to wear veils in public. The regime implemented draconian measures, including flogging and the death penalty, for any public resistance to the laws. And Hamas, which allegedly raped dozens of Israeli women during the Oct. 7 siege, requires Palestinian women to gain permission from male guardians—husbands or fathers—before traveling. Hamas’s 1988 charter says that the role of women in the movement is to “manufacture men and play a great role in guiding and educating the [new] generation.”
Buttu, who previously served as a human rights fellow at Harvard Law School, has repeatedly praised Hamas. She described Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack as the “natural consequence, unfortunately, of 56 years of military occupation and the denial of freedom.”
“When you punch your abuser in the face, it feels good. The first reaction was elation—we saw that both in Gaza and in the West Bank,” she said.
Buttu called Hamas a “movement for freedom, for liberation,” and lauded Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar after he was killed in an IDF operation in October 2024.
“The Israelis will never understand what it means to die a hero,” she said.
It is unclear how prevalent the Israel-Hamas war features in Buttu’s Harvard lectures. But Harvard’s biography for Buttu notes her role as “the only female negotiator” on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from 2000 to 2005. Buttu has been highly critical of the ceasefire agreement last year between Israel and Hamas. In an NPR interview, Buttu lamented that Palestinians were negotiating at all with Israel.
“But I think the bigger issue is, why is it that Palestinians have had to negotiate an end to genocide?” said Buttu.
Buttu’s appearance alongside Meshaal and Araghchi could also raise questions for Zeteo, which Hasan launched in 2024 after he quit MSNBC following the cancellation of his weekend talk show. Hasan, who previously worked for Al Jazeera, is an outspoken critic of Israel, though he frequently touts his disavowal of Hamas’s attacks on civilians on Oct. 7.
Buttu writes the column “Diary from a Palestinian in Israel” for Zeteo. Though Buttu has claimed to live in Haifa, her X account’s location feature says her account is based in Qatar.
Harvard, Zeteo, and Buttu did not respond to requests for comment.
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