Diana Buttu

Diana Buttu was born and raised in Canada to Palestinian parents who, she has recalled, tried to insulate her from the Palestinian identity they carried. She studied Middle East and Islamic studies and law at the University of Toronto, took her JD at Queen’s University, and earned a master’s degree at Stanford Law School. In September 2000 — arriving in the country, as it happened, on the first day of the Second Intifada — she joined the PLO’s Negotiations Support Unit as one of five legal advisors, the only woman among them, working on the refugee file; she soon became the unit’s spokesperson as well. She left the PLO in 2005, disillusioned with a process she came to liken to a hostage being made to negotiate with their hostage-taker.

Since then Buttu has worked as an analyst and commentator, based in Haifa — she is a Palestinian citizen of Israel — appearing regularly on CNN, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and NPR, and writing op-eds for Haaretz, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Globe and Mail. She has held fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative, at Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program as an Eleanor Roosevelt Visiting Fellow, and at the Stanford Center for Conflict Resolution and Negotiation, and she has taught negotiation and human rights law at Harvard. In a 2018 Haaretz op-ed she wrote that advising the negotiating team had itself been a mistake, given the structural imbalance between occupied and occupier. She is a non-resident fellow at DAWN and a practitioner-in-residence at Georgetown University in Qatar.

Selected contributions

• Legal advisor and spokesperson, PLO Negotiations Support Unit (2000–2005)
• Political analysis and commentary for international media; op-eds in Haaretz, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Globe and Mail
• Teaching on negotiation, human rights law, and Palestine and the law at Harvard University and Georgetown University in Qatar

Sources

• Diana Buttu — Georgetown University in Qatar
• Diana Buttu — DAWN
• When the Shake-up Comes — interview, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs