Kanan Makiya is Senior Fellow and Professor Emeritus of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. His books include Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (1989) and Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (1993). In 2003, he founded the Iraq Memory Foundation, a NGO based in Baghdad and the US that is dedicated to issues of remembrance, violence, and identity formation.
Our Voice of the Fortnight is from the Times of Israel's 'Wartime Diaries' podcast. In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, Shai Davidai – an Assistant Professor at Columbia University – became an unlikely public defender of Israel. And truthfully, even he was surprised by this turn of events: As a committed left-wing Israeli, he had spent years criticizing the government, and often took to the streets to demonstrate against its policies. But the atmosphere he witnessed on college campuses (and specifically on his own campus at Columbia), compelled him to speak up and speak out.