Dima Khalidi, Director
Dima Khalidi is the founder and director of Palestine Legal. She oversees Palestine Legal’s array of legal and advocacy work to protect people speaking out for Palestinian freedom from attacks on their civil and constitutional rights.
Prior to founding Palestine Legal in 2012, Dima worked with the Center for Constitutional Rights as a cooperating attorney on the Mamilla Cemetery Campaign, submitting a Petition to United Nations officials to stop the desecration of an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, and advocating on behalf of Palestinian descendants of individuals interred in the cemetery. As a volunteer and Ella Baker intern at CCR, she also worked on numerous cases that sought to hold Israeli officials and corporations accountable for Israeli violations of international law, as well as on CCR’s Guantanamo Bay docket. As a law student, she interned with the People’s Law Office in Chicago, assisting in the acquittal of Palestinian-American Muhammad Salah on major federal criminal charges.
Dima has a JD from DePaul University College of Law, an MA in International and Comparative Legal Studies from the University of London – SOAS, and a BA in History and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan. Prior to studying law, Dima worked at Birzeit University, heading a research project on the role of informal justice mechanisms in the Palestinian legal system.
Dima has advocated on Palestinian rights issues in media forums such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Hill, Democracy Now!, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, The Birmingham News, In These Times, Jacobin, NPR, Law and Disorder Radio, and KPFK's Middle East in Focus, among others.
Dima is based in Palestine Legal’s Chicago office, and is admitted to practice law in Illinois.
Sabiya Ahamed, Staff Attorney
Sabiya Ahamed is a Staff Attorney at Palestine Legal, providing legal support to Palestine activists and supporting the organization’s legislative work by tracking and advocating against legislation targeting advocacy for Palestinian rights.
Understanding that the law was primarily built to protect the powerful, Sabiya has dedicated her lawyering to turning that balance upside down and to advancing the rights of those who have been pushed to the margins and silenced. Before joining Palestine Legal, Sabiya represented low-income tenants against predatory landlords in Manhattan housing court as a staff attorney at Housing Conservation Coordinators (HCC). Prior to HCC, Sabiya was an associate and fellow at the DC Affordable Law Firm, where she represented low-income DC residents in family law matters such as child custody and divorce; immigration matters such as asylum, permanent residency, and employment authorization; and probate matters involving small estates.
Sabiya is a graduate of Georgetown Law, where she was part of the CALS Clinic, representing an asylum client in a removal proceeding, and the Federal Legislation Clinic, where she advocated at the intersection of privacy and immigration. Sabiya graduated Georgetown Law with a certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Emergencies. She also holds an LL.M. degree from Georgetown Law in Advocacy. Sabiya holds a B.A. in Middle East Studies and Political Science from Brown University.
Sabiya is a New Yorker, born and raised, with roots in Puerto Rico and Bangladesh. She is admitted to practice law in New York and DC.
Lina Assi, Advocacy Manager
Lina Assi is the Advocacy Manager at Palestine Legal.
She is a Palestinian community organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement. Since 2014, Lina has been organizing for the Palestine movement both in Canada and the US. In 2014, she helped to pass a historic BDS resolution at McMaster University that mobilized over 600 students.
Over the years, Lina’s work has been focused on developing political education materials, conducting oral history narrative interviews of Palestinian community members, local grassroots community organizing, and mutual aid work servicing working-class and refugee Arab communities.
Lina has interned at UNIFOR’s Education department where assisted in developing union course curriculum on globalization and labor. During her graduate program, she served as Equity Officer for the Canadian Union of Public Employees local 3906, hosting educational forums on Palestine through the lens of labor internationalism for union membership.
Lina has also worked as an academic research assistant exploring various topics including Palestinian working-class identity and Palestinian youth organizing in North America.
Lina earned her BA in Political Science and Labor Studies, and an MA in Labor Studies at McMaster University. Her dissertation focused on the Palestinian labor movement in the Post-Oslo era.
Angela Campion, Senior Manager, Special Projects
Angela Campion is the senior manager of special projects at Palestine Legal. She manages Palestine Legal’s digital security program and other health and sustainability initiatives for the organization.
Angela has over fourteen years’ experience in project management, grassroots fundraising, and non-profit management and development. She began her tenure at Palestine Legal in 2014 as office manager and held the position of Senior Manager of Development and Operations until 2023. Angela graduated from DePaul University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Women and Gender Studies and a Minor in Political Science. She also has a Master’s Degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Adler University and is therapist part-time at a private practice. Angela is based in Palestine Legal’s Chicago office.
Leila Elaqad, Development and Administrative Associate
Leila Elaqad joined Palestine Legal as the Development and Administrative Associate in June 2020. She supports Palestine Legal’s development work, and is responsible for the organization’s administrative functions. In addition, Leila brings a broad experience in law to support the attorneys at Palestine Legal.
Before joining Palestine Legal, she worked as a paralegal for law firms engaged in labor rights, constitutional law, and immigration law. She also worked with attorneys at CAIR Ohio to fight anti-Muslim discrimination. She has extensive grassroots organizing experience, from working on divestment campaigns in college to event-planning in MENA communities in Chicago. Leila is based in Palestine Legal's Chicago office.
Rifqa Falaneh, Michael Ratner Justice Fellow
Rifqa Falaneh is the Michael Ratner Justice Fellow at Palestine Legal where she challenges the censorship, surveillance, and suppression of advocates for Palestinian liberation.
Rifqa graduated from the University of Illinois (UIUC) College of Law in 2023. She is the founder of Bar None at UIUC Law, a civil rights organization dedicated to uplifting the legal struggles of marginalized communities. She also served as the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion officer for the Student Bar Association where she surveyed and published a report on the experiences of diverse students at UIUC Law.
In the summer of 2022, Rifqa was an Ella Baker intern at the Center for Constitutional Rights where she worked on Palestine solidarity cases, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and research on aiding and abetting a tort in New York for international crimes. She previously worked in the Emergency Services Division at Ascend Justice, where she assisted domestic violence survivors in obtaining emergency orders of protection. Rifqa has also represented parents and children in juvenile abuse and neglect cases as an Advanced Clinic Student at the UIUC Family Advocacy Clinic.
Most recently, Rifqa interned in Technology and Policy Accountability at Just Futures Law where she did litigation work on police involvement in federal immigration enforcement and the fast-developing field of technology-driven immigration enforcement.
Born and raised in Chicago, IL and originally from the Palestinian villages of Saffa and Lifta, Rifqa has been organizing for Palestine on university campuses for 7 years. She previously served as President of SJP DePaul and helped re-establish SJP Chicago in 2019.
Zoha Khalili, Staff Attorney
Zoha Khalili is a staff attorney at Palestine Legal. She provides legal advice and advocacy support to activists in the movement for Palestinian freedom on issues ranging from free speech violations, discrimination and disciplinary charges to doxxing, surveillance and threats.
Zoha's legal career has been devoted to defending the rights of marginalized communities. Before joining Palestine Legal, Zoha fought against housing discrimination and advocated on behalf of people with disabilities as a staff attorney at Project Sentinel. Prior to this, she represented immigrants in naturalization and deportation proceedings as an immigrant rights fellow at Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus.
Zoha is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and a managing editor of the Columbia Law Review. Zoha holds a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.
Zoha is not an Arab, but is willing to toss around some Arabic phrases if that will make you more comfortable. She is admitted to practice law in California.
Stacey Krueger, Senior Manager, Development
Stacey Krueger is the senior manager of development at Palestine Legal. She leads the organization’s resource mobilization through fundraising and development.
Stacey has eight years of experience in fundraising for community-based organizations. Prior to her work in development, she was an alternative school teacher who facilitated critical participatory action research projects with marginalized Chicago youth to address school pushout, policing, and access to childcare. She continues to support critical teacher education for graduate and undergraduate pre-service teachers by teaching courses on race and education, sociology of education, and education and social justice.
Stacey has a PhD in Social Foundations of Education with a certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an MA in Linguistics from Northeastern Illinois University, and a BA in English and Italian from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research experience includes studies and program evaluations of liberatory education projects, blended learning and privatization, and education and countering violent extremism. Stacey is based in Palestine Legal’s Chicago office.
Yara Nagi, Senior Manager, Operations
Yara Nagi is the Senior Operations Manager at Palestine Legal. She supports and oversees the organization’s internal processes, policies, and infrastructure, and assures their alignment with the organization’s values.
She has over 10 years of experience in project management and operational analysis. Before joining Palestine Legal, Yara worked in the environmental sector. She began her career working with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon on sustainable waste management strategies to mitigate the lack of public services from local municipalities.
She continued educational training around resource management for small scale organizations in the Arab region. Yara later specialized in internal operations and management strategies for global, impact driven organizations in the local agriculture sector to contribute to improving food accessibility.
Yara holds a Masters Degree from Columbia University in Sustainability Management and a Bachelors in Environmental Science, with a double minor in Public Health and Education, from the American University in Beirut. She is based in New York City.
Ray Packer, Communications Specialist
Ray Packer is the Communications Specialist at Palestine Legal, where she supports and helps oversee the organization's communications strategy in defense of the civil and constitutional rights of people advocating for Palestinian liberation.
Ray is a multimedia artist and organizer with over 8 years of experience creating compelling communications, design, and art in service of movements for justice. Through her experiences as a mural artist at the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Los Angeles, a designer and social media strategist for Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and a multimedia creator for various other organizations locally and internationally, she has honed her sense of the imagery and language that build community, provoke political imaginations, and motivate people to take action. She has designed the visual identity and communications strategy for several campaigns in the Palestine solidarity movement, including No Tech for Apartheid, an ongoing campaign by Google and Amazon workers to pressure their employers to end billion-dollar contracts with the Israeli military.
Ray’s work has been featured in venues both large and small: on millions of smart phone screens, in exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, on billboards across Philadelphia, as part of the world’s longest mural in the LA river, and on signs and banners held at protests and wheat-pasted on walls throughout the country and the world.
Tori Porell, Staff Attorney
Tori Porell is a staff attorney at Palestine Legal. She provides legal advice and advocacy support to activists in the movement for Palestinian liberation on issues ranging from free speech violations, discrimination and disciplinary charges to doxxing, threats, and academic freedom.
As an undergraduate activist in Students for Justice in Palestine, Tori became an early Palestine Legal client after facing repression on campus, which inspired her to go to law school and defend others in the movement.
After graduating from Berkeley Law School, Tori completed an Equal Justice Works Fellowship at the East Bay Children's Law Offices, where she represented children ages 0-5 with complex developmental, mental health and medical needs in the foster care system. Tori has also provided civil legal aid to homeless youth as a Supervising Attorney at Bay Area Legal Aid.
As a Palestine solidarity activist, Tori has also lived in the West Bank doing protective presence work with the International Solidarity Movement and human rights research. She also has a Chihuahua named The Fridge.
Tori is admitted to practice law in California.
Dylan Saba, Staff Attorney
Dylan Saba is a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, where he advises Palestine human rights advocates on a number of issues, such as free speech violations, employment discrimination, bullying, and disciplinary actions. Dylan is half Palestinian and half Jewish American.
Prior to joining Palestine Legal, Dylan worked as a Staff Attorney for New York Legal Assistance Group’s Tenants’ Rights Unit. There, he represented low income New Yorkers in eviction proceedings and advised tenants on housing matters across New York City. Dylan is a graduate of Berkeley Law, where he volunteered with both the Workers’ Rights Clinic and the International Human Rights Workshop. Dylan has also worked for the Berkeley Law Human Rights Center and for a private public interest law firm in San Francisco. During law school, Dylan won awards for his coursework in Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Law and Social Movements, and Race and American Law.
Dylan is admitted to the New York state bar.
Radhika Sainath, Senior Staff Attorney
Radhika Sainath is a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, where she oversees the organization’s case work. She has advised hundreds of students, professors and activists on matters relating to free speech, censorship, anti-Palestinian discrimination, and academic freedom. She has litigated several cases involving the rights of Students for Justice in Palestine to organize on college campuses and filed what is believed to be the first complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights alleging a hostile anti-Palestinian environment in violation of Title VI.
Prior to joining Palestine Legal, Radhika worked at Hadsell Stormer, one of Southern California’s most prestigious civil rights firms. She is a former union organizer with UNITE (now UNITE HERE). From 2002-2003 and in 2011, Radhika lived in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where she worked with the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led nonviolent resistance movement.
Radhika’s writing has appeared in Boston Review, The Nation, Lit Hub and Jacobin magazine. She is a frequent commentator in media outlets including the New York Times, Politico, Vox, Fashionista, The Washington Post, MSNBC, Al Jazeera Faultlines, NPR, Democracy Now, 5-4 and more. She has spoken to thousands of students across the country about their First Amendment rights and the Palestine exception to free speech.
Radhika is a graduate of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, where she was a proud member of Law Students for Justice in Palestine.
She is based in Palestine Legal’s New York City office and is admitted to the California and New York state bars.
Meera Shah, Senior Staff Attorney
Meera Shah is a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal. She supports the organization’s casework and public education and oversees the advocacy work on free speech, academic freedom, and the right to boycott. She joined Palestine Legal in 2019.
Meera has devoted her career to advancing human rights and social justice for marginalized communities. Before joining Palestine Legal, Meera was a Senior Legal Advisor at the Center for Reproductive Rights, where she helped launch a program to ensure the sexual and reproductive rights of women and girls affected by conflict. Prior to that, she supervised law students via teaching fellowships at the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School.
In partnership with local human rights organizations and advocates, she supervised fact-finding, research, and advocacy projects related to human rights violations in Israel/Palestine and arising out of the Syrian refugee crisis. She clerked for Judge Andre Davis of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Baltimore, Maryland.
Meera earned her JD from Columbia Law School where she was a James Kent Scholar, served as an articles editor for the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, and interned for the Center for Constitutional Rights. She also holds a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a BA in international relations from Stanford University. Before law school, she worked as a media coordinator for the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) and spent two years living in Palestine, studying Arabic and working as a journalist during the Second Intifada.
She is based in Palestine Legal’s New York City office and is admitted to the New York state bar.
Lina Habib, Development Associate
Lina Habib is the Development Associate and supports with resource mobilization at Palestine Legal.
She has experience working on Capitol Hill, various refugee/immigrant justice non-profits, and internationally at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). At UNRWA Headquarters in Amman, Lina travelled to private and public schools around Jordan to learn how to digitalize education for Palestinian refugees at UNRWA schools in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, as well as mobilize resources to implement findings. More recently, Lina was on the Development team at the National Immigrant Justice Center and is currently on the Development team at the Chicago Palestine Film Festival as well.
A proud Palestinian, she obtained her bachelor’s in political science and master’s in international affairs from Marquette University in order to better understand the world and advocate for her people. She was on the board of SJP Marquette and helped organize and lead protests in Milwaukee, as well as unanimously pass a historic BDS resolution for the first time in Marquette history. Lina is based in Palestine Legal's Chicago office.
Danya Zituni, Communications Manager
Danya Zituni is the Communications Manager at Palestine Legal, where she oversees the organization's communications strategy in defense of the civil and constitutional rights of people speaking out for Palestinian freedom. Danya has dedicated her career to developing dynamic communications, programming, and organizing strategies to advance the rights of marginalized communities.
Since 2013, Danya has been involved in grassroots organizing campaigns against anti-Arab and anti-Muslim repression across the U.S. She participated in collecting 10,000 signatures from students on her campus—the largest student petition in the history of Florida—to divest from companies engaged in human rights violations against Palestinians. She helped lead the Arab American Action Network’s youth organizing for nearly 3 years, which succeeded in shutting down the local iteration of the federal Countering Violent Extremism program in the state of Illinois.
Prior to joining Palestine Legal, Danya served as Communications Director for PeoplesHub, a national popular education and movement capacity-building organization. She also has 5 years of experience developing communications and narrative strategy specifically for the movement for Palestinian rights as a Communications Coordinator for the U.S. Palestinian Community Network.
As a visual artist, Danya has exhibited work in galleries and community spaces including PO Box Collective gallery, the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Swords Into Plowshares gallery, The Congregation, Arab Film & Media Institute, and Spot Lite Detroit. She was also one of six inaugural fellows in 2021 for the WDET Artist Next Door program in Detroit.
Gloria Imseih Petrelli, Social Media Coordinator
Gloria Imseih Petrelli is the Social Media Coordinator at Palestine Legal, overseeing social media communications and supporting the organization’s communications strategy of defending the civil and constitutional rights of those advocating for Palestinian liberation.
Gloria has extensive experience overseeing social media for grassroots organizations, indie films, and theatre companies alike.
Gloria is a proud Palestinian American and lifelong Chicagoan. In addition to communications work, Gloria has made a life as an actor, playwright, intimacy choreographer, and community organizer. She served as Co-Chair of the US Palestinian Community Network in Chicago, and taught poetry and theatre workshops to the Youth Organizing Program at the Arab American Action Network. She cofounded the arts advocacy organization MENASA MidWest, is a founding board member of The Neighborhood theatre, and has been seen on stages around the country, including the Goodman Theatre, About Face Theatre, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She recently had a reading of her play put on at Steppenwolf Theatre.
Gloria has proudly devoted her life to the intersection of art and politics and is overjoyed to be sharing her skills with Palestine Legal.
Tara Nair, Legal Intern
Tara Nair is a legal intern at Palestine Legal, and third-year law student & International Law and Justice Scholar at NYU law. Born and raised in Singapore, Tara moved to the U.S. in 2017 for college.
As a law student, Tara has been a Staff Editor for the Review of Law and Social Change, an International Law and Human Rights fellow, and involved with Law Students for Justice in Palestine. Utilizing her legal education to support community organizing, Tara is also involved with Singapore's Transformative Justice Collective (TJC). As a member of TJC, they have been involved in the StopTheKilling campaign against the mandatory death penalty for drug crimes, and currently provides legal research support on a range of issues, including the criminalization and sanctioning of protest and dissent.
Outside of law school, she has dedicated time to working in political education and art activism, and credits these spaces in opening her mind to alternative methods of radical advocacy. In all these pursuits she grounds her activism in communitarian, abolitionist and anti-imperialist values.