Dear Friends and Comrades, 

Today is a big day for MERIP. We are releasing our Summer/Fall double issue of Middle East Report, Material Politics of Normalization. This issue brings you hard-hitting reports, interviews and essays on the security, military, industrial and economic architecture that normalizes Israel’s ongoing occupation and genocide in Palestine. 

This issue is coming to you in the wake of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas brokered by the Trump administration –  a tentative but hopefully lasting reprieve from Israel’s campaign of bombing and starvation in Gaza. At this moment, when it appears the tide of global public opinion is turning against Israel, it is essential to look squarely at the myriad ways its dispossession of Palestinian land and destruction of livelihoods has been supported by arms and energy deals, trade agreements and all manner of institutional relationships. As our pieces demonstrate, these material processes have worked to entangle the economies of regional states into the Zionist project, creating facts on the ground that demand new forms of opposition. 

We’ll continue the discussion about  this issue over  the coming weeks. For now we hope you’ll dive in, share it with your networks and let us know what you think.

As you read our latest, you might notice things look a bit different. Along with the issue, we are unveiling MERIP’s new website. MERIP has migrated all our content  and our newsletter to a new platform, Ghost. This move has modernized our publishing and engagement process immensely, allowing us to update the design of our site for easier consumption across desktops and mobile devices. We will now be able to integrate podcasts, video and animation into our articles more readily, and we have added a more efficient search engine to allow for smoother navigation through our online archive. 

This redesign and migration is a massive leap forward toward innovation and sustainability for our organization, and I am personally thankful to the folks at Ghost who helped us with the migration and design. Likewise, our editorial staff, Editorial Committee and Board of Directors were instrumental in this process. Even more importantly, I want to thank you, our readers and supporters. Without the success of our fundraising efforts over the last 10 months, this long overdue migration simply would not have been possible. 

Thank you all for being with us and for your support.

In Solidarity,

James Ryan
Executive Director