MER Article "Creeping Apartheid" in Israel-Palestine On July 5, 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said something that had many rubbing their eyes in disbelief. Reviewing his government’s first 100 days, he pronounced, “We have managed to create a national agreement about the concept of ‘two states for two peoples.’” Can it be that the Oren Yiftachel • 20 min read
MER Article All the President's Women Raising eyebrows all around, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced on August 16 that he would nominate at least three women to be ministers in the new cabinet that, unresolved controversy notwithstanding, he will head as president of Iran. It was a step unprecedented in the 30-year history of the Islamic Republic, whose Nazanin Shahrokni • 15 min read
MER Article From the Editor (Winter 2009) Some words cannot escape the horrors of the human past. When, in September 2001, President George W. Bush proclaimed a “crusade” against terrorism, he evoked in Muslim minds the indiscriminate slaughters by knights seeking to reclaim the Holy Land for Christendom. People have been lynched in many times and places, The Editors • 3 min read
MER Article Editor's Picks (Fall 2009) Abufarha, Nasser. The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Al-Ali, Naji. A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali (London: Verso, 2009). Al-Haq. Operation Cast Lead: A Statistical Analysis (Ramallah, August 2009). Cai The Editors • 1 min read
MER Article Maasri, Off the Wall Zeina Maasri, Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009). Sarah A. Rogers • 3 min read
MER Article Does a Vote Equal a Voice? In a second-floor classroom overlooking a flowering courtyard filled with groups of students sharing textbooks and snacks, a young Yemeni woman in her late teens says simply: “[No political party] cares about us, or about the country.” The “us” to whom she refers are the other young women in the roo Stacey Philbrick Yadav • 15 min read
MER Article Livelihoods Up in Smoke On the streets of Turkish cities, the cigarette packs being traded and tucked into shirt pockets are adorned with the familiar brand names of Philip Morris and British American Tobacco. The ubiquity of foreign brands is remarkable, for Turkey is the world’s leading producer of Oriental tobacco—the s Ebru Kayaalp • 11 min read
