MER Article Gitai, Field Diary Amos Gitai, Field Diary (1984). Rarely has the cinema verité technique, with its false naiveté, been deployed so strategically as in Field Diary. It looks as if it could have been made by your little brother with the family toy camera, and it is even hard to credit filmmaker Amos Gitai with the ear Pat Aufderheide • 5 min read
MER Article The Gulf Between the Superpowers Anthony Cordesman, The Gulf and the Search for Strategic Stability: Saudi Arabia, the Military Balance in the Gulf, and Trends in the Arab-Israeli Military Balance (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984). Occasionally, when an important head of state arrives in Washington for consultation without a previou Scott Armstrong • 11 min read
MER Article Memories of a Sentimental Education I was supposed to set an example. Voluntary Service Overseas was in its second year in 1959 and two of us were here on a pound a week plus keep, to be examples. Nineteen-year-old examples. A year before university, you’ll have a wonderful experience. It was, too. The students in Form 2A were not wh Michael Gilsenan • 9 min read
MER Article "We Are Rebuilding Our Organization" “Ahmad” is a representative of the Socialist Labor Party in the Arabian Peninsula. MERIP interviewed him in February 1984. What were the origins of your party? (Author not identified) • 6 min read
MER Article "We Must Be Realistic About Our Goals" “Al-Hamdani” is the nom de guerre of a representative of the Yemeni People's Unity Party. MERIP spoke with him in February 1984. (Author not identified) • 8 min read
MER Article The Arabian Peninsula Opposition Movements The contemporary opposition movements in the Arabian Peninsula have their origins in two processes of radicalization in Middle Eastern politics. The first was the rise of radical nationalists, Nasserists and Baathists, and of communist parties in the 1950s and 1960s, and the second is the spread of The Editors • 4 min read
MER Article Kuwait Living On Its Nerves The traveler landing at Kuwait does not have to wait long for signs that the small city-state is in some kind of crisis. While citizens of the six countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) proceed swiftly through immigration, the rest of us stand in long, slow-moving lines before sub K. Celine • 9 min read
MER Article Oil Find Could Alter YAR-Saudi Relations In July 1984, the Hunt Oil Company announced it had struck oil in the Yemen Arab Republic. Tests so far suggest that the field will produce a minimum of 75,000 barrels per day (b/d). This would be the threshold for commercial exploitation, given the field’s location nearly 500 kilometers inland and Joe Stork • 2 min read
MER Article North Yemen Today The streets of Sanaa, the North Yemeni capital, appear to condense some of the most divergent elements of Third World economic change and political upheaval. Perhaps nowhere else in the Middle East, or indeed elsewhere in the Third World, do the antinomies of combined and uneven development come so Fred Halliday • 18 min read
MER Article From the Editors (February 1985) Over the weekend of February 15-18, there was an unprecedented gathering in a rural camp in New Jersey. Under a call of “Breaking the Silence,” the American Friends Service Committee and the Mobilization for Survival brought together more than 150 persons from across the country who have been active The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article Freedman, The Middle East Since Camp David Robert O. Freedman, ed., The Middle East Since Camp David (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984). This is the third volume in a series based on papers presented at conferences organized by the Baltimore Hebrew College’s Center for the Study of Israel and the Contemporary Middle East. These papers are Joel Beinin • 1 min read
MER Article Steele, Soviet Power Jonathan Steele, Soviet Power: The Kremlin’s Foreign Policy -- Brezhnev to Andropov (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). This is the sixth book on international events from one of Britain’s most senior and experienced journalists. His previous works on the USSR and Eastern Europe have shown him to Karen Dawisha • 1 min read
