Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

Amahl Bishara

Amahl Bishara is associate professor of anthropology at Tufts University. She is the author of Back Stories: US News Production and Palestinian Politics, about the production of US news during the second intifada. She has also conducted extensive

MER Article

Looking Beyond the Struggle for Palestinian Statehood

It is difficult to overstate the crisis in which Palestinians find themselves over 100 years after the Balfour Declaration and over 70 years after the Nakba. Palestinians are living as refugees without civil rights in places like Lebanon. Refugees who had lived in relative stability in Syria have now been

Amahl Bishara • 10 min read

Covid-19 Coverage

Voices from the Middle East: Palestinian Refugees in the West Bank Confront the COVID-19 Crisis

Refugees everywhere are particularly vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic. Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and Gaza are legally under the protection of the UN and Israel. Are these authorities meeting their obligations? Amahl Bishara talks to Badil director Nidal Al-Azza to find out and to lear

Amahl Bishara, Nidal Al-Azza • 9 min read

Current Analysis

Striking for Dignity and Freedom

More than 1,500 Palestinian political prisoners began a hunger strike on April 17 for better conditions inside Israeli jails. Their demands include access to education, proper medical care and an end to the practice of solitary confinement. They are striking to make their families’ lives easier, too—for regular

Amahl Bishara • 6 min read

MER Article

Covering the Christians of the Holy Land

Every year around Christmas and Easter, a kind of meta-ritual takes place in which American journalists describe how these holidays are celebrated in the “Holy Land.” It is a long-running story, never stripped of politics. In 1923, for example, the New York Times published a classically Oriental

Amahl Bishara • 15 min read

MER Article

The Targeted and the Untargeted of Nablus

On April 14, 2005, Ibrahim Isneiri, a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, was shot dead by Israeli forces in the Balata refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus, a town located between two mountains in the northern West Bank. Palestinian eyewitnesses said Israeli forces opened fire first, while t

Amahl Bishara • 10 min read