Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

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Joel Beinin

Joel Beinin is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University and a contributing editor of Middle East Report.

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf

Feminist analysis has added an important dimension to the peace movement’s understanding of the issues in the Gulf war. Several commentators have noted the gendered character of the metaphors and symbols that the Bush administration has employed in representing the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and the US response, and

Joel Beinin • 4 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf

Egypt has been central to providing an Arab cover for the US-led military expedition to the Persian Gulf, in addition to Saudi Arabia. As of December 1990, Egypt’s 15-20,000 troops constituted the third largest force confronting Iraq, after the United States and Saudi Arabia itself. Joint military e

Joel Beinin • 4 min read

MER Article

Jean-Pierre Thieck

Jean-Pierre Thieck -- activist, scholar, journalist and friend of MERIP -- died of AIDS in Paris on July 5, 1990, at the age of 41. A descendant of a grand rabbi of Tunis on his mother’s side, his upbringing in the thick of the Paris communist milieu manifested itself in youthful political activism

Joel Beinin, Zachary Lockman • 1 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf

The 30-year declassification rule for most US and British and some Israeli official documents stimulates predictably timed reassessments of recent historical events. During 1986 and 1987, three conferences on the Suez-Sinai crisis of 1956 -- prompted by Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal and culminating in the Israeli-Anglo-French attack

Joel Beinin • 4 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf

Najda: Women Concerned About the Middle East, a national organization based in Berkeley, California, has been developing educational materials and conducting teacher training workshops on the Middle East for nearly 30 years. Najda has established a strong reputation among social studies teachers and

Joel Beinin • 4 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf

During four months in Oxford last fall, I spent part of my time pursuing the charge of my editorial colleagues to seek out new and distinctively British approaches to the Middle East. My main finding is that British nostalgia for empire, which many North Americans came to know in the popular televis

Joel Beinin • 4 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf

Since late 1988, MAPAM (The United Workers’ Party) has been among the Israeli political forces favoring Israeli-PLO negotiations which might lead to the creation of a Palestinian state. Yossi Amitay’s Ahvat amim bamivhan: MAPAM 1948-1954: emdot besugiyot araviyei eretz yisra’el [Brotherhood of Natio

Joel Beinin • 4 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s well-documented, theoretically informed, innovative history of the jute mill workers of Bengal, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), poses this central question: “Can…third-world countries like India…build democratic,

Joel Beinin • 4 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf (September/October 1989)

Television may be the best demarcator of the limits of speech that can actually be heard and understood in the US today. The Palestinian intifada has broadened public tolerance for critical presentation of Middle Eastern issues on the tube. But the extent and duration of this change remain subject t

Joel Beinin • 4 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf (May/June 1989)

In 1970 Cambridge University Press defined the state of Orientalism by publishing The Cambridge History of Islam -- a conceptually barren and supremely boring tome whose main claim to distinction may be that Edward W. Said devoted several pages of Orientalism to excoriating it as “an intellectual fa

Joel Beinin • 3 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf (March/April 1989)

The Palestinian human rights monitoring organization, Al-Haq/Law in the Service of Man, the West Bank affiliate of the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists, marked the first anniversary of the intifada with a comprehensive report on Israel’s violations of human rights in its effort to qu

Joel Beinin • 4 min read

MER Article

"We Are Willing to Pay for Settlements But Not for Health Care"

One key to understanding how the Israeli economy (malfunctions is that the Histadrut (The General Federation of Workers in Israel; up to 1965 the “Jewish Workers in Israel”) was never simply a trade union.

Joel Beinin • 10 min read