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

"Suddenly I Can't Hold My Head Up"

Dan Almagor personifies Israeli popular culture of the post-1948 period. He is the master lyricist of the modern Hebrew song, with over 600 compositions and 300 translations to his credit. His songs have been performed on many official and semi-official occasions, and he has composed for the Israel

Joel Beinin • 4 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf (November/December 1989)

Between 1975 and 1978 a group of scholars in England published three annual issues of the Review of Middle East Studies. This political and intellectual project sought to articulate a radical critique of the dominant paradigms in Middle East studies. ROMES unmasked the relations among modernization

Joel Beinin • 4 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf (November/December 1988)

For years, economic analysts of all political persuasions have been commenting on the protracted economic crisis which began with the global recession of 1974-75 and continues to be the defining feature of world capitalism today. Most have restricted themselves to those manifestations of the crisis

Joel Beinin • 4 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf (September/October 1988)

In December 1975, just as the presidential election campaign was getting underway, the Brookings Institution published the report of a study group entitled Toward Middle East Peace. Several members of the group (Zbigniew Brzezinski, Philip Klutznick and William Quandt) joined the Carter administrati

Joel Beinin • 4 min read

MER Article

Palestine for Beginners

After World War I, the League of Nations (controlled by the leading colonial powers of the time, Britain and France) carved up the territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The territory now made up of Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jordan was granted to Great Britain as a Mandate (a qu

Lisa Hajjar, Joel Beinin • 8 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf (July/August 1988)

The defeat of the Arab states in the June 1967 war was more than a military setback. It was also a blow against the radical nationalist project and its modern and secular cultural orientation which bonded the Arab world and the West even as it provided a framework for resistance to Western economic,

Joel Beinin • 5 min read

MER Article

Editor's Bookshelf (May/June 1988)

The human dimensions of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and the social contradictions of Palestinian society under occupation are nowhere better portrayed than in Sahar Khalifeh’s novel Wild Thorns, translated from the Arabic by Trevor LeGassick and Elizabeth Fernea (London: Saqi, 1

Joel Beinin • 2 min read

MER Article

"The State Cannot Make Criminals Of Those Who Want Peace"

Reuven Kaminer immigrated to Israel from the United States in the early 1950s and became a prominent figure in Shasi (Israeli Socialist Left). He was a member of the Israeli delegation that met with the PLO in Romania in November 1986. Israeli authorities brought Kaminer and three others to trial fo

Joel Beinin • 5 min read

MER Article

From Land Day to Equality Day

On June 24, 1987, the Palestinian Arab community of Israel conducted a successful countrywide general strike. The “Equality Day” strike was called by the National Committee of Arab Local Council Heads (NCALCH) to demand an end to all forms of racial discrimination against the nearly 700,000 Palestin

Joel Beinin • 10 min read

MER Article

Bernard Lewis' Anti-Semites

Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986). In the 1960s, nearly all university students in Middle East history courses read Bernard Lewis’ The Arabs in History (1950), The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961) and The Middle East an

Joel Beinin • 10 min read

MER Article

"The Pressure Should Be on the US and Israel to Recognize the PLO"

Hilton Obenzinger is a member of the executive committee of the November 29 Committee for Palestine, and on the staff of their bimonthly, Palestine Focus. His book of poems, This Passover or the Next I Will Never Be in Jerusalem, was reviewed in our February 1982 issue. Joel Beinin interviewed him i

Joel Beinin • 7 min read

MER Article

Private Capital in Israel

The overwhelming majority of big capitalists in Israel today emerged from a group of no more than 60,000 “veterans” of the Jewish settlement in Palestine who arrived before the creation of the state or are descendants of such veterans. Some, especially from Sephardic families who settled in Palestin

Joel Beinin • 11 min read