MER Article Heard on the Hill of Shame It was early afternoon, a bright, crisp Friday in mid-January on the hilltop that lies between Route 34 and the Gaza border, maybe half a mile from Sderot. At the base of the hill lounged journalists and TV crews in foldout chairs, taking advantage of a midday lull in the bombardment. Pop music soun Peter Lagerquist • 5 min read
Current Analysis Recipe for a Riot On October 8, 48-year old Tawfiq Jamal got into his car with his 18-year old son and a friend, and set out for the house of his relatives, the Shaaban family, who lived as of then in a new, predominantly Jewish neighborhood on the eastern edges of Acre. A walled city on the sea, mainly famed in the Peter Lagerquist • 31 min read
MER Article In the Labyrinth of Solitude Our territory is inhabited by a number of races speaking different languages and living on different historical levels…. A variety of epochs live side by side in the same areas or a very few miles apart, ignoring or devouring one another…. Past epochs never vanish completely, and blood still drips f Peter Lagerquist • 21 min read
Current Analysis Reel Casbah To live the East as film is to be in Dubai in mid-December, perched front-row in the outdoor cafés that dot the Madinat Jumeira Oriental theme park. An integrated hotel, shopping and entertainment “experience” sprawled on the city’s booming beachfront rim, the Madina and its whimsy of stucco battlem Jim Quilty, Peter Lagerquist • 25 min read
Current Analysis Après Nous, Nous It was vintage Shimon Peres. On April 18 Israel’s deputy prime minister emerged from a tete-à-tete with French President Jacques Chirac proclaiming a shining vision of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. “We could convert a settlement into a Club Med,” he suggested. “We must not wait for the political solution, but create Thomas Hill, Peter Lagerquist • 14 min read
Current Analysis A Very Slippery "Landslide" for Mahmoud Abbas A chorus of international approval greeted Mahmoud Abbas' victory in the Palestinian Authority presidential election. January 9 was "a historic day for the Palestinian people and for the people of the Middle East," declared President George W. Bush, as the final count gave the Fatah party candidate Peter Lagerquist • 15 min read
MER Article Doing Time in the Theater of Occupation The photograph fetched from a back room in the narrow two-story house on the edge of Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp shows a precociously handsome adolescent, posing in a baseball cap and sports jacket against a faux backdrop of the Versailles palace gardens. A kaffiyya is tucked around his neck; his Peter Lagerquist • 3 min read
Current Analysis False Resolution Looms in EU-Israeli Settlement Trade Dispute George W. Bush's ever more one-sided interventions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most recently his uncritical backing for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's desired "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip, elicit thinly veiled declarations of dissent from the chanceries of the European Union. "No number Peter Lagerquist • 11 min read
MER Article Postmortem of a Compassionate Checkpoint In late October 2000, the intifada was in its then bloodiest throes. In his offices in Stockholm harbor, architect Alexis Pontvik followed the news from the Middle East with growing disquiet but little surprise. What perhaps would have been his most prominent project to date had already been stowed Peter Lagerquist • 7 min read
