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Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

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How One Palestinian University is Remaking ‘Israel Studies’
Birzeit University in the West Bank. (Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Current Analysis

How One Palestinian University is Remaking ‘Israel Studies’

At Birzeit University in the Israeli occupied West Bank, students and faculty are fundamentally remaking the dominant paradigm of Israel Studies as it has been configured in the United States with its proud “advocacy” mandate on behalf of the Israeli state. Birzeit’s program turns this paradigm insi
Rebecca L. Stein • 12 min read
Current Analysis

Precarious Teachers Strike for Public Education in Morocco

Over the past three years, striking and demonstrating teachers have mobilized against their new precarious status as contract-labor under government privatization reforms implemented in 2016. The teachers’ struggle is bound up in the broader fight by Moroccan unions against the government’s neoliber
Zakia Salime • 10 min read
Current Analysis

Israel and the Antisemitism Playbook in Great Britain and the Grassroots

The ongoing attacks on Congressional critics of Israeli policies like Rep.'s Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib for their alleged antisemitic remarks appear culled from the same playbook that Israel’s supporters in Great Britain used to tarnish Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn: continuously vilify the me
Neve Gordon, Lynne Segal, Kristian Davis Bailey, Olivia Katbi Smith • 29 min read
Current Analysis

Turkish Voters Upset Erdoǧan’s Competitive Authoritarianism

Turkish voters sent a strong message to its long-standing ruling party and its leader on March 31, 2019 that the government’s authoritarian turn has not fully succeeded. In nationwide municipal elections, for the first time in a quarter century, the political movement largely associated with Turkey’
Steve Niva • 13 min read
Helen Lackner, Yemen in Crisis: The Road to War
newLackner
MER Article

Helen Lackner, Yemen in Crisis: The Road to War

Few people from the West know Yemen better than Helen Lackner. Her experience and insights make this book essential for understanding the multiple dimensions of Yemen’s crisis.
Joe Stork • 5 min read
Current Analysis

Protesting Politics in Algeria

Since February 22, 2019, Algerians have mounted massive protests in cities across Algeria. While calling for President Bouteflika’s resignation has been a focal point of demonstrations, the protests are more broadly a political contestation against a byzantine, status-quo politics upheld by an elite
Amir Mohamed Aziz • 10 min read
Current Analysis

Making the Economy Political in Jordan’s Tax Revolts

The Jordanian citizenry remain unwilling to pay more taxes. The old system no longer works, but the way forward demands that Jordan’s leaders address the need for substantive reforms in both the economic and political systems that currently govern Jordanian lives. Any new social contract between the
Laith Fakhri Al-Ajlouni, Allison Spencer Hartnett • 9 min read
Current Analysis

The Manufactured Controversy About Ilhan Omar and the Israel Lobby

The firestorm that greeted newly elected Congresswoman (D-MN) Ilhan Omar’s tweets about the Israel lobby’s clout in Congress reveals as much about her critics as it does about the rising tide of progressive politicians who no longer show deference to establishment prohibitions on criticizing Israel.
Joel Beinin, Noura Erakat, Omar Baddar, Mouin Rabbani • 21 min read
Current Analysis

Egypt’s Arrested Battlegrounds

While mass arrests and arbitrary detentions are nothing new to Egypt, the escalation and widening pattern of arrests over the past year indicate that the authoritarian mindset of the Egyptian regime has significantly changed. Egypt under President Sisi has succeeded in reestablishing authoritarianis
Wael Eskandar • 12 min read
Current Analysis

Protesting Clerical Welfarism in Iran’s Pious City

Protests in Iran's holy city of Qom reveal that social fragmentation in Iran runs so deep that even within a community as intimately related to religious learning and the state as Qom, the divisions and boundaries go beyond easy distinctions between regime and opposition, hardliner and reformer or s
Mehdi Faraji • 13 min read
Business as Usual in Western Sahara?
mundy_map
Current Analysis

Business as Usual in Western Sahara?

The end of 2018 witnessed potentially promising peace talks in Geneva between the Polisario Front liberation movement of Western Sahara and the Kingdom of Morocco in an effort to kickstart the stalled peace process for the nearly 45-year conflict over this North African territory. Nevertheless, the
Alice Wilson, Jacob Mundy • 12 min read
Current Analysis

Trump’s Full Spectrum Assault on Palestinian Politics

The attack on UNWRA is part of a full-spectrum assault on the Palestinian people’s rights and capacity to engage in politics undertaken by the Trump administration since entering office in 2016. While the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is reportedly developing a Middle East peace plan, dubbed
Ilana Feldman • 9 min read

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