MER Article Syria Between Two Transitions In the recent years, Syria has inhabited the two processes of fundamental transition. The first is a transition from a statist economy to a greater liberalization or, to use a more accurate term, intifah (open-door policy). The second of these transitions is from a state of belligerency with Israel Hisham Melhem • 14 min read
MER Article Israeli Interrogation Methods: A View from Jalameh In June 1996, Bashar Tarabieh, a resident of the US, visited his family in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. On August 19, three days before he was scheduled to return to the US, he was arrested at 2:15 am by Israeli security service and police agents. Charged with spying for Syria, burning down a Beshara Doumani • 6 min read
MER Article Palestinian Rights in Post-Oslo Israel Below are the proceedings of a roundtable discussion held in Nazareth, Israel, on June 24, 1996. The participants were: Aida Toma-Suliman, general director of Women Against Violence, Hala Espanioli Hazzan, chairperson of the Follow-up Committee on Arab Education in Israel, Hassan Jabareen, director (Author not identified) • 10 min read
MER Article On Elections in Israel On June 5, 1996, Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) became the ninth prime minister of Israel. Soon after his election he successfully replaced the ruling Labor-led coalition with a Likud-led coalition of secular and religious right-wing parties led by his ruling Likud party. This was the third electoral up Baruch Kimmerling • 12 min read
MER Article Israel's Interventions Among the Druze The rights of minorities and their relations with majority groups in power give rise to some of the most intractable struggles around the world. In the United States, for example, the affirmative action debate, a legacy of the civil rights struggle, pivots around the principle of “blindness” to coll Lisa Hajjar • 16 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Summer 1996) From June 4-14, tens of thousands of officials and experts from around the globe will gather in Istanbul for the Second UN Conference for Human Settlement (Habitat II), the last of the global UN summits. The non-official NGO gatherings should take the occasion to scrutinize how the attending states (Author not identified) • 3 min read
MER Article Women and the Women's Equal Rights Law in Israel Israeli society, even prior to the formation of the state, has been permeated by a strong myth of sexual equality. Shortly after the establishment of the Jewish nation-state, the Israeli Knesset began intensive debates on a body of legislation that would guide and define subsequent discourse on issu Nitza Berkovitch • 6 min read
MER Article Designer Heritage Is Israel experiencing an identity crisis? Some such symptoms are evident in a confusion over the territorial, historical and cultural boundaries of contemporary Israeli society. The tourism industry, with its consumer demands and political agendas, is exacerbating this crisis. Joel Bauman • 12 min read
Camille Mansour, Beyond Alliance Camille Mansour, Beyond Alliance: Israel and US Foreign Policy (Columbia, 1994). This long overdue inquiry into what Camille Mansour, with typical understatement, calls “the privileged character of American-Israeli relations”(p. xi) provides an exceptionally lucid analysis of a central feature of Joe Stork • 3 min read
Settlement Expansion Despite Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s August 1992 assurance of a “settlement freeze” in the Occupied Territories, and despite the Declaration of Principles of September 1993, settler population expansion and Israeli land confiscation has continued. Peter Ogram • 2 min read
From Zionism to Capitalism The Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” seems to be in trouble. The due date for the redeployment of Israeli forces in the West Bank to allow for election of the Palestinian governing authority has long come and gone. Expanded construction in “Greater Jerusalem,” land grabbing by settlers throughout the West Bank, bombings Yoav Peled • 12 min read
MER Article Israeli Women, Palestinian Women Deborah S. Bernstein, ed., Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel (SUNY, 1992). Barbara Swirski and Marilyn P. Safir, eds., Calling the Equality Bluff: Women in Israel (Pergamon, 1991). Elise G. Young, Keepers of the History: Women and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Teachers Purnima Bose • 5 min read
