MER Article Land, Identity and the Limits of Resistance in the Galilee There has never been anything abstract about the longings of the Palestinians. The object of their longing has always been well defined: the places that had been left behind in 1948. For these places were, and still are, the dominant components of the Palestinian identity. -- Danny Rubinstein Laurie King-Irani • 10 min read
MER Article Editor's Picks (Fall 2000) Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, Roger Heacock and Khaled Nashef, eds. Landcapes of Palestine: Equivocal Poetry (Birzeit: Birzeit University Publications, 1999). Ahmad, Eqbal. Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000). Amirahmadi, Hooshang. The Caspian Region a The Editors • 1 min read
MER Article Letters (Fall 2000) Kuwait MERIP's Iraq issue (MER 215) represented an opportunity to shape the magazine according to the needs of the new activism challenging Washington's policy towards Iraq-the movement against crippling economic sanctions, thrice-weekly bombings, the undermining of the United Nations and the regio (Author not identified) • 6 min read
MER Article Ruminations on Political Violence Texts Reviewed Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables and Faces of Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1996). Meredith Turshen and Clotilde Twagiramariya, eds., What Women Do in Wartime: Amy Zalman • 6 min read
MER Article Spatial Fantasies Rivka, the tragic protagonist of Amos Gitai's new film Kadosh, is unable to conceive a child. Her anxiety is acute. The ultra-Orthodox community of Me'ah She'arim in West Jerusalem, in which Rivka lives with her husband Meir, is known to ostracize its barren women. Seeking spiritual guidance, she le Rebecca L. Stein • 10 min read
MER Article Policing the Illicit Peripheries of Egypt's Tourism Industry Tourist destinations are never simply reducible to the sun, sand and sea they offer. The lucrative international trade associated with Third World tourism involves packaging and marketing areas of the world that are most devastated by contemporary economic conditions, essentially creating landscapes Laleh Behbehanian • 9 min read
MER Article Resettling, Reconstructing and Restor(y)ing The old village of Umm Qays, Jordan, is strategically lo cated to the south of the Golan Heights, overlooking the northern part of the Jordan Valley and the southern shore of Lake Tiberias. Biblical Gadara and subsequently one of the cities of the Decapolis in antiquity, it attracts modest numbers Laurie A. Brand • 12 min read
MER Article Mediterranean Blues Under pressure to solve immediate economic problems, Middle Eastern countries seek to industrialize as quickly and as cheaply as possible. While developed countries around the world are very slowly adopting technologies and production methods that exert less pressure on the environment, Western in Zeina al-Hajj • 4 min read
MER Article Egyptian Environmental Activists' Uphill Battle In 1990, citizens of Alexandria organized to fight the loss of public access to a street in a main downtown square. The city had given the street to the World Health Organization for a planned expansion of their local offices. In a landmark case against then-governor Ismail al-Gawsaqi, the citizen Jennifer Bell • 4 min read
MER Article Mining for Fish Around 10,000 of the estimated million people employed in Egypt’s fishing sector are based in ‘Izbat al-Burg, situated at the northernmost tip of the Nile’s Damietta Branch and bordered on the east by the vast Lake Manzala. As recently as nine years ago, Lake Manzala was a major fishing area and a co Amal Sabri, Ray Bush • 12 min read
MER Article The 94 Percent Solution Only a decade after the fall of apartheid in South Africa, after we all thought we had seen the end of that hateful system, we are witnessing the emergence of another apartheid-style regime, that of Israel over the incipient Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and parts of Jerusalem. This, at Jeff Halper • 13 min read
MER Article Rogues' Gallery The right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI) -- home to Newt Gingrich, Charles Murray and Dinesh D’Souza -- would certainly prefer a Republican presidential candidate who could be distinguished on foreign policy from his Democratic counterpart. But roundtable discussions hosted by the Institu Ian Urbina • 10 min read
