Protesters demonstrate against Turkey’s military action in northeastern Syria, in Berlin, Germany, October 12, 2019. Christian Mang/Reuters MER Article The Kurdish Freedom Movement, Rojava and the Left Efforts by the Kurds to put revolutionary ideals into practice in Rojava captured the imagination of anarchists and leftists in Europe and North America. Thomas Jeffrey Miley explains the left's fascination with Rojava, the ties of solidarity that connect the Kurdish freedom movement to Europe, Öcal Thomas Jeffrey Miley • 13 min read
Protesters demonstrate against Turkey’s military action in northeastern Syria, in Berlin, Germany, October 12, 2019. Christian Mang/Reuters Current Analysis The Kurdish Freedom Movement, Rojava and the Left Efforts by the Kurds to put revolutionary ideals into practice in Rojava captured the imagination of anarchists and leftists in Europe and North America. Thomas Jeffrey Miley explains the left's fascination with Rojava, the ties of solidarity that connect the Kurdish freedom movement to Europe, Öcal Thomas Jeffrey Miley • 13 min read
MER Article From the Editor (Winter 2011) A question nagged at Occupy Wall Street and its myriad imitators, the most exciting social movement to emanate from the United States in more than a decade, for much of the fall. “What are your demands?” journalists persisted in asking. “What do you want?” The Editors • 9 min read
Current Analysis Egypt's Wall In late December 2009, Arab TV channels aired footage of throngs of demonstrators, surrounded by the usual rows of riot police, on the streets of downtown Cairo and in front of foreign embassies. Street protests in Egypt have been sharply curtailed in the last few years, but the scene was familiar t Ursula Lindsey • 16 min read
MER Article Internalism of the Left Isam al-Khafaji, Tormented Births: Passages to Modernity in Europe and the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005). Any book-length comparison of the historical trajectories of Western Europe and the region “extending from Iran in the east to Egypt in the west, and from Turkey in the north to the John Chalcraft • 8 min read
Current Analysis The Jewish Israeli Left, US Empire and the End of the Two-State Solution Roni Ben-Efrat is editor of Challenge magazine, a critical, left analysis of Israeli and Palestinian politics. She is a veteran activist for Palestinian rights inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories, and a founding member of the Organization for Democratic Action (ODA), a Marxist party with Jewish and Palestinian Israeli Rebecca L. Stein • 12 min read
Current Analysis Dilemmas of the Left-Liberals If liberals and the left are united behind anything in our allegedly post-ideological age, it is that human rights and humanitarian considerations must always trump realpolitik. The left opposed the punishing economic sanctions endured by Iraqi civilians from 1991 to 2003, despite the sanctions’ und Chris Toensing • 3 min read
MER Article The "Street" and the Politics of Dissent in the Arab World In the tense weeks between the September 11 attacks and the first US bombing raids over Afghanistan, and continuing until the fall of the Taliban, commentators raised serious concerns about what the Wall Street Journal later called the "irrational Arab street." [1] If the US attacked a Muslim Asef Bayat • 18 min read
MER Article Groundswell The day after many hundreds of thousands of Americans joined millions in hundreds of cities across the world to protest a war which had not even started, the day after what was perhaps the largest mass action in history, George W. Bush shrugged. "First of all, size of protest, Bilal El-Amine, Chris Toensing • 17 min read
MER Article Women and the Palestinian Left Palestinian women played a major role in the intifada of 1987-93, but have not, so far, in the current uprising. In January 2001, the Jerusalem-based magazine Between the Lines asked Eileen Kuttab, director of the Women’s Studies Institute at Birzeit University in the West Bank, to talk about the wi Chris Toensing • 3 min read
MER Article Left In Limbo The late 1970s saw the demise of the organized left as a viable political force in Arab society. Egypt’s socialists were confined to intellectual circles gathered around al-Ahali newspaper and the Tagammu‘ party. The two largest and most vigorous Arab communist parties, in Iraq and Sudan, had been crushed Salim Tamari • 15 min read
MER Article Who's Afraid of Bureaustroika? At a dinner party in Damascus, our Lebanese host referred enthusiastically to Soviet perestroika, saying: “We Arabs could reap many benefits from it.” A case at hand was his new restaurant in Moscow. Thanks to the good old days when the Communist Party of the USSR used to ladle out scholarships to m Isam al-Khafaji • 13 min read
