MER Article The Arabian Peninsula Opposition Movements The contemporary opposition movements in the Arabian Peninsula have their origins in two processes of radicalization in Middle Eastern politics. The first was the rise of radical nationalists, Nasserists and Baathists, and of communist parties in the 1950s and 1960s, and the second is the spread of The Editors • 4 min read
MER Article Kuwait Living On Its Nerves The traveler landing at Kuwait does not have to wait long for signs that the small city-state is in some kind of crisis. While citizens of the six countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) proceed swiftly through immigration, the rest of us stand in long, slow-moving lines before sub K. Celine • 9 min read
MER Article Oil Find Could Alter YAR-Saudi Relations In July 1984, the Hunt Oil Company announced it had struck oil in the Yemen Arab Republic. Tests so far suggest that the field will produce a minimum of 75,000 barrels per day (b/d). This would be the threshold for commercial exploitation, given the field’s location nearly 500 kilometers inland and Joe Stork • 2 min read
MER Article North Yemen Today The streets of Sanaa, the North Yemeni capital, appear to condense some of the most divergent elements of Third World economic change and political upheaval. Perhaps nowhere else in the Middle East, or indeed elsewhere in the Third World, do the antinomies of combined and uneven development come so Fred Halliday • 18 min read
MER Article From the Editors (February 1985) Over the weekend of February 15-18, there was an unprecedented gathering in a rural camp in New Jersey. Under a call of “Breaking the Silence,” the American Friends Service Committee and the Mobilization for Survival brought together more than 150 persons from across the country who have been active The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article Freedman, The Middle East Since Camp David Robert O. Freedman, ed., The Middle East Since Camp David (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984). This is the third volume in a series based on papers presented at conferences organized by the Baltimore Hebrew College’s Center for the Study of Israel and the Contemporary Middle East. These papers are Joel Beinin • 1 min read
MER Article Steele, Soviet Power Jonathan Steele, Soviet Power: The Kremlin’s Foreign Policy -- Brezhnev to Andropov (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). This is the sixth book on international events from one of Britain’s most senior and experienced journalists. His previous works on the USSR and Eastern Europe have shown him to Karen Dawisha • 1 min read
MER Article Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1983). Lenni Brenner has written a singular book about “the interaction between Zionism and Fascism and Nazism.” It is one of the many ironies of history that Zionism, a movement that claims to be dedicated to assuring (Author not identified) • 4 min read
MER Article Davis, Challenging Colonialism Eric Davis, Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920-1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Eric Davis intends his study to answer a wide range of questions concerning capitalism and industrialization in the Middle East. Two issues in particular are cent Fred H. Lawson • 5 min read
MER Article Sifting the Berkeley Left On June 5, 1984, voters in Berkeley, California, by a margin of almost 64 percent to 36 percent, defeated a ballot measure calling for the United States to reduce its aid to Israel by the amount Israel spends on its settlements in the occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heig Jock Taft • 8 min read
MER Article Israel's Political Formations Alignment: The dominant party in the Labor Zionist movement was the right social-democratic Mapai. In 1965, a group loyal to Mapai’s historic leader, David Ben-Gurion, split and formed Rafi -- a formation characterized by an “activist” military policy and a technocratic/statist outlook. This group i Joel Beinin • 2 min read
MER Article Israel's "National Unity" Israel’s latest elections, for the eleventh Knesset, have certified the state of paralysis and polarization that has gripped the country since the Lebanon invasion of 1982. The results of the election, and the failure of the Likud bloc to maintain a decisive plurality, certainly represent one conseq Zvi Schuldiner • 20 min read
