MER Article Letter from Kabul At night, dogs take over the streets of Kabul. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, roam the city, dig through garbage that’s dumped into the ditches during the day, and engage in vicious barking battles to defend their territories. The dogs are rarely bothered: Small groups of soldiers patrol the d Konrad Ege • 8 min read
MER Article "Abu 'Ammar's Biggest Mistake Was Gambling on the Americans" ‘Abd al-Jawad Salih was born in al-Bira, Palestine, in December 1931. He finished high school there and later attended the American University in Cairo, where he received a B.A. in political economy in 1955. He taught briefly in Jerusalem, and then at a teachers’ training college in Tripoli, Libya. (Author not identified) • 9 min read
MER Article Palestinian Life at Ground Level Since the summer of 1982 everything has changed. The Palestinians’ lives have been transformed in a way which touches all the details of everyday existence and comes to seem almost “normal.” They were refugees then. Now they have become pariahs. Life today remains at ground level. The forces of orde Marie-Christine Aulas • 7 min read
MER Article Yasser Arafat's Nightmare Eqbal Ahmad, a close observer of the Palestinian resistance movement since 1968, has made many visits to the region and conferred with Palestinian leaders. His involvement developed out of his speaking and writing on behalf of the national liberation struggles in Algeria and Vietnam. Ahmad, who is f Eqbal Ahmad • 18 min read
MER Article The Mutiny Against Arafat The mutiny that broke out in May has shaken Fatah with the most serious crisis of its existence. This crisis not only threatens to split the main organization of the Palestinian resistance (with 80 percent of its members), but also calls into question the very existence of the PLO. Eric Rouleau • 13 min read
MER Article Behind the Fatah Rebellion Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian scholar, is associate professor of politics at the American University of Beirut and a research fellow of the Institute for Palestine Studies. He is currently a visiting professor at Georgetown University, and he has written widely on political developments in the Arab Rashid Khalidi • 18 min read
MER Article The Dilemma of the PLO In a ground-floor apartment this July, near a sprawling refugee camp in northern Lebanon, a new PLO poster was taped roughly to the wall. It made a pointed political statement, at a time when Yasser Arafat’s leadership had been openly challenged from within the military wing of his own Fatah movemen Helena Cobban • 10 min read
MER Article From the Editors (November/December 1983) On Sunday night, November 20, we paused along with millions of others in the US to watch ABC’s television drama of nuclear devastation. “The Day After” abstracted its fictional crisis from current headlines by having its US-Soviet confrontation occur over Berlin rather than Lebanon or Nicaragua. On The Editors • 3 min read
MER Article Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose (trans. Georgina Kleege) (Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1982). Lee OBrien • 5 min read
MER Article Randal, Going All the Way Jonathan Randal, Going All the Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers and the War in Lebanon (New York: Viking Press, 1983). Eric Rouleau • 6 min read
MER Article George Hawi, Problems of Strategy, Errors of Opposition CRITICISM AND DEFEAT: AN INTRODUCTION TO GEORGE HAWI A secondary objective of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was to strike at the forces of the Arab left, which since 1967 had made Beirut their intellectual and, in many cases, operational center. Israel did not fully achieve this objective, just as i (Author not identified) • 20 min read
MER Article Pictures from the North Nadia Fifty-two years old, with an opulent and well-rounded shape. A head of hair that once tried to be reddish. Despite her weight, an energy and dynamism that say a lot about her will. She is a woman who is mistress of her surroundings, who dominates places -- in this case, the Villa Nadia. Marie-Christine Aulas • 7 min read
