Current Analysis A Guide for the Perplexed You have reached the village of Kafr Bir‘im. Enjoy the clean air of the Upper Galilee. Listen to the mountain silence. Observe the elegance of the stone construction in front of you; it is left standing after the 1948 occupation of the village and its consequent destruction. And realize as well that Samera Esmeir • 18 min read
Current Analysis The Battle for Nazareth By order of the Israeli Supreme Court [http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/1.573700], Nazareth will reconduct its mayoral election on March 11. The city is once again the site of an acrimonious political battle. Municipal elections were held in Nazareth, along with the rest of the country, on Octo Leena Dallasheh • 3 min read
Current Analysis Our Primer on Israel-Palestine Some 43 years ago, a group of activists in the movement to end the war in Vietnam founded the Middle East Research and Information Project. The impetus was that the American public, including the anti-war left, was poorly informed about the Middle East and the US role [https://www.jacobinmag.com/20 The Editors • 2 min read
Current Analysis The Ongoing Fantasy of Israeli Democracy Before 1967 The past week has a witnessed a flurry of debate in the American and Israeli media over the growing call [http://www.bdsmovement.net/] to boycott companies and institutions that profit from or are otherwise complicit in the ongoing 47-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Shira Robinson • 3 min read
Current Analysis 'Assaf, Palestine and the "Forgotten Palestinians" For months Arab television watchers have been engrossed in the phenomenon of Muhammad ‘Assaf, the 23-year old Gazan singer who has now been crowned the winner [http://www.mbc.net/ar/programs/arab-idol-s2/videos/live-performance/finals/articles/%D9%85%D8%AD%D9%85%D8%AF-%D8%B9%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%81-%D9%8A Leena Dallasheh • 3 min read
MER Article Nazareth Dispatch They are Israel’s Siamese twin cities, forced into an uncomfortable pairing more than half a century ago. Nazareth and Natzrat Illit, or Upper Nazareth in English, almost share a name. Although formally separated by a ring road, Israel has tied their fates together. Each is engaged in a battle with Jonathan Cook • 10 min read
Current Analysis Israel’s Rightward Shift Leaves Palestinian Citizens Out in the Cold Shortly before polling day in Israel’s January general election, the Arab League issued a statement urging Israel’s large Palestinian minority, a fifth of the country’s population, to turn out en masse to vote. The League’s unprecedented intervention -- reportedly at the instigation of the League’s Jonathan Cook • 25 min read
Current Analysis The Myth of Israel's Liberal Supreme Court Exposed Little more than a decade ago, in a brief interlude of heady optimism about the prospects of regional peace, the Israeli Supreme Court issued two landmark rulings that, it was widely assumed, heralded the advent of a new, post-Zionist era for Israel. But with two more watershed judgments handed down Jonathan Cook • 23 min read
Current Analysis The Negev's Hot Wind Blowing Over the past 15 months the dusty plains of the northern Negev desert in Israel have been witness to a ritual of destruction, part of a police operation known as Hot Wind. On 29 occasions since June 2010, hundreds of Israeli paramilitary officers have made the pilgrimage over a dirt track near the c Jonathan Cook • 16 min read
Current Analysis The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Arab Awakening The March 15 Youth Movement, whose name comes from demonstrations held in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that day to demand unity between Fatah and Hamas, is the most direct Palestinian expression of the “Arab awakening” of 2010-2011. The next day, March 16, Fatah’s leader, Palestinian Authority (PA) Joel Beinin • 13 min read
Current Analysis Israel's Palestinian Minority Thrown Into a Maelstrom The first reports of Israel’s May 31 commando raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla surfaced among the country’s 1.4 million Palestinian citizens alongside rumors that Sheikh Ra’id Salah, head of the radical northern wing of the Islamic Movement of Israel, had been shot dead on the lead ship, the Mavi M Jonathan Cook • 19 min read
Current Analysis Recipe for a Riot On October 8, 48-year old Tawfiq Jamal got into his car with his 18-year old son and a friend, and set out for the house of his relatives, the Shaaban family, who lived as of then in a new, predominantly Jewish neighborhood on the eastern edges of Acre. A walled city on the sea, mainly famed in the Peter Lagerquist • 31 min read
