The Long, Steep Fall of the Lebanon Tribunal
MERO - December 1, 2010
Heiko Wimmen

After five long years, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon is expected to hand down its indictments at long last. By the end of 2010, or perhaps the beginning of 2011, the Tribunal will accuse a number of individuals of direct involvement in the murders of former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri and several other prominent Lebanese political figures between 2005 and 2008. Officially, the investigators keep mum about the identity of their targets. Unofficially, a steady stream of “insider information” has converged into a kind of received wisdom: High-ranking members of the Shi‘i Islamist party Hizballah will be indicted for association with the engineering of the assassinations. The various actors in Lebanon now treat the “leaks” that formed this received wisdom as a set of established facts. Full Story>>

Economic Prizon Zones
MERO - November 19, 2010
Sam Bahour

When a project mixes the feel-good words of jobs, economic development and Israeli-Palestinian cooperation, how can anyone complain? These things are some of what the international community has been promising to deliver through the construction of industrial free trade zones in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The free trade zone model has been promoted locally and globally by powerful third parties like the United States, France, Germany, Turkey and Japan for two decades, but none has much to show for the enormous efforts and amounts of money spent to bring these zones to life. Nonetheless, the project’s proponents expect the zones to constitute the economic foundation for a future Palestinian state. They hope that, by bolstering Palestine’s economy, the zones will make Palestinians less prone to social upheaval, less insistent on their national rights and more amenable to the status quo. The idea is that a peace agreement with Israel will ensue. Full Story>>

Unpacking Turkey’s “Court-Packing” Referendum
MERO - November 5, 2010
Aslı Ü. Bali

The news reports and commentary on Turkey in the middle months of 2010 have sounded alarmist themes. Analysts have warned that Turkish foreign policy is undergoing a reorientation away from the West, ominously foreshadowed by deteriorating relations with Israel. Commentators worry about creeping Islamization in domestic and foreign policy, a concern captured by pictures of headscarved women accompanying articles about Turkey’s eastward turn. Elsewhere, descriptions of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s increasingly assertive policies toward the Middle East are paired with allegations of a more authoritarian style of government by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Turkey’s September 12 referendum -- resulting in the passage of a package of constitutional amendments with support from 58 percent of voters -- offers the most recent occasion to revisit this increasingly critical portrait of Turkey in Washington and beyond. Full Story>>

Behind Egypt’s Deep Red Lines
MERO - October 13, 2010
Mariz Tadros

For six weeks, Egypt has been sitting on top of a sectarian volcano. Protesters, men and women, have been exiting mosques following prayers almost every single Friday since the beginning of September to demand the “release” of Camillia Shehata, a Coptic priest’s wife who they believe has converted to Islam and is now incarcerated by the Coptic Orthodox Church. Full Story>>

The Dynamics of Egypt’s Elections
MERO - September 29, 2010
Mona El-Ghobashy

No one thinks parliamentary elections in Egypt are democratic or even semi-democratic. The elections do not determine who governs. They are not free and fair. They install a parliament with no power to check the president. The government National Democratic Party (NDP) always manufactures a whopping majority, never getting less than 70 percent of the seats. The opposition is kept on a tight leash, restrained by police intimidation, rampant fraud and severe limits on outreach to voters. And citizens know that elections are rigged, with polling places often blocked off by baton-wielding police, so few of them vote. No wonder the reform advocate Mohamed ElBaradei and others are trying to build political and moral momentum for a boycott of the contests coming up in November. “Anyone who participates in the vote either as a candidate or a voter goes against the national will,” ElBaradei warned. Full Story>>

Contesting Past and Present at Silwan
MERO - September 17, 2010
Joel Beinin

On September 1, Elad -- a Hebrew acronym for “To the City of David” -- convened its eleventh annual archaeological conference at the “City of David National Park” in the Wadi Hilwa neighborhood of Silwan. Silwan, home to about 45,000 people, is one of 28 Palestinian villages incorporated into East Jerusalem and annexed by Israel after the June 1967 war. It lies in a valley situated a short walk beyond the Dung Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City. Elad, a militant, religious, settler organization, claims that Silwan is the biblical City of David mentioned in the second book of Samuel and that the Pool of Shiloah (Siloam) located there watered King Solomon’s garden. Full Story>>

Hizballah’s Domestic Growing Pains
MERO - September 13, 2010
Marlin Dick

The term dahiya (suburb) is a staple of Lebanese political discourse, practically shorthand for Hizballah, the Shi‘i Islamist party seated in its infamous headquarters just south of Beirut. Before the civil war, the suburb, or more precisely suburbs, consisted of several small towns surrounded by orchards that began where the capital ended. Today, it is a heavily congested urban sprawl replete with higher-income neighborhoods, such as Jinah, where international chains such as Burger King, BHV, Monoprix, Spinneys and the Marriott have opened since the end of the civil war in 1990. Administratively, the dahiya lies in a half-dozen municipalities, and only one of these, Harat Hurayk, home to Hizballah’s party offices, is usually the “dahiya” that politicians and pundits have in mind. Full Story>>

Interventions: A Middle East Report Online Feature

Another War Zone: Social Media in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Interventions
Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein
September 2010

In late May 2010, the convoy known as the Freedom Flotilla met off of Cyprus and headed south, carrying humanitarian aid and hundreds of international activists who aimed to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. The organizers used social media extensively: tweeting updates from the boats; webcasting live with cameras uplinked to the Internet and a satellite, enabling simultaneous rebroadcasting; employing Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and other social networking websites to allow interested parties to see and hear them in real time; and using Google Maps to chart their location at sea. Until shortly after its forcible seizure by Israeli commandos in the wee hours of May 31, the flotilla stayed in touch with the outside world despite the Israeli navy’s efforts to jam its communications. A quarter of a million people watched its video feed on Livestream alone, while many more consumed these images in abbreviated form on television news. Full Story>>

Hamas Back Out of Its Box
MERO - September 2, 2010
Nicolas Pelham

Every year or so the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas confounds the Western policymakers who have worked to deny it power since its electoral triumph in January 2006. If the goal of Western policy is to keep the Islamists out of sight, out of mind, then Hamas is like a jack-in-the-box, periodically jumping out of its confines to general surprise and consternation. Full Story>>

Turkey’s Search for Regional Power
MERO - August 21, 2010
Yüksel Taşkın

Under the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey is carving out a greater role for itself in Middle Eastern affairs. Since 2008, Turkey has sought the role of Middle East intermediary in trying to broker a peace agreement between Israel and Syria and to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis. This more independent and assertive foreign policy has put Turkey increasingly at odds with two of its long-standing allies, Israel and the United States. A crucial ally for the US in its war on Iraq, Turkey now refuses to comply with US policy on Iran. The Turkish government also has become more outspoken against Israeli violations of Palestinian rights in the West Bank and Gaza, placing it on a diplomatic collision course with Israel. Three months after the Israeli assault on a Gaza-bound Turkish aid vessel, the Obama administration is reportedly warning Turkey that if its relations with Israel do not improve, and if Turkey does not temper its opposition to US policy on Iran, Congress may halt arms sales to Turkey. Full Story>>

Disaster Strikes the Indus River Valley
From the Editors
August 17, 2010

The flooding of most of the Indus River valley in Pakistan has the makings of a history-altering catastrophe. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that 20 million Pakistanis are in dire need, many of them homeless or displaced, others cut off from help by fallen bridges and submerged highways, untold numbers lacking supplies of food and potable water. In the August heat, waterborne disease is a mortal peril, especially to children, 3.5 million of whom are said to be vulnerable. Measured in numbers of people affected, says OCHA spokesman Maurizio Giuliano, “This disaster is worse than the tsunami, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake and the Haiti earthquake.” Full Story>>

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The UN Risen Above Its Origins
Interventions
Ian Williams
August 2010

People and nations hold such disparate views of the United Nations that an old allegory from India comes to mind. In John Godfrey Saxe’s nineteenth-century verse rendering, “It was six men of Hindustan, to learning much inclined / Who went to see the elephant, though all of them were blind.” One sage touched only the elephant’s trunk, another the tusks, another the tail, and so on, so that each came back with a very different perspective on the pachyderm. Full Story>>

The PKK and the Closure of Turkey’s Kurdish Opening
MERO - August 4, 2010
Alexander Christie-Miller

At a community hall in Diyarbakır, a majority-Kurdish city in southeastern Turkey, a shrine is draped with the illegal flag of the Kurdistan Workers Party, otherwise known as the PKK. On top of the flag is a framed photograph of Özgür Dağhan, a young man who died fighting for the outlawed rebel group. Looming above, a poster shows the grinning visage of the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, whose organization’s war with the Turkish state has so far claimed more than 40,000 lives. Since the PKK canceled its one-year ceasefire on June 1, scenes such as this one are once again common. Full Story>>

Travesty in Progress: Omar Khadr and the US Military Commissions
MERO - July 26, 2010
Lisa Hajjar

At 23, Omar Khadr is the youngest of the 176 people still imprisoned at the US military’s detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He has been there for eight years, one third of his life. A Canadian, he is the only citizen of a Western country remaining in detention, although one British resident, Shaker Aamer, is also still locked up there. Of the 779 people brought to Guantánamo since 2002, only 36 have been charged or designated for prosecution, 26 by the Bush administration and the remainder by the Obama administration. Khadr is accused of violating the laws of armed conflict -- as reinterpreted by the US government after the September 11, 2001 attacks. He is charged with being an “unlawful enemy combatant” (now relabeled “unprivileged enemy belligerent”) who threw a grenade that killed a US soldier in the heat of battle in Afghanistan. Full Story>>

“We Are All Jordan”…But Who Is We?
MERO - July 13, 2010
Curtis Ryan

Like most countries around the world, Jordan has been gripped with World Cup fever. Since their national team was not in the tournament, Jordanians rallied around perennial favorites Brazil, Italy, Argentina and Germany. They advertised their loyalties with flags draped over windows, balconies, cars and shoulders, and traded half-joking taunts with partisans of other teams. But, as the Cup progressed, and the favored squads fell, another more serious battle over loyalty and identity was being waged barely below the surface of Jordanian politics: the struggle between “East Bank” Jordanians, whose roots lie east of the Jordan river, and Palestinian Jordanians, whose origins are west of the Jordan in historic Palestine. These tensions over belonging in the country and ownership of the state are not new, but they have a newly sharp edge. Full Story>>

Obama’s Nuclear Postures
MERO - July 5, 2010
Zia Mian

In his first official statement after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, President Harry Truman claimed the new weapon as a fundamental breakthrough in military capability and a uniquely American achievement. The Hiroshima bomb, he said, was “more than two thousand times the blast power of…the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare,” drawing its enormous destructive force from “a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.” With the bomb, Truman declared, “We have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces.” It was made possible, he claimed, only because “the United States had available the large number of scientists of distinction in the many needed areas of knowledge. It had the tremendous industrial and financial resources necessary for the project.... It is doubtful if such another combination could be got together in the world.” Full Story>>

Jordan’s Risky Business As Usual
MERO - June 30, 2010
Jillian Schwedler

Political reformers in Jordan are struck by a sense of déjà vu. Jordan has been parliament-free since November 2009, when King ‘Abdallah II dissolved the legislature for not moving fast enough on his program of economic reform. The deputies had yet served even half of their four-year terms. Since then, a hastily assembled rump cabinet has been publishing its own laws, largely the very measures championed by the king but rejected or stalled by the last legislature. The king has done this before; for two years between 2001-2003, Jordan was without an elected assembly, during which time the cabinet introduced more than 200 “temporary laws.” Full Story>>

The Green Movement Awaits an Invisible Hand
MERO - June 26, 2010
Mohammad Maljoo

It is the custom of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to devise a name for each Persian new year when it arrives. On Nowruz of the Persian year 1388, which fell in March 2009 Gregorian time, he proclaimed “the year of rectifying consumption patterns.” But Iranians would not be content to mark 1388 simply with thrift. That year of the Persian calendar turned out to be the most politically tumultuous since the revolution that toppled the Shah, as the loosely constituted Green Movement mounted massive street protests against election fraud. Full Story>>

Grave Injustice: Maher Arar and Unaccountable America
MERO - June 24, 2010
Lisa Hajjar

On June 14, the Supreme Court buried the prospect of justice for Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin who was “extraordinarily rendered” by the United States (via Jordan) to Syria in 2002. Arar was suing the US officials who authorized his secret transfer, without charge, to a country infamous for torture. With the justices’ 22-word statement, the case of Arar v. Ashcroft exited the American legal system and entered the annals of American legal history under the category “grave injustice.” Alphabetically, Arar precedes Dred Scott v. Sanford, which upheld slavery, and Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the internment of Japanese Americans. In this case, however, the grave is literal: Arar spent ten months of his year in Syrian custody confined in what he describes as “an underground grave.” Full Story>>

Israel’s Palestinian Minority Thrown into a Maelstrom
MERO - June 16, 2010
Jonathan Cook 

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 Marmara. Salah is alive, but at the time his demise seemed confirmed when it emerged that large numbers of police had been drafted into northern Israel, where most of the Palestinian minority lives, in expectation of widespread violence. Full Story>>

Cyprus’ Continuously Returning Past
MERO - June 3, 2010
Rebecca Bryant

The April 18 victory of a nationalist candidate in the Turkish Cypriot presidential election threw international observers of the Cyprus negotiations into mourning. They had to bid farewell to Mehmet Ali Talat, the leftist leader who had swept to power in 2004 in the wake of a popular revolution against long-time leader Rauf Denktaş, a man known for his ties to military and ultra-nationalist elements in Turkey and his intransigent stance toward negotiating with Greek Cypriots. Talat’s backers also saw conservatives cement the hold on power they had begun to regain in parliamentary elections in 2009. Full Story>>

Outlaws of the Mediterranean
From the Editors
June 1, 2010

At 4 am Eastern Mediterranean time on May 31, elite Israeli commandos rappelled from helicopters onto the deck of the Turkish-registered ship Mavi Marmara, part of an international “Freedom Flotilla” that had met in Cyprus and then set sail to deliver humanitarian relief supplies to the besieged Gaza Strip. The Mavi Marmara, the largest of the relief vessels, was carrying some 600 activists, mainly Turks but also others of diverse nationalities. The commandos fired live ammunition at some of the passengers, who Israel claims were lightly armed with metal rods or knives, and may have resisted the raid. Some reports say that other ships were also boarded and/or fired upon. The lowest reported death toll among the activists is nine, and the lowest number of wounded is 34. Full Story>>

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The Race Is On: Muslims and Arabs in the American Imagination
Interventions
Moustafa Bayoumi
March 2010

“We are so racially profiled now, as a group,” the Arab-American comedian Dean Obeidallah says in his routine, “that I heard a correspondent on CNN not too long ago say the expression, ‘Arabs are the new blacks.’ That Arabs are the new blacks." Full Story>>

The Sectarian Incident That Won’t Go Away
MERO - March 5, 2010
Mariz Tadros

When violence breaks out between Egypt’s Muslim majority and Coptic Christian minority, the Egyptian government is normally quick to deny that the motive could be sectarian. Spokesmen point to “foreign fingers” that are supposedly stirring up sedition, in hopes that the file on the incident can be closed as quickly as possible and the state can resume displaying an image of Egypt as typified by “national unity.” This rhetorical device has been useful in the past for deflecting demands from Copts, who compose roughly 10 percent of the population, that their underlying grievances be redressed. But the government’s act has worn thin. Full Story>>

Confronting Settlement Expansion in East Jerusalem
MERO - February 14, 2010
Joel Beinin

The neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, a 20-minute walk up the hill from the Damascus Gate to the Old City of Jerusalem, has become the focal point of the struggle over the expanding project of Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

In the first week of February a settler in Sheikh Jarrah attacked a young boy from an Arab family evicted so that Jewish activists could move in. The al-Ghawis were displaced in August 2009, and since then they have been living in front of their former home in a tent, refusing to move in protest of the eviction. Settlers have gone after them more than once. On this occasion, an older al-Ghawi, Nasir, was beaten and menaced with an M-16 by a settler when he attempted to protect the young boy. Police arrived on the scene and disarmed the settler. But they also served Nasir with a restraining order forbidding him to enter Sheikh Jarrah for 15 days. Then the police destroyed the al-Ghawis’ tent. The makeshift abode was rebuilt, but the next day police and municipal officials came to the site and threatened to dismantle it a second time. Full Story >>

Egypt’s Wall
MERO - February 1, 2010
Ursula Lindsey

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 to anyone who had been in the country in 2005, when protests against President Husni Mubarak’s regime and in favor of judicial independence were a semi-regular occurrence. Yet there was something unusual about these protesters: They were all foreigners. Full Story>>

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Once More Into the Breach
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Ussama Makdisi
December 2009

The first decade of the twenty-first century may well be remembered as the biggest boom time ever for Middle East studies. Jobs in the field were abundant, and publishers, after fretting for much of the 1990s about the future of the monograph, were suddenly in the midst of unanticipated demand for things Arab and Muslim. Hanging over these developments, however, were both a tragedy and a debacle. The tragedy, of course, was the attacks of September 11, 2001. The debacle was the presidency of George W. Bush, which claimed to have found its purpose in the attacks’ aftermath. The results spoke for themselves: two foreign countries occupied; countless innocents dead; torture embraced; American credibility at historic lows; and, for the first time in living memory, a Middle East policy openly bleeding American taxpayers. A Manichean view of the world appeared to have overcome America: Good was said to be ranged against evil; crusades were needed to defeat jihads; and despite the platitudes emanating from the White House about how Islam as a religion was not the enemy, there was a very clear sense that “the West” was besieged by dangerously fanatical Muslims. Full Story>>

Catcher’s Mitt: Obama, Pakistan and the Afghan Wars to Come
MERO - December 31, 2009
Graham Usher

Pakistan lies at the heart of President Barack Obama’s plan to wind down America’s war in Afghanistan. If -- as he avers -- the “overarching goal” is to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the war will be fought mainly in Pakistan. With fewer than a hundred fighters, al-Qaeda was defeated long ago in Afghanistan. Full Story>>

Broken Taboos in Post-Election Iran
MERO - December 17, 2009
Ziba Mir-Hosseini

The on-camera martyrdom of Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year old philosophy student shot dead during the protests after the fraudulent presidential election in Iran in June, caught the imagination of the world. But the post-election crackdown has two other victims whose fates better capture the radical shift in the country’s political culture. One victim was the protester Taraneh Mousavi, detained, reportedly raped and murdered in prison, and her body burned and discarded. The other is Majid Tavakoli, the student leader arrested on December 8, after a fiery speech denouncing dictatorship during the demonstrations on National Student Day. Full Story>>

Anatomy of a Nuclear Breakthrough Gone Backwards
MERO - December 8, 2009
Farideh Farhi

According to the headline writers at the hardline daily Keyhan, October 2 saw “a great victory for Iran” in Geneva. That day, Iran’s nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili had sat down with representatives of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany, the contact group known as the “P5+1,” as well as the European Union, and the hardliners were in a mood for self-congratulation. Arch-conservative Keyhan editor Hossein Shariatmadari titled his commentary, “We Did Not Back Down; They Were Cut Down to Size.” Full Story>>

“Road Maps” and Roadblocks in Turkey’s Southeast
MERO - October 30, 2009
Marlies Casier, Andy Hilton and Joost Jongerden

“Whether you call it a terror problem, a southeastern Anatolia problem or a Kurdish problem, this is the first question for Turkey,” Abdullah Gül declared in May. “It has to be solved.” With these words from the president, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish acronym, the AKP) put the long-simmering tensions between the state and the country’s millions of Kurds squarely on the front burner. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an then announced a major new initiative, whose Turkish title literally translates as the “Kurdish opening.” Soon after that, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, announced that he had completed a “road map to peace,” 160 handwritten pages proposing means to the end of the fighting between PKK guerrillas and the Turkish army, an on-again, off-again, decades-long war that neither side is strong enough to win or weak enough to lose. Hopes for a definitive answer to Turkey’s “first question” rose high, but few concrete steps were taken. Full Story>>

Damietta Mobilizes for Its Environment
MERO - October 21, 2009
Sharif Elmusa and Jeannie Sowers

In 2008, Egypt’s Mediterranean port city of Damietta saw escalating protest against EAgrium, a Canadian consortium building a large fertilizer complex in Ra’s al-Barr. Ra’s al-Barr sits at the end of an estuary, where the Damietta branch of the Nile River joins the Mediterranean. It is a prime destination for vacationing Egyptians in the summertime and the location of the year-round residences of the Damiettan elite. Fishermen ply the waters offshore. When plans for the fertilizer complex were announced, a coalition of locals feared that all three sources of income -- tourism, real estate and fishing -- would be jeopardized by emissions into the air and water. As summer temperatures climbed and the protests mounted, the government found itself caught between its contractual obligations to international investors and a well-organized local movement opposed to the project on both environmental and developmental grounds. Full Story

Israel’s Religious Right and the Peace Process
MERO - October 12, 2009
Nicolas Pelham

It would be easy to describe the residents of the outpost of Amona as radicals. In February 2006 they led protests of 4,000 settler activists, some of them armed, against 3,000 Israeli police who were amassed to make sure that nine unauthorized structures in the West Bank were bulldozed as ordered. In the ensuing clashes, 80 security personnel and 120 settlers were wounded, more than the entirety of the casualties during the 2005 “disengagement” from settlements in Gaza, in a showdown that became the symbol of the West Bank settlers’ resolve to resist the state’s efforts to tear down encampments, like their own, that were erected without the state’s permission. “How do I explain to my children that the army that came to protect us behaves like our enemy?” laments Amona resident Irit Levinger. Full Story>>

Norse Code
From the Editors
October 10, 2009

A Minnesota farm boy gets accepted to Yale. On his first day on campus, ambling down the oak-shaded lanes, he meets a toothy young swell whose blood matches his navy blazer. The two exchange words of praise for the pleasant autumn afternoon, and then the Minnesotan ventures a query. Full Story>> 

A Precarious Peace in Northern Iraq
MERO - October 1, 2009
Quil Lawrence

On a stifling August afternoon in 2008, just as Iraq was recovering from the worst of its sectarian civil war, the Arab and Kurdish parties allied with the United States came to the edge of an ethnic bloodbath whose consequences for Iraq and the region would have been every bit as frightening. The trouble started when the mayor of Khanaqin, a predominantly Kurdish city in the Diyala province along the Iranian border, received a frantic call from a police station beyond the Alwand River on the west side of town. “They told me that the Iraqi army was on its way,” said the mayor, Muhammad Mula Hassan. “No one had informed me. A minute later we heard that the Iraqi army was surrounding Khanaqin. They said, ‘We’re going to control the area.’ That means we are the enemy?" Full Story>> 

Dismantling the Matrix of Control
MERO - September 11, 2009
Jeff Halper

Almost a decade ago I wrote an article describing Israel’s “matrix of control” over the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It consisted then of three interlocking systems: military administration of much of the West Bank and incessant army and air force intrusions elsewhere; a skein of “facts on the ground,” notably settlements in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, but also bypass roads connecting the settlements to Israel proper; and administrative measures like house demolitions and deportations. I argued in 2000 that unless this matrix was dismantled, the occupation would not be ended and a two-state solution could not be achieved. Full Story>> 

Democracy, Lebanese-Style
MERO - August 18, 2009
Melani Cammett

Just as reports from Lebanon were indicating that a cabinet would be finalized within days, the notoriously fickle Druze leader Walid Jumblatt announced, on August 2, that his Progressive Socialist Party would withdraw from the governing coalition. Jumblatt criticized his coalition partners in the March 14 alliance, which had claimed victory in the June 7 parliamentary elections, for a campaign “driven by the re­jection of the opposition on sectarian, tribal and political levels rather than being based on a political platform. This view could apply to the campaigns of both major alliances that ran in the elections. While there were spirited appeals to prevent unwanted foreign intervention or control by representatives of other sects, the campaign period was notable for its lack of attention to issues of real substance. Full Story>>

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Rachel Corrie in Palestine…and in San Francisco
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Joel Beinin
August 2009

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the oldest such festival in the United States, was founded in rebellion against received wisdom. Since 1980, the festival has promoted independent Jewish films that contest the conventional Hollywood depiction of Jewish life, particularly its lachrymose over-concentration on Jewish victimhood, and regularly presented “alternatives to the often uncritical view of life and politics in Israel available in the established American Jewish community.” The festival’s audience, mostly Jewish, has reacted positively to this policy, even in 2005, when the organizers decided to show Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, the theme of which is suicide bombing. Full Story>>

The Day After “Victory”: Kuwait’s 2009 Election and the Contentious Present
MERO - July 8, 2009
Mary Ann Tétreault and Mohammed Al-Ghanim

The May 2009 parliamentary election in Kuwait produced a number of surprising results. Occurring on the fourth anniversary of the achievement of full political rights for Kuwaiti women, the outcome attracting the most commentary was the victory of four female candidates. But there were other happenings of note. Doctrinaire religious candidates ran behind women in several districts. In fact, all of the “political groups” that function as Kuwait’s substitute for political parties did poorly on May 16, whether their orientation is center-left or religious. Even more telling is the fact that so many candidates, including several who had run as group representatives in previous elections, chose to run as independents. Although the turnover of seats was normal for Kuwait -- there are 21 new faces in 2009 as compared to 22 the last time around -- a few old stalwarts were defeated, including ‘Abdallah al-Nibari, a founder of the Kuwaiti Democratic Forum, which chose not to endorse candidates. Full Story>>

Tehran, June 2009
MERO - June 28, 2009
Kaveh Ehsani, Arang Keshavarzian and Norma Claire Moruzzi

The morning after Iran’s June 12 presidential election, Iranians booted up their computers to find Fars News, the online mouthpiece of the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus, heralding the dawn of a “third revolution.” Many an ordinary Iranian, and many a Western pundit, had already adopted such dramatic language to describe the burgeoning street demonstrations against the declaration by the Ministry of Interior that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the sitting president, had received 64 percent of the vote to 34 percent for his main challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi. But the editors of Fars News were referring neither to the protests, as were the people in the streets, nor to the prospect that the unrest might topple the Islamic Republic, as were some of the more wistful commentators. Rather, the editors were labeling the radical realignment of Iranian politics that they wish for. This realignment would complete the removal of the old guard, as did the “first” revolution of 1978-1979, and consolidate the rule of inflexible hardliners, as did the “second revolution” symbolized by the US Embassy takeover of 1979. Full Story>>

Old Wine in Older Skins: Lebanon Elects Another Parliament
MERO - June 3, 2009
Heiko Wimmen

On June 8, when all votes are cast and counted between the glitzy urban quarters of Beirut and the dusty hamlets of the Bekaa valley, the Lebanese elections will have produced one certain winner: the local advertising industry. Despite a newly imposed cap on campaign spending, candidates have been falling over each other to plaster the billboards along the roads and highways of this miniscule country with their oversized likenesses and airy slogans. Crowded out by the politicians, some peddlers of more pedestrian seasonal merchandise have retaliated in kind, with a brand of cheap fruit juice poking fun at notorious practices of vote rigging by promising democracy "extra," thus drawing attention to its product by the same name, while the only locally produced beer brand declared itself "victorious for lack of competition" already three months ago -- true to the form of much of the electoral contest. Full Story>>

The Shi‘a of Saudi Arabia at a Crossroads
MERO - May 6, 2009
Toby Matthiesen

Deep in the morass of YouTube lies a disturbing video clip recorded in late February at the cemetery of al-Baqi‘ and on surrounding streets in Medina, Saudi Arabia. An initial caption promises images of “desecration of graves.” Al-Baqi‘, located next to the mosque of the prophet Muhammad in the second holiest city of Islam, is believed to be the final resting place of four men revered by Shi‘i Muslims as imams or successors to the prophet: Hasan ibn ‘Ali, ‘Ali ibn Husayn, Muhammad ibn ‘Ali and Ja‘afar ibn Muhammad. The prophet’s wives, as well as many of his relatives and close associates, are also said to be buried here, making the ground hallowed for Sunni Muslims as well. Full Story>>

Pakistan’s Troubled “Paradise on Earth”
MERO - April 29, 2009
Kamran Asdar Ali

Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes in areas of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) as the army has launched ground operations and air raids to “eliminate and expel” the Islamist militant groups commonly known as the Tehreek-e Taliban or the Taliban in Pakistan (TIP). The targeted districts border Swat, a well-watered mountain vale described as “paradise on earth” in Pakistani tourist brochures, where the provincial government tried to placate the Taliban by agreeing to implement Islamic law (sharia). The February agreement, the Nizam-e Adal regulation, was approved by the lower house of the Pakistani parliament on April 12 and signed into law soon afterward by the president, Asif Zardari. But since then, fighting has continued, with both sides accusing the other of breaching the peace. As of April 27, according to a cleric close to the TIP, talks with the provincial government about Swat are suspended. Full Story>>

The Reawakened Specter of Iraqi Civil War
MERO - April 17, 2009
Michael Wahid Hanna

April has already been a cruel month in Iraq. A spate of bombings aimed at Shi‘i civilians in Baghdad has raised fears that the grim sectarian logic that led the capital to civil war in 2005-2007 will reassert itself. On April 6, a string of six car bombs killed at least 37 people; the next day, shortly after President Barack Obama landed in Baghdad, another car bomb killed eight; and on the morrow, still another bomb blew up close to the historic Shi‘i shrine in Kadhimiyya just northwest of the capital’s central districts, taking an additional seven civilian lives. Worryingly for Iraqis, the bombings occurred following gun battles between the security forces of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shi‘i-led government and Sunni Arab militiamen, fueling rumors that the disgruntled militiamen have spearheaded the violent campaign. Full Story>>

Bouteflika’s Triumph and Algeria’s Tragedy
MERO - April 10, 2009
Jacob Mundy

Shoes and pants soaked with rain, I tagged along with a journalist from the popular Arabic daily Echorouk -- his paper my umbrella -- while he visited polling stations in the Belcourt neighborhood of Algiers on the day of local elections in November 2007. At the first site, disgruntled party officials quickly ejected us. We did not have the right papers, they said, and the police who looked on bored were inclined to agree. At the second station, we kept our distance. Watching for half an hour, we could count the voters who entered on two hands. Next to us stood four youths, escaping the rain under a shop awning. They laughed at us when we asked if they were going to vote. Down the road we saw an older gentleman on his way back from voting. For the occasion, he had donned a woolen Nehru-type cap and a brown burnoose, to which he had proudly affixed a medal earned during the war for independence from France (1954-1962). Full Story>>

Introducing Algeria’s President-for-Life
MERO - April 1, 2009
Ahmed Aghrout and Yahia H. Zoubir

Across nearly the breadth of North Africa, the head of state enjoys a lifetime appointment. Morocco has a king. In Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, president since 1987, pushed for a constitutional amendment removing term limits and has now announced a bid for a fifth term in office. President Husni Mubarak of Egypt, who assumed office in 1981, is already serving his fifth term. Libyan strongman Mu‘ammar Qaddafi, in power since September 1969, has never permitted a meaningful election. In March, during a visit to Niamey, Niger, where President Mamadou Tandja is also seeking to rescind term limits, Qaddafi denied that such measures are “anti-democratic,” declaring: “I am for freedom of popular will; the people must choose who should govern, even if it is for eternity.” Full Story>>

The Hazy Path Forward in Sudan
MERO - March 24, 2009
Sarah Washburne 

On the day after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the wanted man addressed a pre-planned rally of thousands in front of the presidential palace in Khartoum. Bashir was defiant, denouncing the warrant as “neo-colonialism,” and praising his supporters in Martyrs’ Square as “grandsons of the mujahideen,” a reference to the participants in the Mahdiyya uprising against Anglo-Egyptian rule in 1885. The atmosphere was almost one of jubilation; one might have mistaken the crowds for soccer fans celebrating a win. As Bashir condemned the ICC and the West from the microphone, the protesters waved the Sudanese flag and held aloft pictures of Bashir, as well as posters depicting the face of Luis Moreno Ocampo, the ICC prosecutor, superimposed upon the body of a pig. There were sporadic outbreaks of drumming, dancing and singing. Full Story>> 

Bring In the Dead: Martyr Burials and Election Politics in Iran
MERO - March 19, 2009
Rasmus Christian Elling

Beating their chests and wearing black, a procession of young men and women filed toward the gates of Tehran’s Amir Kabir Polytechnic University on February 23. The mourners -- drawn primarily from the ranks of the Basij militia and unaffiliated hardline Islamist vigilantes -- were carrying the remains of five unknown soldiers, martyred during the 1980-88 war with Iraq, to campus, where they intended to rebury them. Inside the gates, a gathering of angry students had assembled to protest what they saw as a blatant show of state force, and when the procession crossed onto campus, a confrontation ensued. Students claimed the fight pitted 1,500 protesters against a smaller group of mourners, most of whom were armed with clubs, knives and martial arts weapons. Security forces arrested more than 70 of their number, the students reported, and nine were hospitalized. In subsequent days, more student activists were picked up in police raids, and at press time, some of them were still in detention. Full Story>>

Assessing Italy’s Grande Gesto to Libya
MERO - March 16, 2009
Claudia Gazzini

Under a tent in Benghazi on August 30, 2008, Silvio Berlusconi bowed symbolically before the son of ‘Umar al-Mukhtar, hero of the Libyan resistance to Italian colonial rule. “It is my duty to express to you, in the name of the Italian people, our regret and apologies for the deep wounds that we have caused you,” said the Italian premier. Eastern Libya was the site of the bulk of the armed resistance to the Italian occupation, which lasted from 1911 to 1943. More than 100,000 Libyans are believed to have died in the counterinsurgency campaign, many in desert prison camps and in southern Italian penal colonies. Inside the tent, Berlusconi and Libyan leader Mu‘ammar al-Qaddafi signed a historic agreement according to which Italy will pay $5 billion over the next 20 years, nominally to compensate Libya for these “deep wounds.” The treaty was ratified by Italy on February 3 and by Libya on March 1. Full Story>>

The Song Does Not Remain the Same
MERO - March 12, 2009
Ramin Sadighi and Sohrab Mahdavi

Starting in the late 1990s, and especially following two stories by CNN's chief international correspondent, the British-Iranian Christiane Amanpour, Westerners were treated to a slew of articles and broadcast reports aiming to “lift the veil” on Iran. Amanpour’s second story revolved around “youth and the party scene.” She visited the house of another hyphenated Iranian to show a group reveling in youthful abandon, toasting each other with alcoholic drinks to the tune of playful music, and so consuming two illegal items of consequence in the Islamic Republic. With youth, it seemed, came merriment and rebelliousness. Full Story>>

Shooting Film and Crying
Interventions
Ursula Lindsey
March 2009

Waltz with Bashir (2008) opens with a strange and powerful image: a pack of ferocious dogs running headlong through the streets of Tel Aviv, overturning tables and terrifying pedestrians, converging beneath a building’s window to growl at a man standing there. It turns out that this man, Boaz, is an old friend of Ari Folman, the film’s director and protagonist. Like Folman, he was a teenager in the Israeli army during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And the pack of menacing dogs is his recurring nightmare, a nightly vision he links to the many village guard dogs he shot -- so they wouldn’t raise the alarm -- as his platoon made its way through southern Lebanon. Full Story>>

Wanted: Omar al-Bashir—and Peace in Sudan
MERO - March 5, 2009
Khalid Mustafa Medani

For the first time, the international community has indicted a sitting president of a sovereign state. Omar al-Bashir of Sudan stands accused by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague of “crimes against humanity and war crimes” committed in the course of the Khartoum regime’s brutal suppression of the revolt in the country’s far western province of Darfur. Having indicted two other figures associated with the regime in 2007, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo began building a case against the man at the top, and on March 4, the court issued a warrant for Bashir’s arrest. Full Story>>

A Litmus Test for Iraq
MERO - January 30, 2009
Reidar Visser

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari arrived in Basra on January 24. His mission in the southern oil port was to stump for his Reformist Front, a breakaway faction of the Da‘wa Party of the current premier, Nouri al-Maliki, ahead of Iraq’s January 31 provincial elections. His itinerary included visits to the Five Miles area -- often described as a stronghold of the movement loyal to the young Shi‘i leader Muqtada al-Sadr -- as well as a rally at a sports stadium. Only days earlier, he had been preceded by Maliki himself, and in the first days of 2009 numerous other national politicians trooped to Basra as well. Full Story>>

The Continuity of Obama’s Change
MERO - January 27, 2009
Mouin Rabbani and Chris Toensing

President Barack Obama’s campaign pledge that his administration would begin working for peace in the Middle East from its first day in office is one that he almost met. On January 21, a mere 24 hours after his inauguration, Obama placed phone calls from the Oval Office to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, Egyptian President Husni Mubarak and Jordanian King ‘Abdallah II. The next day, together with Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he visited the State Department to announce the appointment of former Sen. George Mitchell as the new special envoy for the Middle East. Full Story>> 

Birth Pangs of a New Palestine
MERO - January 7, 2009
Mouin Rabbani

Shortly after 11:30 am on December 27, 2008, at the height of the midday bustle on the first day of the Gazan week and with multitudes of schoolchildren returning home from the morning shift, close to 90 Israeli warplanes launched over 100 tons of explosives at some 100 targets throughout the 139 square miles of the Gaza Strip. Within minutes, the near simultaneous air raids killed more than 225 and wounded at least 700, more than 200 of them critically. These initial attacks alone produced dozens more dead than any other day in the West Bank and Gaza combined since Israel’s occupation of those lands commenced in June 1967. Full Story>>

Cast Lead in the Foundry
From the Editors
December 31, 2008

A stopped clock, the saying goes, is right twice a day. The “senior Bush administration official” who chatted with the Washington Post on December 28 was right that Israel is “not trying to take over the Gaza Strip” with the massive assault launched the previous day, and correct that the Israelis are bombing now “because they want it to be over before the next administration comes in.” That’s twice, and so one must take this official’s remaining reasoning -- that President-elect Barack Obama may not smile upon Israel’s gross abuses of military power as the Bush administration has done -- with a grain of salt. Full Story>>

Dangerous Liaisons: Pakistan, India and Lashkar-e Taiba
MERO - December 31, 2008
Graham Usher

The day after Christmas, the wires buzzed with reports that Pakistan was moving 20,000 troops from its western border with Afghanistan to locations near the eastern border with India. The redeployment, said Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Qureshi, came in response to “certain developments” on the Indian side of the boundary, one reportedly being that New Delhi might be considering military strikes on militant bases inside Pakistan. Pakistani security officials stressed that these moves were “minimum defensive measures”: No soldiers had been taken away from the theater of counterinsurgency operations against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, only from “snowbound areas” where the army sits idle. Still, the troop transfers marked another dip in relations between India and Pakistan since the November 26 massacre of over 170 people in the Indian metropolis of Mumbai. Full Story>>

Interventions: A Middle East Report Online Feature

Recipe for a Riot: Parsing Israel’s Yom Kippur Upheavals
Interventions
Peter Lagerquist
November 2008

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 West for having served as the CENTCOM of the crusading Richard the Lionheart, Acre is today a “mixed” Israeli town, inhabited by Jews as well as Arabs like Tawfiq. That day, he was on his way to pick up his daughter, who had been helping the Shaabans prepare cakes for a wedding scheduled for the following week. He insists that he drove slowly and quietly, with his radio turned off. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, one of the holiest days of the Jewish religious calendar, on which the streets of Israel’s Jewish cities and towns customarily empty of traffic. After he parked his car at the Shaaban home, a group of Jewish youths attacked Tawfiq and chased him inside. For the next few hours, a mob besieged the place, and as rumors spread that one of its inhabitants had been killed, Arab youths poured out of the city’s old casbah ghetto, some reportedly to come to the rescue. On their way back home the youths proceeded to break a number of windows in Jewish shops. Full Story>>

Bypassing Bethlehem’s Eastern Reaches
MERO - October 7, 2008
Nate Wright

The town of Bayt Sahour spills down the hills to the east of Bethlehem, spreading out along ridges and valleys that mark the beginning of the long descent to the Dead Sea. Up the slopes the roads carve out twisting rivers of dirt and asphalt, wending their way through clusters of soft brown stone houses, but across the ridges they run straight and smooth. 

At the end of one of these roads lies a hill called ‘Ush Ghurab, known to Israelis as Shdema, the name of the military base that sat on the summit until 2006. Today there are only a few hollowed-out buildings, thick concrete blocks with gaping windows and doorways set low behind earthen walls, to remind visitors of the previous occupants. On the northern slope, small pillboxes stare out vacantly over Bayt Sahour and Bethlehem. Full Story>>