In 2011 Yemenis shared a vision of revolutionary change with protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria demanding the downfall of cruel, corrupt presidential regimes. Today, like many of their cousins, the peaceful youth (shabab silmiyya) of Yemen face a counter-revolutionary maelstrom from within and without. If Gulf sultans were anxious about insurrection in North Africa, they were even more fearful of subaltern uprisings in their own neighborhood.
There are few obvious reasons to visit Basatin, a poor district off the Ring Road at the southern edge of Cairo. Getting there requires a driver willing to bob and weave through a succession of potholed lanes barely wide enough to accommodate pedestrians and the tiny shops that spill into the street. The problems of Basatin are the problems of Egypt: grinding poverty, overcrowding and the slow deterioration of state services. The neighborhood has learned to fend for itself, and non-residents are regarded with suspicion. I stick out more than most. One man watches me curiously for a while, and wanders over to ask if I am Syrian.
On August 14, 2013, supporters of deposed President Muhammad Mursi were massacred at two protest camps in Cairo and Giza. In the subsequent four months, the Muslim Brothers have regrouped to launch a wave of popular protest the likes of which has not been seen in Egypt since the January 25 revolution. Under the banner of the National Alliance to Support Legitimacy, the Brothers have mounted over 1,800 actions in 26 of Egypt’s 27 governorates to call for Mursi’s restoration to office and justice for his dead supporters. These protests have continued in spite of an ongoing crackdown that has claimed the lives of hundreds more and seen thousands of Brothers and pro-Mursi supporters detained.
In August 2013, as the United States was preparing to attack Syria over the use of chemical weapons, a chant echoed through ‘Alawi areas of Homs: “Strike, strike, buddy, we want to loot Tel Aviv” (idrab idrab ya habib, bidna n’affish Tall Abib). The couplet draws on a familiar position in Baathist discourse — resistance to the American-Zionist project for the region — but the means of resistance it espouses departs from the standard of national sacrifice in favor of something far more local. The term for looting, ‘afsh, is slang that comes from a word for furniture.
On January 25, 2011, thousands of Egyptians angered by police brutality, among other state abuses, took over Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, setting off the exuberant upheaval that unseated a dictator of 30 years’ standing and inspired democrats the world over. Spellbound observers (including us) predicted that January 25 would never again be known in Egypt as Police Day.
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was full of tough talk when he visited the island kingdom of Bahrain in early December.
The United States, he vowed, will continue to guard “the free flow of energy and commerce” from the Persian Gulf and keep Iran nuclear-free, through the presence of 35,000 US military personnel or the (as yet unproven) regional missile defense system.
Hagel also trumpeted the American commitment to “political reform” in the Gulf region. But the Pentagon chief uttered not a word about the hundreds of Bahrainis languishing in prison — many without adequate medical care — for demanding the very rights he says they deserve.
In late June 2013, as neighboring Arab states continued their struggles against popular pressure for political reform or regime change, the Gulf emirate of Qatar undertook its own, voluntary transfer of power. Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, patriarch of modern Qatar, appeared on state television to name as successor his 33-year old son, Sheikh Tamim. The outgoing leader was hobbled by serious health problems, it was said, and in any case most observers agreed that a recalibration of Qatar’s domestic and international agendas was perhaps just what the doctor ordered.
Everyone is happy with the interim agreement reached with Iran in Geneva on November 23 — that is, everyone who really wants to defuse the tensions over Iran’s nuclear research program.
American Zionism has made any serious public discussion of the past or future of Israel — by far the largest recipient ever of US foreign aid — a taboo. To call this quite literally the last taboo in American public life would not be an exaggeration. Abortion, homosexuality, the death penalty, even the sacrosanct military budget can be discussed with some freedom. The extermination of native Americans can be admitted, the morality of Hiroshima attacked, the national flag publicly committed to the flames. But the systematic continuity of Israel’s 52-year-old oppression and maltreatment of the Palestinians is virtually unmentionable, a narrative that has no permission to appear.
The penultimate scene in the recently released film Captain Phillips, about the 2009 seizure of the US-flagged cargo ship Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates, depicts the methodical precision with which a Navy SEAL Team 6 unit identified and then captured or killed the pirates during their doomed attempt to ferry their hostage to the Somali mainland.
Christopher Hitchens’ article “Uncorking the Genie: The Cyprus Question and Turkey’s Military Rule” (MERIP Reports 122) must be commended for approaching the complex issue of Cyprus from the vantage point of regional politics, rather than the more usual and not very enlightening arguments involving US imperialism or ethnic-religious differences. However, although his analysis is interesting and his paradigm plausible, the fact is that they quite simply do not apply. By looking at Turkish politics entirely through the prism of Cyprus, he has set up a model that appears to be supported more by aesthetics than hard facts.
The release of the Swiss Institut de Radiophysique’s Experts Forensic Report Concerning the Late President Yasser Arafat has lent further credence to the proposition that the iconic Palestinian leader’s 2004 demise was an act of Sharon rather than of God or nature. Speaking to the Guardian, forensic scientist David Barclay concluded the report provides
The ten days of protests in Sudan beginning September 23, 2013 were the largest in the country since the installation of the military government of Omar al-Bashir in 1989. As Middle East Report editor Khalid Mustafa Medani explains in an interview with KPFA, unlike...
Whatever comes next in the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, the State of Israel is here to stay.
To acknowledge this fact is not to nod to Israel’s “right to exist” — people have rights, states are supposed to protect them — but to bow to the one-state reality in historical Palestine. There is but one sovereign entity in that territory and there is presently no combination of political forces that can produce a second or compel the first to surrender its sovereignty. Anyone who would see peace in Israel-Palestine must first grapple with the many implications of the one-state reality.
Having declared independence in May 1948, the new State of Israel was lacking in international legitimacy. Recognizing the deficiency, Israeli officials invested tremendous effort over the course of 1948-1949 in securing Israel’s admission to the United Nations.
A recent paper identifies three arguments advanced by Israeli diplomats at the time in support of Israel’s application:
Iran’s 1979 revolution, in helping to push out Jimmy Carter and bring in Ronald Reagan, offered up one of the few instances in the latter half of the twentieth century where domestic politics in a Third World country affected domestic politics in the United States more than the other way around. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made no bones about it: The US couldn’t do a damn thing.
This fact remains an unspoken reason the Islamic Republic looms larger than life in our insecure American psyche. Thirty-four years later, it could happen again.
Albrecht, Holger. Raging Against the Machine: Political Opposition Under Authoritarianism in Egypt (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013).
Al-Rasheed, Madawi. A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics and Religions in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Antoon, Sinan. The Corpse Washer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
Bayat, Asef, ed. Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Bröning, Michael. Political Parties in Palestine: Leadership and Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
MERIP mourns Graham Usher, our long-time correspondent and contributing editor. Below are his obituary and two remembrances from our editors.
In her article, “A Makeover: Baghdad, the 2013 Arab Capital of Culture” (MER 266), Nada Shabout gives a description of arts and culture initiatives being developed in three Iraqi “zones.” There are a few discrepancies regarding the non-profit Sada (Echo) for contemporary Iraqi art. First, the organization is described as being based in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. Sada has never been based in Erbil nor have we done specific work in this city. There is no connection between Iraqi Kurdistan and Sada as an organization, other than Sada’s broader mission to work in the Iraqi arts sphere as a whole.
When Sheikh Muhammad ‘Ali Hasan ‘Awad learned that nine kidnapped “Africans” — eight Eritreans and one Ethiopian — were being beaten, raped and starved in a compound in Sheikh Zuwayd, a Sinai village near the Israeli border, he wasted little time. Firing AK-47s in the air, the sheikh and his Bedouin posse burst in to free the victims and threaten their three torturers with death if they did not immediately tell all. The captors’ accounts — and the raid itself — were recorded in high-definition video with an iPad.
