Anatomy of Another Rebellion
From the Editor (Winter 2000)
On Hold
Cracks in Egypt’s Electoral Engineering
The Peres-Arafat Agreement: Can It Work?
Within hours of the November 2 announcement that PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and the Israeli Minister of Regional Cooperation, Shimon Peres, had agreed to implement the understandings reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) at the October Sharm al-Sheikh summit, Israeli soldiers shot and killed teenage Palestinian demonstrator Khalid Rezaq in the village of Hizma near Jerusalem. Another Palestinian, Adli Abeid, succumbed to wounds sustained a day earlier at the Mintar/Karni crossing on the eastern border of the Gaza Strip.
Hizballah Outside and In
Shows of Solidarity Forever
Egyptian President Husni Mubarak and his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Asad will convene an Arab summit in Cairo this weekend to formulate a common stance against the harsh Israeli response to the ongoing Palestinian uprising in the Occupied Territories and within Israel. The summit, the first in over a decade, reflects substantial pressure on Arab regimes from their own populations: large demonstrations in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere manifest an unusually strong feeling of solidarity with the Palestinian cause on the Arab street.
Yemen and the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army
After the Sharm al-Sheikh Summit
The Iron Fist in the Peace Process
Televised images of Israeli combat soldiers killing unarmed Palestinian children and helicopters strafing Palestinian neighborhoods have publicly exposed the Israeli military force that undergirds and shapes the Oslo process.
Running for Cover: The US, World Oil Markets and Iraq
Last week's panic within the Clinton Administration over a potential winter spike in heating oil prices has greatly eased, as oil prices have begun to fall. The Democrats' political planners feared that Republican candidate George W. Bush and voters would blame Clinton and Vice President Al Gore for failing to forestall the price rise that dominated the news for the last two weeks.
Israel’s Palestinians and the Politics of Law and Order
Last week, a shocking case of Israeli police brutality in the occupied West Bank was reported in the Washington Post. Officers accosted three young Palestinians out delivering groceries, beat them and took photographs of themselves holding up the Palestinians' bloodied heads "like hunting trophies" for the camera. Aggression and erratic behavior on the part of Israeli police is routine in the Occupied Territories — and familiar to Palestinian citizens of Israel itself.
Iran’s Reform Dilemma
Land, Identity and the Limits of Resistance in the Galilee
There has never been anything abstract about the longings of the Palestinians. The object of their longing has always been well defined: the places that had been left behind in 1948. For these places were, and still are, the dominant components of the Palestinian identity. — Danny Rubinstein
Editor’s Picks (Fall 2000)
Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, Roger Heacock and Khaled Nashef, eds. Landcapes of Palestine: Equivocal Poetry (Birzeit: Birzeit University Publications, 1999).
Ahmad, Eqbal. Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000).
Amirahmadi, Hooshang. The Caspian Region at a Crossroads: Challenges of a New Frontier of Energy and Development (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000).
Letters (Fall 2000)
Kuwait
MERIP's Iraq issue (MER 215) represented an opportunity to shape the magazine according to the needs of the new activism challenging Washington's policy towards Iraq-the movement against crippling economic sanctions, thrice-weekly bombings, the undermining of the United Nations and the regional arms race that hamstrings real disarmament.
Ruminations on Political Violence
Texts Reviewed
Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables and Faces of Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1996).
Meredith Turshen and Clotilde Twagiramariya, eds., What Women Do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa (London: Zed Books, 1998).
Suha Sabbagh, ed., Palestinian Women of Gaza and the West Bank (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998).
Spatial Fantasies
Rivka, the tragic protagonist of Amos Gitai's new film Kadosh, is unable to conceive a child. Her anxiety is acute. The ultra-Orthodox community of Me'ah She'arim in West Jerusalem, in which Rivka lives with her husband Meir, is known to ostracize its barren women. Seeking spiritual guidance, she leaves their home one evening to pray. The camera follows Rivka as she walks through the darkened streets of Me'ah She'arim, then cuts to her arrival in the spacious, well-lit courtyard of the Western Wall. Hands pressed against the stones, she seeks salvation.
Policing the Illicit Peripheries of Egypt’s Tourism Industry
Tourist destinations are never simply reducible to the sun, sand and sea they offer. The lucrative international trade associated with Third World tourism involves packaging and marketing areas of the world that are most devastated by contemporary economic conditions, essentially creating landscapes of paradise out of realities of poverty. The case of Dahab, a small coastal town in South Sinai, Egypt, offers an example of the processes and power dynamics involved in the production of tourist spaces. What are the political, economic, cultural and moral forces that shape Dahab? Who are the players involved in shaping this local site of tourism, and what are the interests at stake?
Resettling, Reconstructing and Restor(y)ing
The old village of Umm Qays, Jordan, is strategically lo cated to the south of the Golan Heights, overlooking the northern part of the Jordan Valley and the southern shore of Lake Tiberias. Biblical Gadara and subsequently one of the cities of the Decapolis in antiquity, it attracts modest numbers of both foreign and Jordanian tourists. From the mid-twentieth century on, Umm Qays residents increasingly abandoned farming for work in the civil service and the army, and a new village began to develop adjacent to the original village.
