Middle East

Key Concerns Include Unlawful Attacks, Treatment of Displaced People, Arbitrary Arrests

South Africans advise Palestinians on how Apartheid can be Overcome

Ramzy Baroud | @RamzyBaroud | – The way to truly defeat Apartheid: A conversation with Na’eem Jeenah and Salim Vally “Perhaps the time has come for Palestinians and justice-loving Israelis to imagine a new future,” wrote South African intellectuals and academics, Na’eem Jeenah and Salim Vally, in their essay, “Beyond Ethnic Nationalism: Lessons from South […]

Kurds

Turkish attack on Syria endangers a remarkable democratic experiment by the Kurds

The Conversation

By James L. Gelvin | – Turkey’s attack on Kurdish-run territory in northern Syria will likely snuff out a radical experiment in self-government that is unlike anything I have seen in more than 30 years studying the Middle East. In a surprise Oct. 6 statement, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw its troops […]

Israel/ Palestine

An Expansionist State? Did Israel ever have any intention of honoring either the 1947 Partition Plan or 1967 borders?

Middle East Monitor

By Thomas Suárez | – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to annex parts of the occupied West Bank if re-elected in last month’s General Election, eliciting outrage from world leaders. However, that “promise” to usurp not just the West Bank, but all of Palestine, is century-old news, an ongoing promise being kept, and no […]

Iraq

Did Bush put Iraq on Road to Democracy? Not to Judge by the Violent Crackdown on Protesters

The Conversation

By Balsam Mustafa | – When Muhanad Habib, a 22-year-old Iraqi from the Sadr City district of Baghdad, posted on Facebook in late September, he probably didn’t imagine that his demands for a better life and basic rights would be met with bullets. It will be a huge and angry public revolution in Baghdad … […]

Featured

Not Just Ethnicity: Turkey v. Kurds and the Great Divide over Political Islam v. the Secular Left

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Turkey’s incursion into Syria has roiled the Middle East and NATO countries, demonstrating one key polarizing divide on both sides of the Mediterranean. That divide is between supporters of political Islam and its opponents. By political Islam I mean movements like the Muslim Brotherhood that make Islam more than a […]

Iraq

On Yom Kippur, remembering the Diversity Iraq’s Mosul has Lost with Nationalism and ISIL

The Conversation

By Stephennie Mulder | – On Yom Kippur each year, as Jews around the world pray for atonement, the biblical Book of Jonah is read in its entirety. Jews recall the story of how God summons Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh to tell its inhabitants to turn from their evil deeds. At […]

Iraq

Iraq protests expose the crisis in the regime’s integrity

Middle East Monitor

By Abdulwahhab Badrakhan | – A third wave of protests in Iraq, following those in 2015 and 2018, continues to shake the three pillars of the regime — the constitution, electoral law and an independent judiciary — although protesters’ basic demands are not political. There is, nevertheless, a general conviction that they are impossible to […]

Featured

Is Trump’s Syria Policy about to Loose 12,000 ISIL Terrorists on the World?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Tessa Fox at Al Jazeera writes that Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of U.S. special operations forces from northern Syria in expectation of a Turkish invasion could throw the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia cultivated for the past four years by the US into confusion. Moreover, Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Army may […]