Late last month, Israeli military planes carried out a strike on the outskirts of Damascus, targeting a convoy transporting anti-aircraft weapons bound for Hezbollah. The strike was the latest indication that Lebanon’s Party of God is not only directly involved in the violence in Syria, but will leverage the chaos there to bolster its More »
The assassination of prominent Tunisian secular opposition leader Chokri Belaid highlights the growing threat of militancy in the country. This threat has the potential to deepen the divide between the secular and Islamist factions within Tunisia and delay the transition to a permanent government. Meanwhile, the Islamist-led interim government in Tunis is attempting to More »
When the plane of deposed Tunisian dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali touched down in Jeddah in January 2011, the Saudi monarchy’s worst nightmare re-emerged. Ben Ali was a close personal friend of then Saudi strongman, the late Saudi Crown Prince and longtime Interior Minister Naif bin Abdulaziz al-Saud. For the Saudi monarchs, seeing two More »
Remember in May 2011 when U.S. President Barack Obama told the government of Bahrain “you can’t have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail?” The people of Bahrain do, but many doubted a real dialogue would be possible. Since President Obama’s call for talks, there has been no real political More »
A decade ago, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) shone a spotlight on the sorry state of education in the Arab world with its inaugural Arab Human Development Report in 2002, and its 2003 follow-on report, “Building a Knowledge Society.” The reports’ statistics still shock: in one year, Spain translates the same number of More »
The French military’s current campaign to dislodge jihadist militants from northern Mali and the recent high-profile attack against a natural gas facility in Algeria are both directly linked to the foreign intervention in Libya that overthrew the Gadhafi regime. There is also a strong connection between these events and foreign powers’ decision not to intervene in Mali More »
The spate of violent incidents in Cairo and the Suez Canal cities of Port Said and Suez in the last week of January has highlighted the increasingly fractured state of Egyptian society and exposed the failings of key institutions, in particular the presidency, the judiciary and the forces of law and order. The president, Mohamed Morsi, More »
One of the primary demands of the 2011 Egyptian revolution was to end the three decades of emergency rule under President Hosni Mubarak. But two years later, President Mohamed Morsi has declared a state of emergency in three canal cities: Port Said, Suez, and Ismailya. The decision came three days after violence erupted on the More »
With the second anniversary of the Egyptian January 25 uprising having sparked renewed violence and the country having been once again pushed to the brink, there is a strong sense now that the hopes of Tahrir Square have been seriously tarnished. There’s some reason for this: There have been too many broken promises. Women, who More »
On January 20, the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry announced that it will evacuate approximately one hundred Russian citizens from Syria, mostly women and children. However, the ministry downplayed the importance of the evacuation, with those leaving representing a mere fraction of the many thousands of Russian citizens residing in Syria. Indeed, the hopes that More »
The Arab Spring introduced us to the strength and determination of the many Arab women who took to the streets and the Internet to call for change in their governments and societies. Gone were the stereotypes of oppression and passivity. In their place were voices and faces of hope, courage and indomitable spirit, calling More »
Israeli voters delivered an unexpected outcome in the general election held on January 22nd. According to still preliminary results, a late surge by the new centrist Yesh Atid party saw it capture 19 seats and emerge as the second-largest grouping after Likud-Beiteinu, which secured 31 seats in the 120-member Knesset (parliament). Overall, the election More »
One hundred years after the Levant embarked on a journey to build modern political societies, our experiment has failed and we are now back to square one. Lebanon collapsed in the 1970s, Iraq disintegrated in the 1990s and 2000s, and Syria is in the process of tearing itself apart. Unlike Egypt, Tunisia, and several More »
The past week marked the second anniversary of the resignation of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, an event that in many ways turned unrest in Tunisia from a purely national affair to what the media dubbed the Arab Spring. That Arab Spring was seen as a broad rising of the Arab masses against aging More »
Just days ago, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah made history when he named thirty women to the kingdom’s Shura Council, an appointed advisory body that cannot enact legislation but is still the closest institution to a parliament in that country. He also amended the Shura Council’s law to ensure that women would make up no less than More »
Saudi King Abdullah is poised to appoint* women for the first time as members of the country’s Majlis al-Shura (Consultative Council). The move is symbolically important, but the assembly itself lacks real power. The king first announced his intention to appoint women to the Majlis al-Shura over a year ago, and, since that time, newspaper reports More »
The Middle East in 2012 was surprising, exhilarating, depressing, and endlessly fascinating. Will it be the same in 2013? Odds are, yes, but there is really no way of providing an accurate forecast. If we’ve learned anything in the last few years, let’s try not to build scenarios – a favorite Washington, D.C., exercise. More »
On Thursday, January 10, a court in Cairo is to resume its case against foreign-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Egypt. The case can be traced back to events just over a year ago when Egypt witnessed an unprecedented assault on its civil society. In December 2011, Egyptian authorities raided the offices of 11 human rights and More »
At the dawn of the New Year President Bashar al-Assad and his regime remain committed to pursuing a corrosively destructive sectarian survival strategy, one enjoying a critical assist from an increasingly radicalized and politically directionless armed opposition. Left to their own devices – as both the West and Russia seemed inclined to leave them – More »
Israel did not bomb Iran last year. Why should it happen this year? Because it did not happen last year. The Iranians are proceeding apace with their nuclear program. The Americans are determined to stop them. Sanctions are biting, but the diplomatic process produced nothing visible in 2012. Knowledgeable observers believe there is no “zone More »
