Research & Commentary Results

Sunday was a festive day in Baghdad. The last time Iraqis had received an Egyptian president 30 years ago, the region was gearing up for war and uncertainty as the late President Hosni Mubarak shuttled between Baghdad and Gulf capitals prior to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The circumstances were quite different on June 27, when Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi and King Abdullah II of Jordan were given the red-carpet treatment at a tripartite summit marking the fourth meeting between the leaders of the three countries aiming to form a new regional alliance.

Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan are caught in a dangerous deadlock over the Nile River and despite what the international community seems to think, the risk of military confrontation among the three nations is not at all far-fetched. Addis Ababa began the second phase of filling the reservoir behind its giant Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in early May without an agreement with the riparian nations — Egypt and Sudan. However, much has changed over the past year and the second filling has played out rather differently from the first last July. In the intervening months Egypt has ramped up its diplomatic outreach and emerged as an influential player in the Nile Basin, the Horn of Africa, and East and Central Africa. Cairo succeeded in forging strategic alignment with Khartoum to exert diplomatic pressure on Addis Ababa, forming webs of alliances with different regional powers across East and Central Africa and the Horn of Africa to project power and influence, and exerting geopolitical forward pressure on Ethiopia in parallel with the diplomatic track to solve the GERD dispute. 

In a landscape of suppression and retaliation against Palestinian journalists and activists at the hands of Israel, social media networks have been at once critical organizing platforms and tools for exacerbating censorship.

اقرأ تقرير MEI الأسبوعي الذي يتضمن تحليلات الخبراء للتطورات الإقليمية الرئيسية للأسبوع المقبل.

On Dec. 21, 2020, the United States Congress passed the Nita M. Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act. The new law provides $250 million over five years to expand peace and reconciliation programs between Israelis and Palestinians as well as to support projects bolstering the Palestinian economy. But such programs are unlikely to be effective because the whole approach on which they are based is structurally flawed in two critical ways: first, because it is disconnected from local political, social, cultural, and economic processes and expectations; and second, because it tends to reinforce the inequalities that sustain the conflict between the two sides while undermining the declared goals of this intervention.

The Biden administration has repeatedly said that Israelis and Palestinians “deserve equal measures of security, freedom, opportunity and dignity” (sometimes expressed as “equal measures of freedom, security, dignity and prosperity”). Since the recent crisis in Gaza and East Jerusalem, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other U.S. officials have reiterated this formula in one form or another. What is its significance? What does (or should) it mean in the context of the Biden administration’s approach to Israel/Palestine — particularly given the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, pending expulsions in East Jerusalem, and ongoing settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem? We asked eight experts to weigh in with their thoughts.

“لاتزال ثمة عقبات خطيرة محتملة على المدى القريب أمام تشكيل حكومة إسرائيلية جديدة”

There is only one thread holding together the unprecedentedly disparate parties that will establish and support the nascent Israeli government announced on the night of June 2, an hour before the midnight deadline. That thread is, of course, a shared loathing for Benjamin Netanyahu. Whether that thread will even get the new government past its first hurdle, which is a vote of confidence in the Knesset, much less to its theoretical four years, is an open question. Until recently no one could have imagined such a political monstrosity might be conceived, let alone gestated, but there’s a decent chance this government will get off the ground.

“إن استعداد مجلس حقوق الإنسان لإنشاء لجنة دائمة ذات تفويض شامل يشير إلى مدى التغيير في التصورات الدولية للصراع الإسرائيلي الفلسطيني في السنوات القليلة الماضية”.

تحليل إقليمي متخصص من قبل باحثي ومساهمي معهد الشرق الأوسط.

Singer Kamilya Jubran, founding member of the iconic Palestinian band Sabreen, once famously sang, “We’ve tried resistance, we’ve tried confrontation, we’ve tried intifada, we’ve tried peace. What else is left to us?” The answer of course, that hung in the air of her breathtaking vocals, was “to sing.”

The Gaza war and violence against Arabs within Israel may slow investment from the Gulf.

In March 2021, the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum held its first meeting as a recognized international organization. Delegations from member countries – including Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan, and Palestine – gathered in Cairo to organize a regional gas market. The forum is a unique space that offers a platform for dialogue between European and Middle Eastern countries. Furthermore, it is rare that Israeli and Palestinian delegations cooperate on the international stage. Yet, as the inaugural meeting demonstrated, the conflict is never too far away. When the delegates voted on whether to grant the United Arab Emirates observer status in the forum – a privilege given to the United States and European Union – Palestine vetoed, a clear demonstration of Ramallah’s frustration with the normalization process that started a few months ago.

While riots and even violent military clashes between Israel and the Palestinians are unfortunately nothing new, and the conflict itself has been of interest to the international community for many decades, the recent, sudden escalation in violence has come as a surprise to many outside observers. This has forced individual states and international organizations to take a stance on what’s happening, including the EU. For the EU, the Middle East conflict is one of the greatest challenges in the immediate neighborhood and a major factor hindering the implementation of its European Neighborhood Policy in the eastern Mediterranean.

Due to its relatively stable political institutions, geographic proximity to Libya, and UNSC seat, regional powers in the Middle East are competing for influence in Niger. Egypt and the UAE are trying to counter Turkey’s growing economic and security cooperation with Niger, Saudi Arabia and Iran wish to leverage its UNSC voting power, and Israel is testing the waters for a potential normalization of diplomatic relations. These rivalries are poised to intensify, as the Sahel’s geostrategic significance continues to expand.