Technology represents one potentially fruitful area where the I2U2 member states — Israel, India, the U.S. and the UAE — could cooperate together, expand their format to include more countries, deliver tangible results, and avoid agitating other global and regional powers.
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Iraq is facing one of its worst political crises in years. Following the bloody street battles at the end of August that left more than 30 dead, violence has stopped, for now, but the political crisis is far from over, even if superficial solutions may be found in the interim. Iraqis anxiously await the end of the Arba’een holiday on Sept. 17 to see what will happen next.
It appears that calm has returned to Iraq after the reported intervention of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s chief and widely respected Shia cleric. In recent weeks, violence had occurred in and near parliament, which has been unable to implement last October’s election results. The clashes involved demonstrators and armed forces loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the leading candidate in the elections, and militias loyal to a loose array of rival Shia political parties calling themselves the Coordination Framework.
Two years after the signing of the Abraham Accords, progress in developing relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors has achieved mixed results, opening up some greater cooperation in the security sphere but failing to change Arab publics’ minds due to the lack of movement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Followers of Iraqi Shi’a cleric and political leader Muqtada al-Sadr and those of the Iran-aligned Coordination Framework clashed in downtown Baghdad on Aug. 29. Iraqis spent that evening wondering whether the country was descending into an intra-Shi’a civil war.
Expert regional analysis by MEI scholars and contributors.
Israel’s early August offensive against Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza achieved several strategic and tactical goals, but it failed to entirely sever the PIJ’s relationship with Hamas.
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The renewal of the international agreement on Iran’s nuclear program does not undermine Israeli national security per se but rather a longstanding tenet of Israel’s strategic thinking: that it must be able to fully eradicate any challenge to its military superiority deep inside enemy territory.
Ten months on from last October’s elections, Iraq still does not have a new government and faces a deepening political crisis. To understand the current situation’s perils and what may be next for the future of the country, we are joined by Farhad Alaaldin, chairman of the Iraq Advisory Council, and Robert Ford, MEI Senior Fellow and former Ambassador to Syria and Algeria.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
The July 2022 leaders’ meeting took good steps on energy and food security, but Egypt and Saudi Arabia can help take the I2U2 to the next level when it comes to regional security.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
According to UNRWA, there are approximately 6.3 million registered Palestinian refugees across the Arab world. The majority of these are the descendants of the 750,000 Palestinians who were displaced between 1947 and 1949 over the course of Israel’s creation, an event known among Palestinians as the Nakba or “catastrophe.” This paper aims to evaluate past proposals on the refugee question and promote a new refugee-first framework that could produce tangible solutions for Palestinian refugees and for the conflict at large.