A false alarm or a wake-up call for Israel’s fragile coalition?
On May 19, Ghaida Rinawi Zoabi, one of Meretz’s two Arab Knesset members, announced she was leaving the governing coalition and her party. On May 22, however, it was announced that she had rejoined both. What happened and what does it tell us about the state of Israel’s fragile coalition government?
The Palestinian Authority’s economic “disengagement” looks a lot like the status quo
Palestinian Authority (PA) officials repeatedly deny acquiescing to the economic peace model with Israel, but such rhetoric is not reflected in their actions. In recent years integration between the Palestinian and Israeli economies has only deepened.
“Half of us were left behind while one of our colleagues back home was shot dead”
There are certain events that are so impactful that you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when you heard about them. The killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the veteran Al Jazeera journalist, last Wednesday in the occupied West Bank was for me just such an event — both because of who she was and what I was doing at the time.
Five things the United States knew about the Nakba as it unfolded
An estimated 750,000 Palestinians were either driven from their homes or fled during the Nakba in 1948. To counter attempts at Nakba denial and “memoricide” by U.S. politicians and others, it is instructive to review the archives of U.S. diplomats stationed in Palestine and surrounding Arab countries who witnessed the Nakba unfold and reported back on the magnitude and gravity of Israel’s dispossession of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants.
Israel’s fight to define the right matters for US security
The Israeli government is in the midst of a fight to define what it means to be on the “right” politically in Israel, and this has important implications for U.S. security policy in the Middle East. The United States’ support for Israel is a defining pillar in its Middle East policy, and the decisions made by this fragile Israeli government could have ramifications that affect the security landscape of the entire region. There are small policy shifts the U.S. can make now to lessen the security impacts of those changes.
The CMF-153: Rebuilding US-GCC confidence through maritime security
Efforts to restore confidence between the U.S. and the Arab Gulf states took a first step with the recent formation of a new naval task force, known as the Combined Maritime Forces-153 (CMF-153), to improve maritime security in the Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb, and the Gulf of Aden, including the hotspot of Yemen. Established in mid-April, the new task force intends to target weapons smuggling for Ansar Allah, as the Houthi militias are officially known, as well as human trafficking and the drug trade.
What’s driving Mansour Abbas and Ra’am’s strategy?
The United Arab List (Ra’am) political party and its chairperson, Knesset Member Mansour Abbas, have come under fire recently from Hamas Gaza head Yahya Sinwar and other Palestinian leaders for supporting Israel’s governing coalition, particularly in light of the violence at al-Aqsa Mosque over the past month. What accounts for the party’s position and what is it hoping to achieve?
Tunisia’s food shortages shine a spotlight on its core economic failings
President Kais Saied’s war on speculation is attempting to direct the focus of people’s anger about food shortages onto speculators. A recent emergency importation of grain has stayed off the emptying of shelves, but as the country’s treasury empties and eventually products begin to disappear from stores again, the people’s patience and faith in his new political project will wear very thin. For now, he is profiting from national exhaustion, but how long till hunger becomes anger and anger becomes a movement?
Nowhere to hide: The impact of Israel's digital surveillance regime on the Palestinians
Over the course of 2020 and 2021, groundbreaking investigations revealed in stark detail Israeli authorities’ intensifying use of surveillance and predictive technologies to police and control Palestinians. Subjecting Palestinians to such scrutiny from security and military apparatuses narrows their expressive spaces and plunges them into a state of constant anxiety. This practice also carries out a commercial purpose: Occupied Palestine effectively functions as an open-air laboratory for Israel to test techniques of espionage and surveillance before selling them to repressive regimes around the world.
Intissar Fakir, Cinzia Bianco, and Perla Srour-Gandon discuss the results of the recent French presidential election and what they mean for France’s foreign policy and the Middle East.
Pairing renewables with energy storage could help MENA states to realize their green goals
MENA countries are currently home to nearly 15% of the world’s installed energy storage capacity, but this total will need to grow to enable variable renewable energy systems to be integrated into the region’s power grids in a flexible and stable manner.
Why the latest escalation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is unlikely to lead to a repeat of last year’s Gaza war
While the events now taking place in Jerusalem and the West Bank are very similar to those of May 2021, the political contexts are different on all sides. Although Israel carried out an airstrike on April 18 following rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, the situation is unlikely to lead to a repeat of last year’s Gaza war.
