Research & Commentary Results

Despite constituting about 20 percent of the Israeli population, Israel’s Palestinian minority does not wield significant political power; throughout Israeli history Palestinian parties have played the role of the permanent opposition. While low Israeli-Palestinian electoral participation and the resulting disproportionate parliamentary representation have hampered political influence, these factors are merely one part of a multi-faceted and multi-causal picture. This report seeks to provide a comprehensive analysis of the exogenous and endogenous drivers of reduced Palestinian political engagement. It is concerned with the structural obstacles –– primarily put in place and sustained by the Israeli right wing –– that seek to impede Palestinian influence at the polls and in the Knesset.

This week’s briefing on recent news and upcoming events in the region featuring Ruba Husari, Paul Salem, Gerald Feierstein, Amal Kandeel, Grace Wermenbol, Robert S. Ford, Charles Lister, and Gonul Tol.

Israel’s upcoming election, set for Sept. 17, dragged on through the summer and looked set to be a repeat of its predecessor on April 9, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed by a single Knesset vote to put together a majority coalition. It has indeed been a largely sleepy affair, with the centrist Blue-White party dueling with the Likud for the crucial top spot and most other parties barely budging in the polls. This somnolence ended explosively the week before the election with a series of events whose impact is still unclear.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won a fifth term in April, the first such victory for an Israeli politician. In May, he failed to form a governing coalition, a first for an Israeli politician as well. Snap elections are scheduled for Sept. 17 and, true to form, rivals and observers are saying that surely his era may be nearing an end. Notwithstanding the possible changes that could be witnessed on the local political scene, skeptics are hard-pressed to see how the elections could bring about drastic change for either Israel or the region.

This week’s briefing on recent news and upcoming events in the region featuring Marvin G. Weinbaum, Randa Slim, Alex Vatanka, and Gonul Tol.

Over the past few weeks, my colleagues at MEI have debated whether the U.S. should stay in Syria or leave. Here I’d make a different argument: that it doesn’t really matter. The president has already made the decision to leave, and while his aides may have been able to slow roll the troop drawdown, the reality is that Donald Trump has made it clear the U.S. will not disburse any additional resources. Even within the 2020 Democratic field, not a single candidate has advocated increasing resources.

This week’s briefing on recent news and upcoming events in the region featuring Randa Slim, Gerald Feierstein, Alex Vatanka, Robert S. Ford, and Michael Sexton.

Israel has reportedly expanded its operations against Iran in the Middle East. In July, Israeli and foreign media attributed airstrikes on Iranian targets near Baghdad to Israel. Last week, U.S. officials confirmed that Israel was responsible for the attacks, which mark the first such air raids on Iraq since 1981, when Tel Aviv destroyed Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor.

On Aug. 12, an explosion took place inside an ammunition warehouse in the al-Saqr military base in southern Baghdad, triggering hundreds of mortars and rockets to fire off in all directions throughout urban, populated areas. One person was killed and 29 wounded, as munitions and debris scattered as far as 5 kilometers away.

While some changes may be in the offing, for now most signs suggest that regional leaders should expect neither new opportunities, nor new challenges, but more likely a broad continuity of existing EU policy toward the region.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains a destabilizing element in an already volatile Middle East. The Palestinians are too weak to wrest their independence from Israel. But as long as their right to self-determination is denied, they are likely to engage in regular violence targeting Israel. Absent outside intervention, Israel is powerful enough that it can suppress Palestinian demands for freedom — but it is not able to completely pacify the Palestinians. Thus, the conflict continues, punctuated every few years by rounds of more significant violence.

The current Rashida Tlaib/Ilhan Omar debacle has received more attention from every quarter than virtually anything other than a war. All the usual suspects have weighed in with (mostly) predictable comments, generally in the context of the long-running “special relationship” between Israel and the U.S. The two domestic political contexts are often mentioned only in passing. With all respect to those who have tried to take a longer or strategic view, I would suggest that it really boils down to the political calculations of just two men, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Autonomy is normally given to a specific cultural or national group as part of a political agreement. For Palestinians, the idea that autonomy is the goal of talks is unhelpful because they already have autonomy.

The news came eight months after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid a visit to the Omani capital for surprise talks with Sultan Qaboos in October 2018, and four months after Minister Responsible for Foreign Affairs Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdullah met with Netanyahu in Poland during the Trump administration’s “Peace and Security in the Middle East” summit.

Iraq’s state-sponsored, majority-Shiite militias — called al-Hashd al-Shaabi, or the Popular Mobilization Forces — were central to the fight against ISIS, but there are major questions over their ongoing political and economic role. Enabling Peace in Iraq Center program manager Omar Al-Nidawi, American University in Iraq Sulaimani professor Akeel Abbas, and MEI’s Randa Slim join host Alistair Taylor to discuss what might happen to the force now that the threat ISIS poses has diminished.