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.
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.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
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.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Immediately following the outbreak of COVID-19, cyber attacks swept across the Middle East, leaving public and private entities highly vulnerable and transforming the pandemic into both a physical and a digital threat. Despite worldwide physical isolation, many people were more digitally connected than ever before, which vastly expanded the attack surface for eager cyber threat actors. Ransomware attacks, in particular, hit the Middle East rapidly and in great numbers, especially the UAE.
For many years, Iran’s educated elites have been leaving the country in growing numbers. They are emigrating, mostly to Western countries, for various reasons, but chief among them are poor economic conditions and a lack of political and social freedoms at home. Iran’s information technology sector is among the sectors hit hardest due to the burgeoning outflow of its experts in recent years.
In early June 2022, the Advisory Commission of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East met in Beirut. Facing a $100 million budget deficit and the indifference of donor countries, UNRWA’s future is uncertain.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
On June 6 Israel’s coalition government lost an important vote, in which more than half of the Knesset members on both sides voted against their own most fundamental beliefs in a desperate effort to either bring down the coalition or to save it. The substance of the legislation was barely more than a pretext, but the opposition smelled blood and was willing to do virtually anything to regain power.
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?
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.
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.