Research & Commentary Results

The Sinai-based Multinational Force & Observers (MFO) will soon celebrate its 41st anniversary. Like most of what the MFO does, recognition will be low key and understated. The MFO has always operated under the radar, but this may soon be changing. 

Less than a year after the U.S. State Department removed the term “occupation” from its 2019 human rights report, and just a few weeks after it stopped referring to the residents of East Jerusalem as Palestinians, the coronavirus has exposed the reality of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories like never before.

The magnitude of voter betrayal is such that Israeli politics will never be the same again.

MEI’s Paul Salem, Khaled Elgindy, and Fatima Abo Alasrar join host Alistair Taylor to discuss the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on the Middle East as nations scramble to contain the spread of COVID-19 and the massive humanitarian and economic toll it could take on already vulnerable populations.

COVID-19 has disrupted both supply and demand around the world. Egypt is not immune to the recessionary trends caused by the sudden halt in supply chains and the sharp decline in demand, domestically and globally, resulting from the rapid spread of the virus.

No part of the world will emerge unscathed from the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Just because China and Italy were the first to be severely hit, does not imply, that when all is said and done, that they will have sustained the brunt of the damage. North Africa is a region dependent on global commodities prices, tourism, and political and monetary support from Europe and the Gulf, where regime brittleness, youth unemployment, and Islamic radicalism all intersect.

11 scholars and experts from across MEI weigh in with the latest on how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting the Middle East.

Israel is fighting two battles at once: one against the coronavirus, which has engulfed the entire world, and another against itself.

From Morocco to Afghanistan, the scholars and experts at MEI take a closer look at how the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is affecting the Middle East.

The most populous country in the Arab world, with 100 million people straining its seams, Egypt has weaknesses that make it susceptible to a serious outbreak of COVID-19.

Whether or not Gantz succeeds in forming a government, the Joint List has cemented its role as “king makers” in Israeli politics.

Neither Likud nor Kahol Lavan was able to break the political stalemate and clear the path to the immediate formation of a majority government.

While attention in the third Israeli general elections in a year has focused on the performance of the caretaker prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a powerful light must be shed as well on the successful performance of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who again increased their representation in Israel’s parliament.

The announcement of Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” was a rude shock, roundly condemned by almost everyone concerned with peace and justice between Israelis and Palestinians. But it also presents an urgent challenge for all those who reject it because they realize the dire implications of what it portends for the future of any peaceful negotiated solution. If a genuine two-state solution is truly dead, and an equitable one-state solution is even harder to achieve, then where does that leave us? What is, or should be, the agenda for the foreseeable future for those concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Both politicians and populace are sick of a pointless political process.