Research & Commentary Results

As a Lebanese actor ideologically tied to Iran, Hezbollah has multiple allegiances and objectives that do not always align symmetrically. Hezbollah’s regional activities are a reflection of the group’s increasingly close alignment with Iran, rather than the interests of the Lebanese state or citizenry. Today, Hezbollah’s regional adventurism is most pronounced in its expeditionary forces deployed in Syria and elsewhere in the region, but no less important are the group’s advanced training regimen for other Shi’a militias aligned with Iran, its expansive illicit financing activities across the region, and its procurement, intelligence, cyber, and disinformation activities. Together, these underscore the scale and scope of the group’s all-in approach to transforming from one of several Lebanese militias into a regional player acting at Iran’s behest.

The idea for writing this piece came late last Tuesday as feelings ran high — the author’s included — amid scenes of patients’ charred bodies being pulled out from what remained of a burned-out coronavirus isolation ward in Nassiriya. It was originally meant to be a eulogy for those lost to Iraq’s stubborn corruption and chronic mismanagement, but it has since become a eulogy for democracy in Iraq.

Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.

It would be an understatement to say that the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Germany has written the book on how to analyze textbooks. The Institute has actually published many books — ones that are meticulous, detailed, and dispassionate. Now the Institute has published one more, this time on Palestinian textbooks.

Expert regional analysis by MEI scholars and contributors.

The forces and agencies of Kurdistan’s Ministry of Interior and the Kurdistan Region Security Council, collectively referred to the Kurdistan Region Interior Forces, are now the region’s main security actors, but their role as instruments of partisan rivalry and enforcers of public loyalty to the political bureaus threatens the Kurdistan Region’s stability. This report makes the case that coalition security sector reform efforts should be refocused on them. Although Peshmerga reform is necessary to improve the Kurdistan Region’s ability to combat external threats, it is equally, if not more important to start the same reform within these internal forces and agencies to achieve durable stability.

مهما كانت شدة محاولات الحكومة العراقية لتوجيه البلاد بعيدًا عن الصراع الإيراني الأمريكي، فإن الميليشيات العراقية المدعومة من إيران ستظل تسحبها مجددًا لهذا الصراع

Sunday was a festive day in Baghdad. The last time Iraqis had received an Egyptian president 30 years ago, the region was gearing up for war and uncertainty as the late President Hosni Mubarak shuttled between Baghdad and Gulf capitals prior to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The circumstances were quite different on June 27, when Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi and King Abdullah II of Jordan were given the red-carpet treatment at a tripartite summit marking the fourth meeting between the leaders of the three countries aiming to form a new regional alliance.

Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.

Some international concern has been voiced about the future prospects of the Abraham Accords under Israel’s new government. This stems from the perception that the normalization agreements Israel signed in 2020 with the UAE and Bahrain were the personal achievements of two former leaders — Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu — and would not have happened without them. The question thus arises of whether the agreements can survive their departure from power. Not only will the Abraham Accords survive, they will now be able to flourish and reach new heights. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid’s statement that his first visit abroad will be to the UAE is a good indicator. 

In a landscape of suppression and retaliation against Palestinian journalists and activists at the hands of Israel, social media networks have been at once critical organizing platforms and tools for exacerbating censorship.

Over the past year, intensifying political and economic conflicts between the Kurdistan Region’s two hegemonic parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, have challenged the legal and institutional order in which the Kurdistan Regional Government operates. A new generation of leadership within the parties, a fraught relationship with the federal government, and a prolonged economic crisis have strained the relationship between the two parties to its breaking point.

One of the first foreign policy decisions facing Israel’s new government will be if it wants to maintain or modify the policy spearheaded by Netanyahu to counter the United States’ determined effort to return to the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran. Moreover, the new government needs to assess how successful the maximalist approach Israel has embraced since the negotiations between Iran and the great powers began about two decades ago has been, and to what extent it has pushed the international community to refrain from making concessions and compromises vis à vis Iran.

On Dec. 21, 2020, the United States Congress passed the Nita M. Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act. The new law provides $250 million over five years to expand peace and reconciliation programs between Israelis and Palestinians as well as to support projects bolstering the Palestinian economy. But such programs are unlikely to be effective because the whole approach on which they are based is structurally flawed in two critical ways: first, because it is disconnected from local political, social, cultural, and economic processes and expectations; and second, because it tends to reinforce the inequalities that sustain the conflict between the two sides while undermining the declared goals of this intervention.

The Biden administration has repeatedly said that Israelis and Palestinians “deserve equal measures of security, freedom, opportunity and dignity” (sometimes expressed as “equal measures of freedom, security, dignity and prosperity”). Since the recent crisis in Gaza and East Jerusalem, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other U.S. officials have reiterated this formula in one form or another. What is its significance? What does (or should) it mean in the context of the Biden administration’s approach to Israel/Palestine — particularly given the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, pending expulsions in East Jerusalem, and ongoing settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem? We asked eight experts to weigh in with their thoughts.