Research & Commentary Results

The Dorra Gas Field, located in shallow waters offshore in the northern Arabian Gulf, lies at the junction of competing territorial claims by Kuwait, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. With the growing gas demand in these countries, any production will be absorbed into the domestic network and the impact of production on the global gas and LNG market will be insignificant. However, the development of the field, if it occurs, may serve as a bellwether for regional relations.

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.

Making the most of Iran’s reserves will require it to develop shared fields like Dorra/Arash, a gas field located offshore in the northern Gulf, where Iran must vie with competing claims from neighboring Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In the past, Iran has often neglected its joint gas fields as a result of sanctions and focused instead on meeting its rapidly growing domestic needs through exploiting non-shared fields, but the country says this must change going forward.

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.

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.

Iran began the new fiscal year on March 21, 2022 having recorded an estimated GDP growth rate of about 4% over the previous year, but CPI has grown by 35% year-on-year. While GDP growth could be the result of the stabilization of the economy after several years of recession, a steady rate of high inflation is alarming for Iran’s economy.

در جمهوری اسلامی ایران, این فرضیه وجود دارد که حمایت از سازمان حزب الله در لبنان, امنیت و قدرت بازدارندگی ایران را افزایش داده است.  در عین حال, شواهد و قرائنی وجود دارند که نتایج انان برعکس این فرضیه را نشان می دهند.

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?

Since late September 2021, Tehran and Baku have engaged in a process of de-escalation, largely focused on economic cooperation and regional transportation links. Such efforts should be welcomed, but underlying geopolitical tensions, especially the Iranian-Turkish competition for influence in the South Caucasus, can still derail them at any moment.

As the U.S. administration considers whether to remove Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, understanding its nature, development, and ideology is essential to making an informed decision. There is much about it that differentiates it from a conventional armed force. One fundamental aspect of its ideology that until now has been overlooked is the doctrine of Mahdism.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has turned into the largest testing ground for ballistic and cruise missiles in modern warfare. Militaries around the world are watching carefully, and Iran is certainly no exception. With its military doctrine heavily dependent on ballistic missile forces, Iran has a particular interest in the war in Ukraine and is taking notes on Russia’s use of missiles.

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.

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

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.

In recent remarks, the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi announced preparations for a potential upcoming military operation, foreshadowing a possible move against Iran. Kochavi’s announcement came shortly after Israel and the foreign ministers of four Arab nations — Morocco, Egypt, the UAE, and Bahrain — along with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, met at the Negev Summit in the Israeli desert to lay the foundation for a strategic military alliance to deter “Iran and its associated militias,” as Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid put it.