Bonus Episode: Previewing Israel’s First Post-October 7 Election
Israel is preparing to hold what may be its most consequential election in decades. On October 27, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will face his first electoral test since October 7, 2023. In this bonus episode of Middle East Focus, we present the audio from a recent MEI webinar, hosted in Israel on the eve of the vote. Senior Fellow Natan Sachs is joined by Dr. Shira Efron, Distinguished Chair for Israel Policy and senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, and Neri Zilber, veteran journalist and Financial Times correspondent. They explore what’s at stake in this historic election and how different outcomes could reshape Israel’s domestic politics and the wider region.
Israel Was Built on Hope. This Election May Be Our Last Chance to Save It
Israel’s national anthem, Hatikva, means “the hope.” Israel is not just another country, but the culmination of a 2,000-year-old dream of national redemption. The rebirth of the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland, just three years after the Holocaust, was a miraculous triumph of hope over all odds.
Today, that hope has been shattered and the elections on October 27 have become the most consequential in Israel’s history.
One striking thing about US President Donald Trump’s endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this past week is how isolated he was in making this call. The Israeli Prime Minister has become a widely detested figure worldwide following Israel’s war in Gaza—where Israel committed war crimes. This disdain was clearly on display in New York in September when dozens of diplomats streamed out of the hall during Netanyahu’s speech.
Since 1967, Israeli settlements in the West Bank have been a contested feature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The ultimate disposition of the settlements and ongoing activity related to their growth have repeatedly defied agreement in negotiations over a resolution to the conflict.
The Houthis are a political-military faction and Zaydi religious movement founded in northwestern Yemen in the 1980s. A key member of Iran’s Axis of Resistance with links to other militant organizations in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, the group has continued to pose a threat to Western interests on a global scale.
The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is a proposed multinational infrastructure initiative aimed at upgrading connectivity between the three regions through integrated trade, energy, and digital networks. Announced at the G20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023, IMEC is envisioned partially as a counterweight to China’s international infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative.
After a decade of post-Arab Spring isolation, Turkey’s leaders have recognized that their ambition to position the country as an agenda-setter on the world stage requires active engagement in all directions. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s consolidation of executive authority has centralized foreign policy decision-making and tied it to his domestic political priorities, transforming the country’s revisionist approach to one shaped primarily by personal and pragmatic interests.
MEI Senior Fellow Brian Katulis engages friends, colleagues, and policy experts in casual conversations on the most important happenings in the Middle East.
For decades now, decentralization has been a recurring theme in Lebanese politics. That it is “administrative” does not make it any less “political” in a country where even minor technicalities can easily turn into major controversies. Yet decentralization is still perceived as one of the key reforms that has yet to come about.
Mansour Abbas: Islamist kingmaker or the “good Arab”?
At a press conference on Thursday, MK Mansour Abbas, head of the newly elected Islamist party in Israel, the United Arab List (Ra’am), made what many in the Israeli media dubbed a historic speech. In an effort to reach out to the Jewish Israeli public, he spoke in Hebrew and during the prime time on television often given to Israeli politicians. Speaking surrounded by the party’s green flags, the conservative Islamist quotedverses from the Quran calling for the creation of “an opportunity for a shared life, in the holy and blessed land for the followers of the three religions and both peoples” and told his Hebrew-speaking audience that “Now is the time for change.”
في ‘آراء من واشنطن’ هذا الأسبوع، يستعرض إبراهيم الأصيل رأي لميريت مبروك (مديرة برنامج مصر) حول إمكانية التقارب بين مصر وتركيا والمسائل الأساسية بينهما. — Ibrahim Al-Assil Mirette Mabrouk
حلقة 30: آراء (10) تغيرات في العلاقات الأمريكية-الفلسطينية
في ‘آراء من واشنطن’ هذا الأسبوع، يستعرض إبراهيم الأصيل رأي لنيثين ستوك حول التغييرات المحتملة في السياسة الأمريكية تجاه الفلسطينيين. — Ibrahim Al-Assil Nathan Stock
Myanmar: The February Coup and the Rohingya Genocide
Since the NLD emerged as the most potent challenger to the military’s monopoly grip on state power three decades ago, the generals have tried different methods of exclusion, disenfranchisement and purposive prosecution against Aung San Suu Kyi and all dissidents. Today, they are discovering that Suu Kyi and the NLD are a mere expression or embodiment of the democratic will of Burmese society. The military leadership is unlikely to be able to defeat 50 million people who have decided that a half-century of life under the boot is more than enough.
The cyclical futility of governance by TikTok in the Middle East
When headlines flashed this month about the Peshawar High Court’s decision in Pakistan to yet again ban the controversial video-sharing app TikTok, you might have been tempted to scroll away in boredom. After all, who hasn’t banned TikTok these days?
The data centers industry: The GCC’s new oil fields
Close observers of policy trends in the GCC will notice that digital transformation and data governance are becoming vital issues in the region. Over the last decade, Gulf countries have introduced ambitious plans to digitally transform their public and private sectors, with the goal of providing reliable, rapid, and efficient public and private services.
Egypt: The Pandemic Experience in a Time of Reform
Egypt announced its first COVID-19 fatality on March 8, 2020, a few months after concluding a “reform” program supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan it had obtained in 2016. The pandemic thus posed the first test for the IMF-prescribed economic and social policies adopted by the Government of Egypt. As this article will show, whereas the reforms helped propel economic growth in a time of global recession, they did not provide a strong social safety net for vulnerable families during the crisis.
Egypt should go green by putting a price on carbon
It is time for Egypt to put a price on carbon. While Cairo has taken small steps toward developing a sustainability plan, it needs a bold idea to stop rising carbon emissions. Establishing a carbon exchange — or putting a price on carbon — would be good for the country and help make Egypt an environmental leader in the region.
The EU’s diplomatic head and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict one year on
Josep Borrell Fontelles, former Spanish minister of foreign affairs, officially assumed the role on Dec. 1, 2019, and during his first year in office his focus in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region was primarily on four main issues: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the ongoing civil wars in Syria and Yemen, Iran’s nuclear program, and the threat of another migration crisis.
Reflecting on the global effort to fight violence against women
On March 8, the world came together to celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD), a barometer of annual development on global gender equality. This year, violence against women and women’s protection have been front and center on the political agenda across the world, including in the Middle East, as incidents of violence against them spark mass mobilization and anger from citizens. As civic activism grows, and citizens are increasingly politically and publicly engaged, women are fighting louder and harder than ever before to be a central voice in broader calls to action.
The oldest peer-reviewed publication dedicated to the study of the modern Middle East, MEI’s flagship journal covers politics, society, and culture in the region.
