Middle East Politics

Sabrina Mahfouz once sat in a Whitehall interview room and was interrogated about everything from her political leanings to her private life. It was ostensibly a job interview, but implicit in their demands was the unspoken question: as a woman of Middle Eastern heritage, could she really be trusted? Years later, Sabrina found herself confronting the meaning behind this interrogation, and how it was specifically informed by the British Empire's historical dominance in the Middle East.

Inside Syria and Iraq, and even along the refugee trail, they’re a religious minority persecuted for their Christian faith. Outside the Middle East, they’re suspect because of their nationality. A small remnant of Christians is on the run from the Islamic State. If they are wiped out, or scattered to the corners of the earth, the language that Jesus spoke may be lost forever - along with the witness of a church that has modeled Jesus’ way of nonviolence and enemy-love for two millennia.

A portrait of the current Israeli prime minister, one of Israel's more noticeable leaders in recent decades. Benjamin Netanyahu is currently serving his fourth term in office as prime minister of Israel, the longest serving prime minister in the country's history. Now Israeli journalist Ben Caspit puts Netanyahu's life under a magnifying glass, focusing on his last two terms in office.

Una reflexión imprescindible que permita sentar las bases para pensar Medio Oriente con claridad: un escenario donde se entrecruzan nervios tan sensibles como la religión, la identidad nacional, el petróleo, el terrorismo y el fundamentalismo.

On September 12th, 2012, Brandon Webb learned Glen Doherty, one of his closest friends and his former Navy SEAL teammate, was killed alongside Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and two other Americans when the U.S. State Department and CIA headquarters in Benghazi, Libya, were sieged in a shocking terrorist attack.

The enormous sense of optimism unleashed by the Arab Spring in 2011 soon gave way to widespread suffering and despair. Of the many popular uprisings against autocratic regimes, Tunisia's now stands alone as a beacon of hope for sustainable human rights progress. Challenging the widely shared pessimism among regional experts, Micheline Ishay charts bold and realistic pathways for human rights in a region beset by political repression, economic distress, sectarian conflict, a refugee crisis, and violence against women.

In 2003 Rachel Aspden arrived in Egypt as a 23-year-old journalist. She found a country on the brink of change. The two thirds of Egypt's eight million citizens under the age of 30 were stifled, broken, and frustrated, caught between a dictatorship that had nothing to offer them and their autocratic parents' generation, defined by tradition and obedience. In January 2011 the young people's patience ran out.

Após o fatídico 7 de outubro de 2023, estopim de mais uma sangrenta etapa do conflito entre Israel e Palestina, estatísticas e uma profusão de imagens em torno da escalada de vítimas fatais inundam o noticiário global, num processo em que crianças, homens e mulheres se tornam conhecidos somente a partir da morte — e não da vida.

What happens when democracy produces "bad" outcomes? Is democracy good because of its outcomes or despite them? This "democratic dilemma" is one of the most persistent, vexing problems for America abroad, particularly in the Middle East. When Islamist parties rise to power through free elections, the United States has too often been ambivalent or opposed, preferring instead pliable dictators. With this legacy of democratic disrespect in mind, and drawing on new interviews with top American officials, Shadi Hamid explores universal questions of morality, power, and hypocrisy.

This audiobook explains the fault lines that have often plagued US efforts to protect its national interests in the region and how these ongoing faults have led to a precipitous decline in American influence. It also includes some recommendations as to how this decline can be reversed.

Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East distills eleven years of expert reporting for the New York Times, Reuters, and The Atlantic into a clarion call for change. Here Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Rohde exposes how a dysfunctional Washington squandered billions on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, neglected its true allies in the war on terror and failed to employ its most potent nonmilitary weapons: American consumerism, technology, and investment.

The Trump administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” vision for the Middle East was unveiled on January 28, 2020. What followed over the next eleven months was one of the most fascinating and consequential periods of US foreign policy in a generation, leading to five normalization agreements between Israel and Muslim states. The Abraham Accords achieved what had seemed impossible for decades and set the Middle East on a trajectory toward a broad regional peace.

Christians in the Middle East are fleeing their homes or dying at the hand of Islamists creating the very real possibility of a successful faith-based holocaust. The implications of such an outcome for the region and the world are stark: a very fanatical militarized Islamist region that soon might be armed with nuclear weapons to threaten the world with atomic terrorism and the same insidious conditions that promote Christian genocide there could spread to America.

Innerlich zerrissen und von außen bedroht: Wie sieht Israels Zukunft aus? - Einer der besten Kenner des Landes berichtet Alltag im Ausnahmezustand ist das Porträt eines Landes, das hin- und her gerissen ist zwischen Normalität und Ausnahmezustand, zwischen Konsum und Krieg, zwischen der Sehnsucht nach Frieden und dem Bedürfnis nach Sicherheit. Richard C. Schneider bereist als Journalist seit über 30 Jahren den Nahen Osten und war von 2006 bis 2015 als Leiter und Chefkorrespondent des ARD-Studios Tel Aviv verantwortlich für Israel und die palästinensischen Gebiete.

Born to Palestinian refugees, Kassem Eid grew up in the small town of Moadamiya on the outskirts of the ancient city of Damascus. The streets that he and his many siblings played on were perfumed with jasmine. A precocious child, he excelled at school and had a natural gift for languages. But it didn't take long for Kassem to realise that he was treated differently at school because of his family's resistance to the brutal government regime.

David Kilcullen was one of the architects of America's strategy in the late phases of the second Gulf War, and also spent time in Afghanistan and other hotspots. In Blood Year, he provides a view of the current situation in the Middle East and analyzes how America and the West ended up in such dire circumstances. This is an essential book for anyone interested in understanding not only why the region has collapsed into utter chaos, but also what the US can do to alleviate the grim situation.

Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush both led the United States through watershed events in foreign relations: the end of the Cold War and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In The Gulf, Michael F. Cairo reveals how, despite many similarities, father and son pursued very different international strategies. He explores how the personality, beliefs, and leadership style of each man influenced contemporary US foreign policy.

עמוס עוז משוטט פה ושם בארץ ישראל ומשוחח עם אנשים. הוא יצא למסע של הקשבה סובלנית ליריבים ולתמימים. והתוצאה – ספר מרתק המתעד תמונות חיות להפליא של ישראלים כאן ועכשיו, של אנשים חמי לב וחמי מזג המשמיעים באוזניו למן דברי חזון משיחי התנחלותי ועד להתפרצות של זעם עדתי, למן תורה כוחנית קיצונית ועד לתסכול ולתקווה של הפלסטינים. לקורא נדמה שוהא שומע במו אוזניו את יושבי בית הקפה הזועמים והנעלבים בבית שמש.

Per tredici anni, la dittatura siriana si è aggrappata al potere, sopravvivendo a guerre, rivolte e sconvolgimenti geopolitici. Eppure, in una svolta rapida e drammatica degli eventi, il regime che sembrava incrollabile è caduto l'8 dicembre 2024.

One neighborhood in Istanbul: a window on a city, country, region, and world in a state of upheaval. Karagumruk, an Istanbul neighborhood once dominated by Ottoman-era homes, is now known for its cheap apartment blocks and petty thieves—and a massive influx of Syrian refugees. It's here that...