Format: 270 x 200 mm
Page: 32
Language: English
Publisher: MEI Publications Ltd, Nicosia
Year: 2010
ISSN: 0047-7249
Issues: 25 Issues/12 Months
Gaza: Israel’s own goal
Viewpoint
Israel and the world: a turning point?
From Mouin Rabbani
The horrific bloodbath on the high seas perpetrated by Israeli special forces aboard a civilian flotilla carrying relief supplies to the besieged Gaza Strip has been compared by some commentators to South Africa’s 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, which...
News Analysis
Gaza flotilla crisis
Turkey’s 9/11
From Nicole Pope in Istanbul
Regional tectonic plates had been shifting visibly since the Gaza offensive of late 2008, causing rumblings on several occasions between Turkey and Israel. But no one expected the devastating tremor that was felt when Israeli commandos intercepted a...
Alone with Israel
From Graham Usher in New York
It took Turkey less than 24 hours to respond diplomatically to Israel’s attack. On 31 May, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu – ironically in town for a fence-mending meeting with Binyamin Netanyahu – submitted a draft statement to the UN...
Hamas and the blockade
From Nicolas Pelham in Ramallah
The headline in the pro-Hamas daily Filasteen said it all. “Thank you for your foolishness, Mr Barak.” The Israeli defence minister’s handling of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla seemed to have played right into Hamas’ hands. The international...
Targeting the traitors
From Diana Buttu in Ramallah
One week after Israel’s commando raid on the Free Gaza Flotilla and long after the deportation of all the ships’ foreign passengers, Palestinian citizens of Israel were still feeling the raid’s aftermath. Four of the six who were on board –...
A costly ‘success’
From Amos Harel
There is a dramatic gap in perspective between the way Israelis see the botched raid on the Gaza flotilla and international reaction to the incident. Israeli public opinion, by and large, viewed it as a justified act of self-defence, though not...
INSIDE ISRAEL with Haim Baram: Criminal folly
From Haim Baram
We were sitting quietly in our home in central Jerusalem at 10pm, about 30 minutes after the demonstration outside the PM’s residence had petered out. There had been 600 of us, facing very hostile soldiers from the Border Police, but finding...
We’re all going to keep going
From Ewa Jasiewicz
By Ewa Jasiewicz, co-coordinator of the Free Gaza movement, who was on the boat Challenger 1 in the flotilla During the night, we had seen lights from Israeli boats tailing us, but they had been staying at a distance. In the early hours of the...
PASSIONATE DETACHMENT Ian Williams' America: A tale of two lynchings
From Ian Williams
In the Eastern Mediterranean, armed Israeli commandos equipped for ‘crowd control’ in that distinctively lethal way reserved for Palestinian crowds, faced a ‘lynching’ by ‘terrorists’ armed with bars. One of them even might have had a...
Arab anger and inaction
From Omayma Abdel-Latif in Beirut
An advertisement published in the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar on 6 June called for volunteers and funding for the ‘Free Journalists’ Ship’. Media workers and others were invited to come forward to help launch the vessel that would send...
Palestine
The one-state solution: old dream, new brand
From Diana Buttu
The West Bank is awash with billboards peddling everything from cellular phone services to cultural events, and even promoting the good work of USAID. But recently, a new type of billboard has appeared espousing, for the first time, a “one-state...
Egypt
Baradei and the Brothers
From Issandr el Amrani in Cairo
Is Mohamed ElBaradei’s campaign for reform in Egypt adrift? This is the question on many people’s minds nearly four months after the former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency returned to his country. This feeling has been...
Copts and marriage
From Issandr el Amrani
Egypt’s judiciary has entered into a battle with the Coptic Orthodox Church by ruling on 29 May that the church must allow its members to remarry if they divorce. The ruling, which raises questions about Egyptian family law that go beyond the...
Iran
Growing disunity
From Paul Sampson in London
Eyes in Iran have been focused on the first anniversary of the 12 June presidential elections, which triggered a wave of protests that shook the foundations of the Islamic Republic and widened the cracks within the ruling elite. Memories of the...
United Nations
Isolated at the NPT
From Graham Usher
On 28 May, member states attending the five-yearly review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at the United Nations agreed on a nebulous ‘Final Document’ charting a high-sounding if non-binding pathway to a world without...
Iraq
A line is drawn
From Jim Muir in Baghdad
Nearly three months after Iraq’s general elections, something happened. On 1 June, the Supreme Court certified the poll results. They confirmed the same outcome as was announced provisionally nearly 10 weeks earlier: the secular Iyad Allawi,...
Syria
No end to exile yet
From Sarah Birke in Damascus
Iraqis in Syria have been watching the outcome of the elections back home closely. Despite a broad distrust of politicians of all parties and hues, many saw the very fact of elections and the narrow victory of Iyad Allawi’s secular Iraqiya bloc as...
Sudan
Parallel wars
From Julie Flint in London
The international strategy for the Darfur peace talks appeared close to collapse in early June as the talks resumed against a backdrop of the heaviest fighting – and greatest killing – seen in Darfur in the two-and-a-half years since the UN...
Lebanon
Torn between two camps
From Nicholas Blanford in Beirut
Nawaf Salam, Lebanon’s ambassador to the United Nations, faces a seat-squirming moment when the Security Council meets this week to vote on a draft resolution to tighten sanctions on Iran. Of all the 15 countries on the Council, Lebanon finds...
Turkey
Kurdish escalation
From Nicole Pope in Istanbul
When six people were killed by a rocket launched apparently by the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) against a naval base in Iskenderun on 31 May, conspiracy theorists in Turkey drew a link with the Israeli assault on the aid flotilla, which took...
Saudi Arabia
Laying down the law
From Neil Partrick in Riyadh
The official announcement by Saudi Minister of Justice Mohammad al-Eissa on 25 May that Shari’a codification will go ahead, having been approved privately by the Higher Council of ‘Ulama (HCU), emphasises that the legal reform process continues...
Yemen
AQAP under fire
From Philip McCrum in Bath, UK
Intensified operations against al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Yemeni affiliate militant group, appear to be having a degree of success by exposing weaknesses in the organisation. In the space of four days in early June, two key...
Somalia
Humanitarian crisis
From Steve Sherman in London
After a brief respite, heavy fighting resumed in early June in north Mogadishu. Over several days, the combined forces of Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahedin and Hizb al-Islam battled those of Ahl al-Sunna wa al-Jama’a, backed by African Union...
Features
Kuwait and Iraq: unfinished business
From Jane Kinninmont
The recent revival of a Kuwaiti war-reparations claim against Iraqi Airways led Iraq to take the drastic step of dissolving its national airline. Jane Kinninmont warns that solving the other outstanding disputes between the two countries will not be...
Sudan’s election report card
From Julie Flint
It may seem logical to pin President Omar al-Bashir’s sweeping victory on fraud and intimidation, but Julie Flint explains there is more to the election outcome The year 2010 was to have been the year of democracy in Sudan, beginning, in April,...
Reviews
The long road
From Andrew Novo
The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East Patrick Seale Cambridge University Press, 2010, £30.00 ISBN: 9780521191378 Patrick Seale, author of a highly regarded biography of Syria’s Hafez...
A story of survival
From Alan Munro
King Hussein of Jordan – A Political Life Nigel Ashton Yale (New Haven and London), 2010, £14.99 ISBN: 9780300163957 As is the due of a personality whose 47-year rule was the longest of any contemporary Arab leader, the bibliography of...
Letter From
Letter from ... Zanzibar
From Ala'a Shehabi
When the famous globe trekker Ibn Battuta visited East Africa in the 14th century, he noted that the Swahili people were as well housed, clothed and fed as the Europeans of his time. “The inhabitants are pious, honourable, and upright, and they...
