Middle East
A Tale of Two Israeli Air Wars
The Israeli actions in Gaza and Syria are usually thought of separately — with comparisons between the two rare. But how did a military that runs such a careful campaign in one theater end up killing so many civilians in just a few days in another?
Israel (Sort of) Misses the Iran Deal
Earlier this year, Israeli military intelligence ruled out the chances of any new deal including Iran’s malign regional activity and of Iranian missile development as extremely unlikely — contrary to demands still aired periodically by certain Israeli officials and U.S. analysts. Today, albeit not widely publicized, in Israeli eyes the nuclear issue should be completely decoupled from the regional dimension, lest it create more bargaining power for Tehran.
What I Taught in the Emirates — and What It Taught Me
The UAE wanted loyal citizens above all to preserve its political model; that primary lesson filtered down to the education system, even if it wasn’t written in the curriculum itself, in the ways that some rules were enforced and others were not, why some people were deported and others worked for decades in the same school.
As Murder Plagues Palestinian Towns in Israel, the Killers Are Rarely Caught
The pattern is painfully familiar — men, mostly young, are gunned down, often in broad daylight, in Palestinian towns or mixed cities inside Israel. Police rarely seem able to stop these crimes or catch their perpetrators. Many residents believe this inability to solve such crimes is an intentional act aimed at ensuring Palestinian communities are mired in crime and poverty, unable to fight for their civil rights and end state discrimination that has contributed to the gun violence epidemic plaguing these neighborhoods.
Why Kurds Fight
Whoever “goes to the mountains” — the metaphor that Kurds use for joining the PKK — must undergo an education on a wide range of issues, from the basics of evolutionary biology and early human migratory patterns out of Africa to the intricacies of Kurdish nationalism and many things in-between.
An Enduring Tension: Turkey Caught in the Middle
The violent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in World War I created a complex and enduring relationship between Turkish attitudes toward the Arab world and Turkish attitudes toward Europe.
Justice and Punishment in the Middle East
In a wide-ranging podcast with Newlines’ Kareem Shaheen, David Kaye, who served as the U.N. special rapporteur for freedom of opinion and expression discusses justice and accountability for crimes in the Middle East.