Informed Comment

The Republican candidates for president once again tried to out-do the Likud Party in their devotion to the doctrine of the Iron Wall and their attempt to erase the Palestinian people from history and justify their being kept in a condition of statelessness and lack of citizenship in any state.

(The first thing the National Socialists in Germany did to the Jews was to strip them of citizenship, understanding that a stateless people is “flotsam” that no one wants and which lacks any legal standing).

Israel is in a race with time. The 11 million Palestinians are not going to go away, and those in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon have gained powerful new friends because of the Arab uprisings of 2011. Israel can only survive in some recognizable form if it achieves peace with the Palestinian people and with their supporters in the Muslim world, which means making arrangements for Palestinians to have citizenship in a state. Israel caught a break during its first 60 years because its Arab neighbors were largely peasant societies with low literacy, few modern organizational skills, and a significant technology gap.

That advantage is evaporating as Middle Easterners become more and more sophisticated. In the 2006 Lebanon War, Hizbullah and its backers (Iran and Syria) cracked Israeli communications encryption and so knew everything the Israeli army planned to do as soon as the orders were radioed. Hizbullah used micro-war techniques, including small rockets, the emplacements of which could not be easily found and destroyed, to force 1/4 of Israelis from their homes. Toward the end of the war Hizbullah was threatening to hit toxic gas storage areas in Haifa and it wasn’t clear that the Dimona nuclear facility was safe. Tiny Hizbullah, with only about 5,000 fighters, drawn from a religious group with only about 1.5 million members in Lebanon, is a harbinger of things to come. Arabs and Muslims are no longer push-overs, and will become less so over time.

It is unrealistic to think that little Israel, with about 7.5 million people (20% of them Palestinian-Israelis), can forever dominate militarily some 400 million Muslims in its neighborhood–Muslims who overwhelmingly side with the Palestinians.

The alternative is to make peace, and peace requires a settlement of the issue of Palestinian statelessness and a drawing of final boundaries in Israel’s land disputes with neighbors. (The firmest boundary is already that with Egypt, precisely because Egypt is the most militarily powerful of the neighbors).

Palestine was recognized as a Class A mandate after WW I by the League of Nations, and, like Syria and Iraq, was scheduled for statehood. League of Nations members France and Italy consistently pushed back against Lord Balfour’s attempts to interpret the Mandate as permitting the expropriation of the Palestinian majority. As late as the British White Paper of the late 1930s, the British envisaged a Palestinian state in ten years. Palestinian statehood was forestalled when the Jewish settlers (brought into Palestine by the British colonial authorities) engaged in a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1947-1948 that left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians homeless and stateless.

As Hannah Arendt and SCOTUS chief Justice Earl Warren recognized, citizenship is the right to have rights. Without citizenship in a state, Palestinians never really own property or have any other civil or human rights, since if someone steals from them they have no state to back their claims. In almost all legal proceedings, they lack standing. Palestinians once given Jordanian citizenship have sometimes recently had it withdrawn. Palestinians in Lebanon cannot own property, vote, in most cases cannot get work permits or business licenses, and mostly are not permitted by other states to travel to them, since Palestinians don’t have a home country or proper passports and so are seen as an illegal immigration risk. Far from being “Arabs,” many Lebanese Christians reject that identity and they are not going to give citizenship to Sunni Arabs expelled from Mandate Palestine by the Israelis, since that would weaken the Christians’ own position in Lebanese politics. The Israeli supreme court even just declared that Palestinians married to Israeli citizens can never achieve Israeli citizenship. The stigma of being a stateless Palestinian can never be removed, and Palestinian families have no more right to stay together in Israel than the families of black slaves in the Old South (where Newt Gingrich still thinks he lives) had a right to stay together.

So here is what Romney said in the debate:

“(UNKNOWN): Abraham Hass[an] (ph) from Jacksonville, Florida.

How would a Republican administration help bring peace to Palestine and Israel when most candidates barely recognize the existence of Palestine or its people? As a Palestinian-American Republican, I’m here to tell you we do exist.

BLITZER: All right. Let’s ask Governor Romney, first of all.

What would you say to Abraham?

ROMNEY: Well, the reason that there’s not peace between the Palestinians and Israel is because there is — in the leadership of the Palestinian people are Hamas and others who think like Hamas, who have as their intent the elimination of Israel. And whether it’s in school books that teach how to kill Jews, or whether it’s in the political discourse that is spoken either from Fatah or from Hamas, there is a belief that the Jewish people do not have a right to have a Jewish state.

There are some people who say, should we have a two-state solution? And the Israelis would be happy to have a two-state solution. It’s the Palestinians who don’t want a two-state solution. They want to eliminate the state of Israel.

And I believe America must say — and the best way to have peace in the Middle East is not for us to vacillate and to appease, but is to say, we stand with our friend Israel. We are committed to a Jewish state in Israel. We will not have an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally, Israel.

This president went before the United Nations and castigated Israel for building settlements. He said nothing about thousands of rockets being rained in on Israel from the Gaza Strip. This president threw –

(APPLAUSE)

ROMNEY: I think he threw Israel under the bus with regards to defining the ’67 borders as a starting point of negotiations. I think he disrespected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

I think he has time and time again shown distance from Israel, and that has created, in my view, a greater sense of aggression on the part of the Palestinians. I will stand with our friend, Israel.

BLITZER: Thank you, Governor.

(APPLAUSE)”

As Ron Kampea points out at a blog of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Obama has in fact complained about Gaza rockets hitting Israel.

And, Hamas is not the leader of the Palestinian people. The PLO has the presidency of the Palestine Authority, and it recognized Israel long ago in return for an agreement that the Israelis would stop stealing Palestinian land and allow Palestinians finally to have a state and escape the chattel-like estate of statelessness. The Israelis took the recognition but reneged on the other promises, which hasn’t encouraged other Palestinian parties to give away the bargaining chip of recognizing Israel before there are even serious negotiations.

At least, as Kampea points out, Romney got the nuance right when speaking of Obama’s statement that 1967 borders should be the basis for negotiations.

But the Republican Party now seems to have a Greater Israel position that would bestow all the West Bank on Israel, including East Jerusalem, but without saying what should be done with the millions of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

Alan Grayson once said that the Republican health care plan is, “Don’t get sick. If you get sick, die quickly.” The Republican plan for 11 million Palestinians is shorter. It is just, “Die quickly.”

Then Newt Gingrich weighed in (and I do mean weigh):

“BLITZER: Speaker Gingrich, you got into a little hot water when you said the Palestinians were an invented people. GINGRICH: It was technically an invention of the late 1970s, and it was clearly so. Prior to that, they were Arabs. Many of them were either Syrian, Lebanese, or Egyptian, or Jordanian.

There are a couple of simple things here. There were 11 rockets fired into Israel in November. Now, imagine in Duvall County that 11 rockets hit from your neighbor. How many of you would be for a peace process and how many of you would say, you know, that looks like an act of war.

You have leadership unequivocally, and Governor Romney is exactly right, the leadership of Hamas says, not a single Jew will remain. We aren’t having a peace negotiation then. This is war by another form.

My goal for the Palestinian people would be to live in peace, to live in prosperity, to have the dignity of a state, to have freedom. and they can achieve it any morning they are prepared to say Israel has a right to exist, we give up the right to return, and we recognize that we’re going to live side-by-side, now let’s work together to create mutual prosperity.

And you could in five years dramatically improve the quality of life of every Palestinian. But the political leadership would never tolerate that. And that’s why we’re in a continuous state of war where Obama undermines the Israelis.

On the first day that I’m president, if I do become president, I will sign an executive order directing the State Department to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to send the signal we’re with Israel.

(APPLAUSE)”

Gingrich implies that Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza, is responsible for the eleven rockets. Gaza is a mess, reduced by Israeli occupation to a 1.6-million person slum, where people are not even permitted by Tel Avivi to export 99% of what they make or produce, where unemployment is astronomical, and where 55% of the population is food insecure. It is a congeries of refugee camps where the families expelled by the Zionist forces in 1948 live in squalor and once-flourishing towns and villages now cut off from their markets by Israeli malevolence. Hamas doesn’t control Gaza, and radical groups, fostered by the concentration camp-like conditions of the Strip, are the ones who fire little home made rockets over the border sometimes. Since Israel has 200 nuclear warheads, you’d think it might survive somebody’s high school chemistry set and some taunts.

Gingrich asks what would happen if 11 rockets fell on Duvall County. But he doesn’t ask what would happen if Venezuelan troops pushed Floridians into Duvall County from a neighboring county, stripped them of US citizenship, then surrounded Duvall County and refused to let the people there export most of their products or import more than basic needs. What would the people of Duvall County do to those Venezuelan troops, do you think?

As for Palestinians being recently invented, Gingrich may want to consult the medieval Islamic coins inscribed with the word “Palestine,” referring to the place that the medieval Palestinians lived.

There are tens of thousands of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, and they are 35% of the Israeli-created district of Jerusalem, and the status of Jerusalem is a matter to be settled in final status negotiations. For Gingrich to forestall peace negotiations by unilaterally giving all of Jerusalem permanently to Israel would not lead to peace, but to further generations of conflict. Americans, who keep telling the Palestinians that unilateral actions at the UN cannot lead to peace, nevertheless favor Likud Party unilateral actions when it comes to Israel.

Everyone knows that Newt Gingrich is in the back pocket of casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who worships Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party like a golden calf, and that Gingrich is playing for the vote of the Christian Zionists among southern evangelicals. He isn’t interested in peace or the welfare of Palestinians. Indeed, it seems unlikely he is interested in Israeli welfare, since the advice he gives Tel Aviv (yes) is likely to dig the state’s grave over the long term.

Posted in Israel/Palestine, Uncategorized | 26 Comments

1. The upheavals of 2011 were provoked by the Bush administration’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq Bzzt! Wrong answer. None of the young people who made this year’s revolutions ever pointed to Iraq as an inspiration. The only time Iraq was even brought up in their tweets was as a negative example (“let’s not let ourselves be divided by sectarianism, since that is what the Americans did in Iraq.”) Americans are so full of self-admiration that they cannot see Iraq as it is, and as it is perceived in the Arab world. Iraq is not a shining city on a hill for them. It is a violent place riddled with sectarian hatred, manipulated by the United States, and suffering from poor governance and dysfunctional politics. I did interviewing with activists last summer in Tunisia and Egypt. The youth do not want to be like Iraq! They want to be like Turkey, or, now, Tunisia.

2. President Obama was wrong to ask Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down. This position has been taken by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. It is a crazy thing to say. Mubarak could not have stayed in power, with nearly a million people in the streets and order breaking down in the country. If anything Obama was far too slow to act, and there was danger of Egypt turning seriously anti-American if he had not stepped in when he did. Trying to keep a dictator in power who has worn out his welcome is always a big mistake on the part of a great power, as was seen in the case of the shah of Iran.

3. Muslim radicalism benefited from the revolutions in the Arab world. So far, at least, the beneficiaries of the upheavals have been both secular, left-leaning dissidents and Muslim religious parties. Neither is violent. In Tunisia, the new president, Moncef Marzouki, is a staunch secularist. The al-Nahda (Ennahda) religious party got about 40 percent of the seats in parliament. But neither sort of movement is radical or violent. Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is now peaceful and talks moderately, and is attacked for it by the radicals such as Ayman al-Zawahiri. Muslim radicals have not been able to take advantage of these largely peaceful movements in the way they could of George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, which really did fuel the spread of violent extremism. Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakkol Karman of Yemen argues that if democracy can be achieved in the Arab world, it will finish off violent extremism, which only flourishes under dictatorship.

4. Muslim religious groups spear-headed the revolutions. This allegation is made by Iran from one side and Western conservatives from the other. It is for the most part incorrect. Leftists, secularists, workers and students made the revolutions. The Muslim forces had often been devastated by government persecution and were weak (Tunisia) or had been made a junior partner in governance and were reluctant to risk entirely losing that position (Egypt). In Egypt, the revolutionaries are referred to in Arabic as the thuwar, and they are contrasted to the Muslim Brotherhood and other forces. In Egypt, it is these secularists and leftista who are are still calling for demonstrations in Tahrir Square. The most effective revolutionaries in Libya, the Berbers of the Western Mountain region and the urban street fighters of Misrata, were the least fundamentalist in orientation. While the Muslim religious parties may be good at organizing to win elections and so are perhaps the main beneficiaries of the revolutions politically, they did not make the revolutions themselves.

5. The uprising in Bahrain was merely a manifestation of sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shiite. The protesters in Bahrain included reformist Sunni Muslims. And the conservative forces pressuring the king to crack down on the crowds included the country’s great merchant families which comprise both Sunnis and Shiites. The struggle in these islands, like that elsewhere in the Arab world, was over authoritarian forms of government versus popular democracy, accountability and transparency. The king’s constitution allows him to over-rule both houses of parliament, allows him to appoint the upper house, and allows it to over-rule the lower house. The Shiite protesters were upset that these arrangements, along with gerrymandering that reduced Shiite representation, preventing the majority from asserting itself (Shiites are about 58% of the population). But the discourse was about constitutional monarchy, not about Shiite rule or an Iran-style Shiite theocracy, with some small exceptions.

6. Iran was behind the uprising in Bahrain. There is no good evidence for this allegation, which is the basis for the Saudi and United Arab Emirates military intervention on behalf of the Sunni Arab monarchy. Bahrain’s Shiites are Arabs and probably a majority of them belong to the conservative Akhbari school of jurisprudence, which rejects ayatollahs in favor of the ability of laypeople to interpret the law for themselves. Bahrain Shiites of the Usuli school, prevalent in Iran and Iraq, are more likely to look for leadership to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf, Iraq, than to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. Bahrain’s Shiites claim educational and workplace discrimination, and dispute a constitution and electoral system that disadvantages them. They are not agents of Iran.

7. The Arab Spring is a Western plot. This allegation was made by the Qaddafis in Libya and is currently asserted by many in Syria’s Baath Party. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is quite clear that the upheavals in the Arab world came as a surprise to the G8 nations, and were mostly at least initially unwelcome. France’s minister of defense offered help with police training to Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s Tunisia once the demonstrations got going last year this time. The US initially signalled support for Hosni Mubarak during the rallies against him of late January. Hillary Clinton said she was sure that the Mubarak regime was “stable.” Vice President Joe Biden was constrained to deny that Mubarak was “a dictator.” Obama only saw the writing on the wall with regard to Egypt at the last minute, and was starting to be a target of protest posters in Tahrir Square. The US was reluctant to lose an ally against al-Qaeda in Yemen such as Ali Abdullah Saleh, and still has never sanctioned him for killing hundreds of innocent protesters. Washington was likewise unhappy with the uprising in Bahrain, and at most urged the king to find a compromise (the US Fifth Fleet is headquartered in the capital, Manama, and so the US did not feel itself in a position to support the protesters strongly). Obama was famously reluctant to get involved in Libya. There is substantial ambivalence over the upheaval in Syria, and so far the main form of intervention is targeted financial sanctions. If there is anything that is already clear as we catch history on the run here, it is that the uprisings were spontaneous, indigenous, centered on dissatisfied youth, and that and presented the status quo Powers with unwelcome challenges.

8. The intervention of NATO in Libya was driven primarily by oil. European sanctions on Libya began being dropped in the late 1990s, and US sanctions were lifted in 2004. Western oil companies had sunk billions into the Libyan petroleum sector by 2011, and it is highly unlikely that they would have wanted to risk instability there or the advent of a new government that might not honor their bids. The oil majors suffered substantial losses because of the loss of Libyan production last spring and summer. The conservative government of David Cameron in the UK and that of Nicola Sarkozy in France allegedly feared that if Qaddafi were allowed to crush the Libyan reformers by main force, he might drive them into the arms of al-Qaeda, as had happened in Algeria in the early 1990s. And, they may have feared that Qaddafi would provoke a big exodus to Europe at a time when European economies are poorly situated to absorb such immigrants in large numbers. Sarkozy may have felt the need for a quick victory to bolster his position in the polls ahead of next year’s presidential elections. Cameron, as a conservative, may have sought to rehabilitate the use of military force to enforce international order, which had been tarnished in UK public opinion by the Iraq disaster. Those who say Europe would not have intervened in the absence of the petroleum factor forget the Balkans, which presented similar challenges of massive violence on Europe’s doorstep. Likewise, oil isn’t everything; Bahrain has very little, and so it cannot explain Washington’s reluctance to lambaste the monarchy there. To argue that Western Europe had interests in Libya that drove its intervention is common sense. To peg everything to oil is vulgar Marxism.

9. The Arab dictatorships now overthrown or tottering were better for women than their likely Islamist successors. The postcolonial Arab states often pursued what my friend Deniz Kandiyoti of the School of Oriental and African Studies has called “state feminist” projects of female uplift. But because these policies were pursued by unpopular dictatorships, they created a male backlash. The Muslim Brotherhood’s patriarchal pushback against the upper class feminism of Suzanne Mubarak was a feature not of 2011 but of 1981-2010. The massive trend to veiling among Egyptian women took place in the past 20 years, not all of a sudden today. That is, “state feminism” often backfired because it was felt as intrusive and heavy-handed. Women’s progress was tainted, moreover, by association with hated dictatorships. Nor was Hosni Mubarak exactly Germaine Greer. Two of my Ph.D. students had their projects initially rejected by the Egyptian authorities because they included a focus on feminist issues, which were increasingly controversial in Mubarak’s dictatorship. If Tunisia and Egypt can now move to democratic systems, women will have new freedoms to organize politically and to make demands on the state. Nor can outsiders pre-define women’s issues. Their actual desires may be for social services, notably lacking under Mubarak and Ben Ali, rather than for the kinds of programs favored by the old elites. In any case, while women’s causes may face challenges from conservative Muslim forces, it is healthier for them to mobilize and debate in public than for faceless male bureaucrats to make high-handed decisions for women.

10. The Arab upheavals are an unmitigated disaster for Israel. This position has been argued by Netanyahu and others. While it is true that the Muslim religious parties coming to power in Tunisia and Egypt are more sympathetic to the Palestinians than were Ben Ali and Mubarak, the issue is more complex than that. The Syrian National Council that is opposing the Baath Party in Syria has said that it will cease supporting Hizbullah and Hamas if it comes to power. The National Transitional Council in Libya is not anti-Israel. Moreover, you cannot gauge whether the changes are good or bad for Israel only by whether they might affect Israeli policy toward Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Dictatorships such as that of Mubarak were politically pathological, pursuing policies advantageous to the Israeli Right wing that were deeply unpopular with the Egyptian people. A democratic Egypt that actually represented public opinion would not necessarily be militant (no Egyptians want a return to a war footing), but it would be honest in its dealings with Tel Aviv. Israel has not been benefited by its denial of statehood to the Palestinians, by Mubarak’s corrupt collaboration in right wing policies, nor by the Syrian Baath Party’s cynical deployment of Palestine as a domestic issue. In a politically healthy Middle East, when Israel steals Palestinian land and water, it would get regional push back of a political and economic nature (as has finally started happening with regard to Turkey). That isn’t apocalyptic, it is politics. What has been wrong with Israel’s relationship with its Middle Eastern neighbors has been a lack of politics in favor of bribed sycophancy or ginned-up militancy, which has bred terrorism on the one side and arrogant hawkishness on the other. The changes in the Arab world, if they lead to more democracy, could well normalize Israel and Palestine in the region. It wouldn’t be the end of disputes, but it might be the beginning of the end of pathological politics.

Posted in Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Uncategorized, Yemen | 31 Comments

Haredi Jews clashed with police on Monday in Beit Shemesh, Israel, leaving one policeman wounded, over the issue of segregation of women. They shouted “Nazis!” at the police. The Haredim are the Salafis of Judaism, and many insist on strict separation of women in public. Some forbid women to visit deceased relatives in cemeteries or walk on public sidewalks. Although gender segregation is asociated with Islam, it is also common among conservatives of other religious traditions, including Hinduism.

Part of the conflict is over the establishment of a national-religious school for girls in the town, which the Ultra-Orthodox activists say is full of “prostitutes” and of non-Jewish loose women (“shiksas”). Some have been spitting on the girls, and have beaten up non-Haredis who support the school.They complain that Zionists have invaded their neighborhood (most Haredis reject Zionism or Jewish nationalism on the grounds that it is impudent for Jews to establish a state before the Messiah comes.)

One of the victims who was spat on is an American little girl, Na’ama Margolies, whose plight has enraged secular Jews.

Haredim are about 10% of the Israeli population, and are growing rapidly because of large families. They are an important part of the coalition led by the ruling Likud party, so that this controversy has put the government in an awkward position. It has responded with verbal condemnation of extremism but no practical action.

Ironically, the more hardline Haredis do to secular Zionists what the Zionists do to Arabs, generalizing, stereotyping, and Nazifying them. See e.g. Ben White. And while Na’ama Margolies’ ordeal is heartbreaking, so is that of Palestinian children in al-Khalil / Hebron, who suffer restrictions from the occupying Israeli troops (h/t Ali Abunimah)

Posted in Israel/Palestine, Uncategorized | 14 Comments

Marc Lynch writes in FP:

“It’s time for the official, Aardvark-certified list of the Best Books on the Middle East for 2011! (See last year’s winners here.) Next year’s list will undoubtedly be dominated by books addressing this year’s uprisings which have transformed the Arab world, but not many significant books on the topic were published in 2011.  That’ll hopefully change on March 27, when my own book The Arab Uprising comes out – don’t worry, it won’t be eligible for the 2012 awards of course! — and, all joking aside, when a number of great journalists and scholars weigh in with books in the pipeline.  In the meantime, you can always go back to Revolution in the Arab World, the eBook based on Foreign Policy articles, which I think remains an outstanding guide to the first few months.

First, the ground rules. The awards are limited to English-language books that were published in calendar year 2011 and which dealt primarily with the contemporary broader Middle East. I read more than 65 books published this year which fit that description, from academic and trade presses alike. The award is entirely subjective, based on what I found impressive or interesting. There’s no committee, no publishers sent me free copies or offered up lucrative swag, and I couldn’t read everything — especially if books were published too late in the year or if publishers insisted on releasing them only as $90 hardcovers. If your book didn’t make the list, however, then you know what do do (hint: you really can’t go wrong by blaming Blake Hounshell).

And with that…the 2011 Aardvark Awards for the Best Books on the Middle East:[[BREAK]]

Book of the Year: 

Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia, by Stephane LaCroix (Harvard University Press). Awakening Islam is an astonishingly rich, detailed analysis of the fascinating world of Saudi Islamism. The young French scholar Stephane LaCroix spent significant time in Saudi Arabia, and got deep inside the competing networks that have shaped Saudi Arabia’s distinctive Islamist milieu. He unpacks the role of Muslim Brothers and Salafis and their sometimes-uneasy relationship with the state. He carefully traces the evolution of the Sahwa (Awakening) networks, and how they both carried political dissent and re-structured the pathways of political mobilization. And while he certainly pays attention to militant jihadism and the worldview which helped spawn al-Qaeda, that does not overwhelm his broader analytical mission.  This book is simply an extraordinary accomplishment, and should be required reading for anyone interested in the politics of Islam. Read LaCroix on the Middle East Channel: "Saudi Islamists and the Potential for Protest" (June 2, 2011).

Runner Up

Violence, Non-Violence and the Palestinian National Movement, by Wendy Pearlman (Cambridge University Press). Pearlman has produced a beautifully written, deeply researched, and theoretically sophisticated overview of a century of Palestinian political mobilization. She goes deep inside the political opportunities and obstacles which have shaped Palestinian decisions about violence and non-violent mobilization, with a particularly rich and insightful reading of both of the Intifadas.  Nobody should ever again dare ask "where is the Palestinian Ghandi?" before reading her book.  This is the best kind of scholarship, and deserves a wide readership — which I fear it will not get, unless Cambridge decides to quickly issue it in an affordable paperback version instead of as an absurdly expensive $99 hardcover. Read Pearlman on the Middle East Channel: "A New Palestinian Intifada?" (Oct. 10, 2011). ”

Read the whole Lynch piece.

Posted in Arab World, Egypt, Elections, History, Human Rights, International Relations, Islam, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, North Africa, Politics, Religion, Saudi Arabia, U.S. Foreign Policy | Comments Off