Posted By Nate Wright Friday, January 20, 2012 - 2:27 PM
On the top floor of a towering apartment block in Cairo,
half a dozen Syrian activists are hunched over their laptops. Each man
organized demonstrations in his home town before escaping the Assad regime's intelligence
agents in the last few months. Now, armed with a list of trusted contacts that
stretches across the borders from southwest Syria to Lebanon and Jordan, they
have become a key link in the supply chain of an opposition movement that is
struggling to outmaneuver a brutal crackdown. Donations collected from Syrians
and well-wishers in Cairo are used to purchase cell phones, satellite
communications equipment, medicine, and money, which is smuggled to friends and
family members on the inside. In turn, protesters send out video evidence of
attacks, which the men in Cairo catalogue, upload to YouTube, and forward to
media outlets.
The men work with close contacts in their own villages
and neighborhoods, independently of organizing committees or opposition bodies.
Abdel Youssef fled from Ad Dumayr, a city northeast of Damascus. Syrian
authorities went door to door there searching for military defectors on
Wednesday night and he spent the day following their movements through
eyewitness accounts. As he tells the story of how he fled, a Skype window
flashes up on his screen. A woman he knows tells him that security forces
attempting to arrest a man have captured his daughter instead. "Now I'm looking
out the window," the message reads. "She is being beaten up by the security
forces because she is saying ‘Allahu Akhbar'." Abdel Youssef passes on
information like this to a contact in the Free Syrian Army, who he says use
this information to block roads and set up ambushes in an attempt to protect
demonstrations.
Posted By P.J. Dermer, Steven White Tuesday, November 22, 2011 - 5:58 PM
In light of the
resignation of the National Security Council's Dennis Ross, and as the
international community waits for the United Nations to
consider Palestine's road to formal statehood, we call upon the Obama
administration and so-called Middle East experts advising the various
presidential hopefuls to take some introspective "down time." The purpose is to reassess heretofore
time-honored policies, practices, political campaign pronouncements, and come up
with a realistic and viable way forward.
It is clear that
Obama's efforts toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire have been
nothing short of a failure. When tallying on to previous failed administration
attempts, the cumulative effect has been a clear loss of strategic
leverage. This loss is detrimental to the
U.S. interest of securing two states living side by side in peace in the region,
as well as influencing the likes of Syria and Iran at a critical time. This trend must be reversed and replaced by
revitalized action on a critical U.S. national security issue.
Posted By Daniel Levy Friday, September 23, 2011 - 6:38 PM
Ethan Frome
Cynicism and skepticism always have their place, but today might
just go down as an historic day on the Israeli-Palestinian front. No,
there is
no direct or quick fix move from the Palestinian application for U.N.
membership to the actual realization of a Palestinian state (and
certainly not
when one factors in the Israeli response) but the Palestinian U.N. move
does
represent the most definitive break yet with the failed and structurally
flawed
strategies for advancing peace of many a year. Many Palestinians and
others are
now suggesting that the PLO leadership progress from the symbolism of
September
23rd to a concerted struggle for their freedom centered on nonviolent
resistance, diplomacy, and international legality, believing that this
would
finally deliver a breakthrough.
In its theatrics, today was rather predictable -- other than
the Quartet statement of the afternoon, on which more in a moment. The
speeches
of Abbas and Netanyahu held few, if any, surprises. Abbas played to the
Palestinian community at home and around the world, and to the rest of
the
international community.
Posted By Alastair Crooke Thursday, April 28, 2011 - 7:53 AM
Europe and America
have shared a settled conviction over the last decades: It is that Israel, out of its own necessity, must seek to
conserve a Jewish majority within Israel. And that with time, and a
growing Palestinian population, Israel will at some point have to acquiesce to
a Palestinian state in order to maintain that Jewish majority: that is, only by
giving Palestinians their own state and thereby shedding a part of the
Palestinians it controls, can Israel's Jewish majority be preserved.
This simple proposition has given us the security-first
doctrine: Meeting Israel's self-definition of its own security needs -- it is
presumed -- stands as the unique and sufficient principle, allowing Israel
to transition with confidence to the two-state solution.
But Israel
has not done this -- despite many opportunities over the last 19 years -- and
does not seem any more disposed to "give" a Palestinian state now. Seldom is it asked why, if the logic is
indeed so compelling, have two states not emerged?
Posted By Avi Spiegel Friday, March 18, 2011 - 11:50 AM
When the famed author Paul Bowles first caught a glimpse of Morocco, he
quickly became convinced it was a "magic place."
The Moroccan government long ago embraced this fantasy, selling itself as a
bastion of calm in a troubled region, the Arab world's model of reform. And American policymakers bought it. In sentiments repeated regularly by
her successors, Madeleine Albright called
the North African kingdom a "leader in democratic reform" -- boasting that
"other countries are moving in the right direction, but Morocco is showing the way."
If Morocco's
political system was our model all this time, then perhaps our standards were
too low. Having the least-worst record of democratization in the region should never have been
enough. Every time the U.S.
government lavished praise on Morocco,
we sent a message to all Arab citizens: This was the most they should ever hope
for.
Posted By Virginie Collombier Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - 11:25 AM
If parliamentary elections were to be held in Egypt before summer,
many argue that only the National Democratic Party (NDP) and the Muslim
Brotherhood would be able to secure a significant number of seats. The
two are viewed as the only political groupings currently organized at the
national level and able to confront the challenge of an imminent election. But
after weeks of popular attacks directed against NDP symbols, and several of its
highest representatives facing charges in court, what really remains of the
former ruling party - of its organization and its capacity to mobilize?
The NDP, target
of popular anger
As soon as Egyptian protesters began taking to the
streets on January 25, it became clear that the National Democratic Party (NDP)
- like its Tunisian counterpart, the Democratic Constitutional Rally - would
soon become one of the main targets of popular anger.
Over the past decade, the NDP had come to symbolize
everything that crystallized opposition to the rule of President Mubarak: the firm grip over the political arena,
illustrated by a continuous and almost complete domination of Parliament; the
elaboration and implementation of neoliberal reforms and their negative impact
on the social conditions of most citizens, especially the middle class; the
corruption of a new business elite that has used its growing political
influence for its own profit and enrichment; the grooming of Hosni Mubarak's younger
son Gamal as heir.
Posted By Steven Heydemann Thursday, January 13, 2011 - 11:11 AM
In bringing about the fall of Lebanon's government, Hezbollah has deployed its "nuclear option." The move underscores Hezbollah's ruthlessness and determination in its campaign to force Prime Minister Saad Hariri to reject the results of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) -- which is expected to issue its long-delayed indictments soon and identify Hezbollah as complicit in the assassination of Saad's father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in February 2005. The government's collapse followed the breakdown of attempts by Syria and Saudi Arabia to broker a deal between Hariri's forces and Hezbollah's that would permit the prime minister to avoid the politically untenable and personally repugnant option of denouncing the tribunal's indictments and thus lend his support to his father's killers. Syrian sources, predictably, blame the collapse of negotiations on Hariri's refusal to accept what they characterize as joint Saudi-Syrian demands for concessions. What this latest twist tells us about Syrian intentions and the limits of Saudi influence over both Syria and Saad Hariri may be no less telling.
Hezbollah is playing a high stakes game, confident that its military dominance gives it a decisive upper hand should politics move from parliament into the streets. The tea leaves are still settling and will no doubt be further stirred up in coming days. Yet whether Hezbollah's withdrawal from the Hariri government will have the effects it desires is far from clear.
Posted By Lara Friedman Tuesday, October 12, 2010 - 5:46 PM
It has
become a truism to state that President Obama erred when he picked a fight with
Israel over settlements at
the outset of his Middle East peace efforts.
Like many Mideast truisms, this one too is
false.
Obama's error had nothing to
do with settlements. His error was picking a fight that he apparently
wasn't committed to winning.
Because if Obama wasn't
ready to play tough and demonstrate -- to both sides -- that there are real
consequences for not playing ball, then his Middle East peace efforts were
doomed to failure from the start, regardless of what strategy or tactics he
adopted along the way.
Posted By Anna Theofilopoulou, Jacob Mundy Thursday, August 12, 2010 - 6:06 PM
Sept
In what is possibly a first for the
mainstream U.S. media, New York Times columnist Nicholas
Kristof recently
noted some of the parallels between Israel's
occupation of Palestinian lands and Morocco's
attempted annexation of Western Sahara:
It's fair to acknowledge that there are double standards in the Middle East, with particular scrutiny on Israeli abuses.
After all, the biggest theft of Arab land in the Middle East has nothing to do
with Palestinians: It is Morocco's
robbery of the resource-rich Western Sahara
from the people who live there.
And just as one would expect, Morocco's ambassador to the United States, Aziz Mekouar, issued a prompt
retort denying that Western Sahara was ever
stolen. But the ambassador's logic was a bit fuzzy. "Far from stealing Western
Sahara," Mekouar argued, "Morocco
has offered the region autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty." Which is like
saying that theft is not theft if you are willing to sell the stolen object
back to the victims for a good price.
Eleven years ago, current king of Morocco, Mohammed VI, inherited one of the
world's oldest thrones together with
one of Africa's most intractable conflicts, the Western
Sahara dispute. For his father, King Hassan II, the seizure of
Western Sahara from Spain
became a blessing and a curse. It was arguably Hassan's greatest achievement
and yet Western Sahara soon became the
greatest challenge to the consolidation of the post-colonial Moroccan state.
Over a decade into his rule, Mohammed VI has yet to find a way to make good on
his father's conquest and legacy in the contested Western
Sahara.
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