Patrick Cockburn. Two very different political waves are sweeping through the Middle East and north Africa. Popular protests are overthrowing the leaders of military regimes for the first…
Jonathan Fenton-Harvey Civil societies and political actors in the Middle East and North Africa have continuously fought for democratic change and positive reforms since the 2011 Arab Spring…
Diana Buttu and Dennis J Bernstein Without question, the reporting on recent Israeli elections was devoid of a Palestinian perspective, despite the fact that Palestinians will be deeply…
Adam Shatz. Israel’s legislative elections on 9 April were a tribute to Binyamin Netanyahu’s transformation of the political landscape. At no point were they discussed in terms of…
Jan Oberg. You have certainly not heard much about this in the West. And it didn’t get a fraction of the media attention (and none of the hundreds of millions…
Edo Konrad. Tuesday’s election results were obvious to anyone paying attention. Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and rival Benny Gantz’s Blue and White won the same…
On Thursday night, hundreds of people packed into the Old South Church in Boston to hear the world-renowned dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky speak. He looked back at…
“Vartan didn’t Say a Word” is a political poem by Ahmad Shamlou that underwent censorship because of being addressed to a political prisoner who was tortured to death…
Vijay Prashad. The West and the Gulf Arabs have condemned Libya to the strongman. You can well imagine the tension when Libya’s beleaguered Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj met…
Hamza Hamouchene. What is happening in Algeria is truly historic. The people won the first battle in their struggle to radically overhaul the system. Abdelaziz Bouteflika, president for…
Esen Uslu. Turkey is no longer a dark space, about which the British public occasionally gets scraps of information – it has become a centre of news fed…
Emma Graham-Harrison. The death toll from two weeks of flooding in Iran has risen to 62 as frustration mounts inside the country at the government’s handling of the…
Robert Fisk. Khaled Abol Naga – an outspoken critic of the Egyptian government – stands accused of treason ( AFP )It was comical, farcical, droll. An actor’s dream if…
Carlotta Gall. Step by step over the years, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey sought to ensure nobody could challenge him. He marginalized adversaries. He purged the army,…
Tony Greenstein. In most western countries, political parties compete in general elections over issues such as taxation, nationalisation/privatisation, poverty, etc. Those in most European countries, with the exception…
Ramzy Baroud. “(At dawn) … I will resist … (Since) upon the wall there is still a white sheet … And my fingers are yet to (completely) dissolve.”…
Semir Amin. Radical political economist Samir Amin (1931–2018) left behind a cherished oeuvre of Marxist writings. Amin’s intellectual range—from economics to culture—was admirable, and his lessons remain essential….
Robert Fisk. After all the headlines about the supposed defeat of Isis, anyone who doesn’t believe a word of it may seem a bit of a spoilsport. But whenever…
Tony Greenstein. In 1984 rabbi Meir Kahane of the ultra-nationalist Kach party entered the Israeli parliament (knesset), having received over 25,000 votes. Kach stood on a programme which,…
Ramzy Baroud. Political commentators sympathetic to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Fatah Movement, in particular, fanned out as soon as the news was announced of Mohammad Shtayyeh’s…
المركز الفلسطيني للبحوثالسياسية والمسحية Palestinian Center for POLICY and SURVEY RESEARCH Public Opinion Poll No (69). As Fatah and Hamas lose popular support and more than 60% demand…
Ian Black. The meeting publicly showcased the remarkable fact that Israel, as Netanyahu was so keen to advertise, is winning acceptance of a sort from the wealthiest countries…
Anna Taylor. It started in front of the Swedish parliament, on 20 August – a regular school day. Greta Thunberg sat with her painted sign and some homemade…
Brianna Fruean and others. Lovina, 15, and Delema Janvier, 17, Alberta, Canada: As indigenous youths we have a close connection to the Earth We strike for the Earth,…
Orhan Kemal Cengiz. On March 31, Turkey will elect mayors for 81 provincial capitals and 957 towns. Under normal conditions in Turkey, local elections are considered to be of…
Bob Dreyfuss. Here’s the foreign policy question of questions in 2019: Are President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, all…
Dougie Gerrard. By any measure, Leyla Güven is in a bad way. She is assailed by painful cramps, the result of a protein breakdown in her muscular tissue….
Nicholas Lyall. The Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia and away from the Middle East, followed by current President Donald Trump’s “America First” approach, has seen U.S. attention on…
Rohollah Faghihi. The phenomenon of “dirty” or suspicious money appears to have increasingly found a new haven: Iran’s cinema and TV production industry. In 2015, Interior Minister Abdolreza…
Ed Vulliamy. The Syrian city of Aleppo crumbles into rubble, assailed by Russian bombs, government artillery and chemical weapons. In the heat of battle, Turkish troops and Kurdish…
Yassamine Mather. Friday March 8 is International Women’s Day, which this year coincides with the 40th anniversary of the first major protest by Iranian women against the Islamic…
Intan Suwandi, R. Jamil Jonna and John Bellamy Foster To comprehend twenty-first-century imperialism we must go beyond analysis of the nation-state to a systematic investigation of the increasing…
Charles R Larson. Syria’s gut-wrenching civil war serves as the background to Khaled Khalifa’s award-winning new novel, Death Is Hard Work, though incidents in the story often appear…
Richard Falk. While waiting without even a glimmer of hope for the Trump ‘deal of the century’ the Palestinian ordeal unfolds day by day. Many Israelis would like…
Wendy Pearlman: We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, Custom House, 2017. Everyone talks about Syrians, but very few are actually talk to them. Perhaps that’s…
Jonathan Cook. Israel’s decision to withhold part of the taxes it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority and plunge it deeper into crisis starkly illustrates the hypocrisies…
Maya Margit. Amid worsening diplomatic and economic isolation, Iran is continuing its crackdown on perceived dissidents. Among the targets: environmental scientists. A recent Amnesty International report claimed the…
Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy 308 pp, $29 pbk, ISBN 9781583676400 By Kohei Saito. Reviewed by Kaan Kangal for Science &…
Jonathan Cook. You might imagine that a report by a multinational observer force documenting a 20-year reign of terror by Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers against Palestinians, in…
Jack Rasmus. At Davos, Switzerland every year the global capitalist elite gather to party…and to prepare for the year ahead. This year more than 1500 private jets will…
Conn Hallinen. “Democracy is like a tram; you get off when you have reached your destination.” The comment by Recep Tayyip Erdogan—made more than 20 years ago when…
Yassamine Mather. Commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the February 1979 uprising in Iran has been marked by dozens of scholarly seminars in Europe, numerous documentaries produced by…
by Lara al-Kateb and Omar Abbas with contributions from Selin Cagatay, Frieda Afary, Fatemeh Masjedi and socialist feminists inside Iran The Me Too movement against sexual assault and…
Two poems by Solmaz Sharif Lanat Abad / The Place of the Damned By Solmaz Sharif this mangy plot where by nowonly mothers still come, only mothers guard…
Toufic Haddad The rise and expansion of right-wing populism and the dramatic unfolding of global politics in the Trump era have had significant and alarming implications for the…
Behnam Gharagozli. Shortly after the horrific attacks on 9/11, it was discovered that there was an American plan to dismantle the regimes of seven countries: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon,…
Ramzy Baroud. Five years after spearheading what is inaptly referred to as a ‘government of national reconciliation’, Palestinian Prime Minister, Rami Hamdallah, has finally resigned. “We put our…
Nicolas J.S. Davies and Medea Benjamin A shorter version of this article was originally published by The Hill. When the Trump administration unilaterally pulled out of the Iran…
Maged Mandour. Scene One President Abdelfattah Al Sissi, Egypt`s military autocrat is having an interview with the American television program 60 minutes, on CBS. Unlike other interviews, with…
Joseph Daher. As it draws closer to the eve of September 30—when three years earlier Russian military intervention in Syria first began—it is telling that Russia’s influence in…
Conn Hallinan. Keeping track of the Trump administration’s foreign policy is like trying to track a cat on a hot tin roof: We’re pulling out of Syria (not…
Kathy Kelly. On January 27th, 2019, the Taliban and the U.S. government each publicly stated acceptance, in principle, of a draft framework for ongoing negotiations that could culminate…
Omar Sabbour. In September 2018, when the Assad regime was preparing to launch its (now on-hold) offensive against rebel-held Idlib in northern Syria, a rather surprising report emerged in the…
Bree Busk. It is May 2018 and as winter descends on Santiago, Chile, a new wave of feminist activity is exploding into life. Anti-patriarchal graffiti covers the city…
Michael Roberts. The two issues that the rich and famous in world capital like to discuss with wringing hands and weeping are: global warming and climate change; and…
Internationalist Commune of Rojava. The threat of yet another war looms over northern Syria once again. Turkish troops and their Islamist mercenaries are massing on the borders of…
Kourosh Ziabari. Instagram, widely used in Iran among small business owners, students, influencers and even senior officials, is the latest social media application to come under scrutiny and…
Ron Augustin. The presidential elections in Cuba may have marked the end of an era. On the face of it, Raúl Castro’s decision to step aside symbolized, more…
Posted on Middle East Monitor. More than 1,200 Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s Ofer Prison yesterday launched an open-ended hunger strike, in protest against the occupation’s continuous violations against…
Shemuel Meir The title of Ehud Barak’s recently published autobiography My Country, My Life declares that it is a book not just about Barak’s life, but also a…
Ramzy Baroud. The game is afoot. Israel, believe it or not, is demanding that seven Arab countries and Iran pay $250 billion as compensation for what it claims was the…
Yassamine Mather. Iranian workers have been staging large protests since early November in two major industrial complexes: the Haft Tapeh sugar plant and the Foulad steel factory in…
Vijay Prashad. On Jan. 1, 5.5 million women in the Indian state of Kerala (population 35 million) built a 386-mile wall with their bodies. They stood from one end…
Mina Yousefi. For a little over a year, Iran has witnessed a new wave of civil resistance, which had been brewing in various towns and cities around the…
Conflicting Claims over Property in Algeria. Robert P Parks. December 22, 2013, 40 families living at 11 Boulevard de la Soummam — the Champs Élysées of the western…
James Miler. “This is what democracy looks like!”—for some of us protesting Trump in New York on January 21, 2017, this was a familiar chant. We’d heard it…
Sahar Esfandiari. TAs Mehdi Khakyan’s hands move skilfully across the piano keys, the soft chatter in the room subsides to hone in on the melody of a well-loved…
Salem Jubran: The Exile The sun walks through the borderGuns keep silentA skylark starts its morning songIn TulkaremAnd flies away to supWith the birds of a KibbutzA lonely…
Rushi Kumar. Laila Haidari is considered a criminal, despite never committing a crime. The 40-year-old works with drug addicts in Kabul. “The addicts I work with are considered…
Mücella Yapıcı is an architect and activist, known for her work against urban renewal projects and environmental destruction in Turkey. She is the secretary and spokesperson of the…
Michael D Yates. [Author’s note: This essay is based upon arguments made in Chapter 2 (“Some Theoretical Considerations”) of my book, Can the Working Class Change the World? Unless…
Hilary Klein Twenty-five years ago today, the Zapatistas rose up in arms. Twenty-five years – it’s hard to believe! It’s been many years since the Zapatistas were the…
Patrick Cockburn The number of people killed by the violence in Yemen has for the first time risen above 3,000 dead in a single month, bringing the total…
Maysam Behravesh. US President Donald Trump’s abrupt announcement last week of the withdrawal of American troops from Syria caught many people off guard, including his own administration officials. It…
Michael Roberts Well, there has not been a year starting like this for a long time. The US government is in disarray. The President of the Unites States starts…
Dr Hawzhin Azeez If you want freedom you have to take it! You cannot appeal to the conscience of the imperialists, the colonialists, the oppressors, and the creators…
Bianca Britton and Gul Tuysuz. Syria’s army said Friday it had entered the northern city of Manbij for the first time in years after Kurdish fighters called on…
Ramzy Baroud. An eerie video composed of a recorded audio prayer and a photo of one ‘Hajj Jamal Ghalaini’ occasionally pops up on Facebook. The voice is that…
President Trump has announced that the U.S. will withdraw troops from Syria, in a move that has been praised by some in the American peace movement and some…
Koenraad Bogaert, Globalized Authoritarianism: Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Koenraad Bogaert (KB):…
Paul R Pillar. The record of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) as de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia has included a trail of regional destabilization. Foremost on…
Aveek Sen, Mojtaba Mousavi, and Udayan Tandan. Zeinab, the mother of a four-year-old girl suffering from blood cancer, says that “Mina has been under medication for nearly five…
Douglas Gerrard. Of the four countries into which Kurdistan is divided, the region spanning Iran is the least prominent in western consciousness. Rojava is well known amongst leftists due…
Concluding part of dialogue: Political Islamism, women and democracy Ardeshir Mehrdad: As you have probably observed, amongst the authors dealing with feminist-Islamism some place their emphasis on the…
Jeffrey St. Claire. At the close of the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was denounced as a ferocious villain for ordering his retreating troops to destroy Kuwaiti oil…
Peter Corboy. Born in tabriz, iran in 1985 and 1991 respectively, street art siblings ICY and SOT began making work under less than hospitable conditions. initially influenced by…
This is the second part of a three-part conversation carried out with the Syrian academic Aziz Al-Azmeh. Here Professor Al-Azmeh addresses the various forms that political islams take…
Seth Ferris. The history of sanctions teaches us that they are like a pole – you can find a way around them, and in the process, find a…
This is the first part of a three-part conversation carried out with the Syrian academic Aziz Al-Azmeh. Here Aziz Al-Azmeh addresses the relation of contemporary political islams and…
Eve Ottenberg. “Can the Working Class Change the World?”, Michael D. Yates Monthly Review Press. If the working class doesn’t save our vastly unequal and dying world, it’s…
Ramzy Baroud. Although ties between Washington and Tel Aviv are stronger than ever, Israeli leaders are aware of a vastly changing political landscape. The US’ own political turmoil…
Jessica Barnes. The possible link between climate change and political upheaval in the Middle East has attracted increasing media attention and is generating a new wave of academic…
Lisa Gleeson. When it comes to the infrastructure of genocide, you could illustrate it using almost any photo of a school, house, shop or village in the West…
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East. David Kirkpatrick, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. From 2011 to 2015, David Kirkpatrick was the…
Amnesty International. Several Saudi Arabian activists, including a number of women, who have been arbitrarily detained without charge since May 2018 in Saudi Arabia’s Dhahban Prison, have reportedly…
Neta Crawford, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Nearly half a million people have died from violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan since George W. Bush declared a “war…
Bijan Khajehpour. The reimposition of US secondary sanctions has compelled Tehran to look for ways to reduce their negative impact. According to Iranian officials, one of the strategies is…
Michael D Yates. “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!” These are the final three…
ENGAGING BOOKS SERIES Pluto Press Selections On Radical Politics Engaging Books is a new series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an…
Vali Nasr. The Trump administration is not ready to admit it, but its Middle East strategy is in deep trouble, now compounded by the murder of the dissident…
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