Ardeshir Mehrdad Soon after the election of Raisi as new President of Iran with a historically low turnout, Iran faced a widespread wave of protests and strikes. The…
Reynard Loki “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope,” said Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg in 2019….
By Majid Naficy I ask for ChopinBut Alexa plays PaganiniWith his fast violin. She does not know that I’d likeTo sit by a qanat creekAnd watch tiny fishComing…
Yanis Iqbal United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres tweeted on January 3: “Vaccine nationalism is not only unfair, it is self-defeating. No country will be safe … until all…
Ardeshir Mehrdad Ardeshir Mehrdad argues that the recent protests by the Arab population of Khuzestan province of Iran was not only the result of ethnic-national discrimination suffered by…
Peyman Jafari “We are melting away,” lamented the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, on December 26 1978 in a phone tap of a conversation with his advisor and former…
Shervin Malekzadeh SpongeBob SquarePants showed up on the boulevard halfway to midnight, almost two hours after state officials confirmed Hassan Rouhani as the seventh President of the Islamic Republic…
Middle East Eye staff Iran is using unlawful and excessive force in a crackdown against protests over water shortages in its oil-rich but arid southwestern Khuzestan province, international…
We published a letter we received from comrades Iman Ganji and Jose Rosales on the current strikes in Iran. We asked them how these strikes related to the…
Jean Shaoul Petrochemical workers across Iran have been waging strikes since June 19 to demand higher pay, the payment of back wages, the elimination of intermediary contractors and…
Interview with Moshé Machover A two state solution never was viable it was always a deception, argues Moshé Machover Moshé Machover, born in Tel Aviv in 1936 is…
Elise Boyle Espinosa An international delegation comprised of 150 politicians, academics, activists and journalists from across Europe intended to travel to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq this week…
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad Outside the town of Agdam, in the foothills of Nagorno-Karabakh, trucks and tank carriers had left tracks in the muddy road. Bomb craters and mangled military…
Farnaz Fassihi Candidates in Iran’s presidential elections have always been strictly vetted, and those deemed insufficiently loyal to the Islamic Revolution were disqualified. Within those limits, contenders held…
Adam Shatz on the war in Israel-Palestine On 21 May Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire after eleven days of fighting, but the days of ‘quiet’ – as the New…
Moshé Machover The Zionist colonisation regime spreads a nauseating stench – literally. I am referring to an Israeli invention, appropriately named ‘Skunk’ and described as a “non-lethal weapon…
Her poem ‘We Teach Life, Sir’ – an impassioned attack on media misrepresentation of the Palestinian cause – went viral within days of its release. We teach life,…
Maureen Clare Murphy Palestinian armed groups made good on their threats to strike Tel Aviv with unprecedented fire after Israel leveled a residential tower in Gaza on Tuesday….
Noam Chomsky and CJ Polychroniou Successive Israeli governments have been trying for years to push Palestinians out of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and the latest round of…
Yassamine Mather Iran’s presidential elections will be held on June 18 and so far it is not clear who will be the candidates proposed by the many Islamic…
During a particularly polarising election campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, waded into the fray to stir things up even…
Vijay Prashad It is difficult to overstate the grip of COVID-19 on India. WhatsApp bristles with messages about this or that friend and family member with the virus,…
Vijay Prashad After twenty years, the United States government – and the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – will depart from Afghanistan. They said that…
Samer Jabbour, Jennifer Leaning, Iman Nuwayhid and others The health needs in Syria after 10 years of conflict are vast, ranking third after food and protection needs.22 There…
Cihan Tuğal Ten years ago, Erdoğan’s Turkey was hailed in Washington as an example to the Muslim world—a free-market, pro-American Islamic democracy with high growth rates, renowned cultural…
Osama Esber and Lisa Wadeen Osama Esber, born in Jableh, Syria in 1963, is a widely published author of poetry and short stories, as well as a major…
Mouin Rabbani The Israeli defence minister, Benny Gantz, said on 25 February that Israel was suspending an initiative to provide nineteen countries with a hundred thousand surplus jabs…
Carly A. Krakow More than seventeen years since the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, and more than thirty years since the beginning of the 1990–91 Gulf War, legislation has…
Lee Fang President Joe Biden’s administration is being asked to punish Hungary, Colombia, Chile, and other countries for seeking to ramp up the production of Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics without…
Cihan Tuğal Ten years ago, Erdoğan’s Turkey was hailed in Washington as an example to the Muslim world—a free-market, pro-American Islamic democracy with high growth rates, renowned cultural…
Nazan Üstündağ Academics and students at Boğaziçi University responded with protest when President Erdoğan appointed Melih Bulu as the new rectorate. The protests of students were repressed violently…
Abdullah Al-Arian Last month, Tunisia’s parliamentary speaker and head of the Ennahda Party, Rached Ghannouchi, came under fire for comments he made following a meeting with the French ambassador. Following a recent string…
Brian Terrell On February 4, in his first major foreign policy address, President Joe Biden announced “we are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war…
Iranian writer, poet and left-wing activist, he was an active member of the Iranian Writers Association. He was murdered during the chain of extrajudicial murders of progressive intellectuals…
Mehrdad Fallah comes from Northern Iran. He was born in 1960 in Fashoo Poshteh – “a small village . . . five fingers away from the Caspian”, as…
Mohamad Reza Shalgouni was a founder-member of the Organisation of Revolutionary Workers of Iran (Rahe Kargar). He spoke to Yassamine Mather about his strategic reassessment as a prisoner…
Patrick Cockburn Alend Shoresh is a Kurdish farmer and teacher from north-east Syria who was conscripted into fighting Islamic State in 2018: he joined the Syrian Democratic Forces…
As`ad AbuKhalil Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and now former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rushed to engineer various foreign policy initiatives in the very last stretch of…
John Bellamy Foster Winner of the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2020 Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx’s…
Khalida Jarrar is a feminist, human rights activist and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. She lives in Ramallah, but has been held by Israel in administrative…
Najmeh Bozorgmehr This time last year, Mohammad could still just about afford fruit and chicken for his three children. But as US sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic have…
Ramzy Baroud On January 11, the Israeli Lod District Court ruled against a Palestinian film-maker, Mahmoud Bakri, ordering him to pay hefty compensation to an Israeli soldier who…
Ardeshir Mehrdad Since the beginning of the 1990s, Iranian society has witnessed successive waves of protest movements. One could argue that it has been in a perpetual state…
Mac Skelton Iraq, labeled by TheEconomist this fall as the “most infected Arab state,” has the highest number of COVID-19 cases and the most deaths from the coronavirus…
Ardeshir Mehrdad ME4Change summary of the article: The author analyses the three large waves of urban protests in Iran over the last three decades. The three waves differ…
Perry Anderson Since the turn of the century, the Arab states have come to constitute a zone for Western military intervention without parallel in the post-Cold War world—us…
Abdullah Al-Arian Last month, Tunisia’s parliamentary speaker and head of the Ennahda Party, Rached Ghannouchi, came under fire for comments he made following a meeting with the French ambassador. Warning…
Muriam Haleh Davis, Thomas Serres, and the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) This collection of texts in English, Arabic and French is a first attempt to gather…
Andrew Cockburn The Drone Age: How Drone Technology Will Change War and Peace by Michael Boyle. Oxford, Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium by Thomas Stubblefield. California, The Kill Chain: Defending America…
Prabir Purkayastha Reflecting on the contributions of Friedrich Engels on his bicentenary brings three issues to mind. The first issue is, how do we read his writings today?…
Lessons from the Yellow Vests movement in France Maxime Combes “Democracy is not about Saturday afternoons”, French president Emmanuel Macron said, speaking about the Yellow Vests movement (YVM)…
This month, Covid-19 vaccines are set to begin rolling out to patients worldwide. Some countries in the Middle East and North Africa have already ordered doses from manufacturers…
Patrick Cockburn I was in Israel on 4 November 1995 when a student named Yigal Amir assassinated the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as he left a peace…
Sharmila Devi UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East says that a $300 million shortfall is threatening health services. The UN Relief and…
Binoy Kampmark “Making billions from arms exports which fuel the conflict while providing a small fraction of that in aid to Yemen is both immoral and incoherent.” So…
It is possible…It is possible at least sometimes…It is possible especially nowTo ride a horseInside a prison cellAnd run away… It is possible for prison wallsTo disappear,For the…
Jade Saab “A spectre is haunting Europe…” This is how Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels opened their Communist Manifesto, written on the eve of several uprisings on the continent…
Robert Fisk, a veteran Middle East correspondent for The Independent and the most celebrated journalist of his era, has died after an illness. He was 74. Fisk was…
Patrick Cockburn Suha Ahmad lives on the outskirts of the port city of Tartus in north-west Syria. Her husband was killed in March while fighting on the government…
The protest by the Iranian Writers Association in Exile and Iranian PEN Association in Exile against the arrest and long prison sentence by the Islamic Republic on three…
Julia Kassem A year after Lebanese ex-Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned amidst anti-government protests that sparked out of IMF austerity measures, the Lebanese government surprisingly is renewing talks…
Elizabeth Tsurkov “They sent us directly to the front lines. The situation is terrible. Terrible. There is fighting every day. We are charged with storming. There is no…
Robin Yassin-Kassab “Syrians. I hated the deceptive simplicity of that word. We were twenty-three million people. Soldiers and fighters. Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. The torturer and the victim. How…
Djene Rhys, BajalanSara Nur Yildiz, Vazken Khatchig Davidian The outbreak of fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan has thrust the long-running dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh (Mountainous Karabakh, known to Armenians…
Aga Sablinska Iranian filmmaker Khosrow Sinai passed away in August from COVID-19, leaving behind an important and eye-opening document of Polish exodus during the Second World War. His…
Jessica Barnes Water is a prominent topic in discussions about the Middle East. Fishing at the Chebayesh marsh in Dhi Qar province, Iraq, April 2019. Thaier al-Sudani/Reuters Yet…
MEE and agencies Desperate to help his family displaced by Syria’s war, pro-Turkey rebel fighter Abu Ahmad is waiting to be deployed to Azerbaijan, hoping to earn almost 80…
Alex MacDonald In the year since Iraqis took to the streets en masse to protest against unemployment, corruption, foreign interference and a creaking political system, the country has…
Julie Simon, Theo Bass, Victoria Boelman, Geoff Mulgan This paper shares lessons from Nesta’s research into some of the pioneering innovations in digital democracy which are taking place…
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Ammar Maleki, Tilburg Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s…
translated by Stephen Watts and Ziba Karbassi little morning starare you here withyour star-gaze gone?little wrenare you staying in the busheswhen you go to the skies?little silver coinare…
John Bellamy Foster Any serious treatment of the renewal of socialism today must begin with capitalism’s creative destruction of the bases of all social existence. Since the late…
Mike Phipps I Introduction Iraq is back in the news again, partly due to the airing of a five-part BBC documentary. Once Upon a Time in Iraq has…
Bob Dreyfuss Was Donald Trump’s January 3rd drone assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani the first step in turning the simmering Cold War between the United States and…
Bell Trew One of the songs was recorded during an air strike, parts of another by a fleeing refugee aboard a boat. The man behind the album is…
Lucy Garbett In Jerusalem under strict lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the abnormal quiet of the streets is disturbed by the familiar din of business-as-usual drilling and…
Various contributers From deep-rooted racism to the Covid-19 pandemic, from extreme inequality to ecological collapse, our world is facing dire and deeply interconnected emergencies. But as much as…
Yassamine Mather Less than a week after the massive port explosion that cost more than 200 lives, the entire Lebanese government resigned. Of course, long before that, serious…
Robert Fisk Well, we can all agree that the sea took 70 per cent of the blast!” a close Lebanese friend announced to me this week, with intriguing…
Patrick Cockburn The struggle against Covid-19 has often been compared to fighting a war. Much of this rhetoric is bombast, but the similarities between the struggle against the…
Multiple Crises, Multiple Obstacles Mel Gurtov COVID-19 and the protests for racial justice have drawn attention away from the mostly bad news about the environment. Yes, the skies…
Ramzy Baroud Protests against Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have raged on for weeks, turning violent sometimes. Israelis are furious at their government’s mediocre response to the coronavirus…
Simon Watkins Two key questions logically arise from last week’s announcement from Iran’s Petroleum Ministry that it has awarded a US$1.3 billion development deal to more than double…
Houshang Pezeshgnia, Iranian artist (1917-1972) was one of the first modernist painters in the country. He attended the College of art in Istanbul studying under professor Leopold Louis….
Jeff Mackler That Russia paid the Taliban financial bounties to kill 18 U.S. and “coalition” soldiers in Afghanistan is in dispute to say the least. Both Democrats and…
I will greet the sun again I will greet the sun again,greet the stream that once flowed in me,the clouds that were my unfurling thoughts,the aching growth of…
Kaveh Afrasiabi Earlier this month, authorities in New Delhi were rattled by reports from Iran that India had been expelled from a key investment project in favor of…
Ramzy Baroud In a recent TV discussion, a respected pro-Palestine journalist declared that if any positive change or transformation ever occurs in the tragic Palestinian saga, it would…
Moon of Alabama Recently there have been a number of incidents in Iran where unexplained fires or explosion have destroyed some infrastructure: Since June, fires or explosions have…
Michael Roberts ME4Change has posted this article because the condition of garment workers in the UK city of Leicester is replicated throughout the Middle East and to underline…
Farnaz Fassihi and Steven Lee Myers Iran and China have quietly drafted a sweeping economic and security partnership that would clear the way for billions of dollars of…
12 Webinars, June 20-August 5, 2020 Syria has been the focus of much regional and global attention following the massive eruption of popular revolt in mid-March 2011. The…
Iran is one of the countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). What effects will the realization of the BRI have on the geo economical and…
Salena Fay Tramel It has not been an easy year for Palestinians, if there ever was such a thing. With the turn of a new decade in January,…
Nisan Alıcı, Güley Bor, Güneş Daşlı By December 2012, when the peace process between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to end the decades-long armed…
Moshé Machover Rashid Khalidi ‘The hundred-years war on Palestine: a history of settler-colonial conquest and resistance’ Profile Books, 2020, pp336, £17.99 As part of their professional training, historians…
Greg Burris, The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019).* *Book two in the Insubordinate Spaces series edited by George Lipsitz. Jadaliyya (J): What made you…
Arundhati Roy India’s coronavirus lockdown, which began in March, has been one of largest and strictest in the world. It has left tens of millions without work prompting…
Keep calling me! Sweet is your voice. It is the green Growing beyond the companionship of sorrow. In the scopes of this silent era I am lonelier than…
Roba Gaafar As countries around the globe announce their reopening plans and easing of coronavirus lockdown measures, Egypt has witnessed recent a surge in infections, with coronavirus cases…
Middle East 4 Change