Robyn Creswell. In March, 2011, when civil protests broke out in cities and towns across Syria, the country’s most famous poet, Adonis—who is in his eighties and has…
Moshé Machover. Binyamin (‘Bibi’) Netanyahu’s motive for calling an early election to the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), one year before the end of its term, was purely personal: it…
Mehdi Farji. Located 125 kilometers south of Tehran, Qom is a holy city known for its many seminaries and the thousands of clerics and seminarians who live and…
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,…
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