Hurriyah Ziada reflects on how the Arab uprisings and Palestinian youth movements revealed the best and worst of society.
December 17 marked ten years since Mohammed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunis, set himself on fire in an act of defiance and desperation that triggered what would become known as the Arab Spring. Over the course of the last decade we have witnessed revolutions sweep the Middle East and North Africa, but we have also witnessed the sheer might and terror of counter-revolution as well. What are the lessons from the Arab Spring?
The Anthropocene is a proposed new geological epoch which designates a shift to a planetary age dominated by human impacts across the geological processes of the Earth. But the Anthropocene is about far more than just climate change. It is about an entire system of life, whose design is to maximise resource extraction at the expense of expendable ‘Others’, and it is inseparable from the ceaseless sequence of industrial wars, culminating in today’s permanent state of the endless ‘war on terror’.
Anyone deluded enough to believe that Israel truly wants democracy to spread in the Middle East must read David D. Kirkpatrick’s outstanding first-hand account of the 2011 uprising in Egypt and its ugly aftermath, “Hands of Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East.”
Ahmad Kabariti reports from Gaza on how the unfolding crisis in the Gulf around Qatar could move Hamas closer to Iran, or cripple the group in its power struggle with the Palestinian Authority.
A new book by New York Times reporter Robert Worth does not say what U.S. policymakers should do about Syria. But he shows how violence promotes sectarianism and lasting bitterness; and it is hard to see how he would then advocate more violence as any kind of answer.
Advocates for U.S. escalation in Syria will make a bad situation worse, warns George Washington University Professor Marc Lynch; and President Obama’s resistance to increased intervention may be reversed by his successor.
The Clinton Foundation got millions from the royal family of Bahrain and the Crown Prince arranged a meeting with then secretary of state Clinton through the Foundation. The investment seems to have paid off when Clinton did not criticize the Bahrain government’s crackdown on democracy protesters in the Arab Spring of 2011.
Read an excerpt from Richard Falk’s new book “Chaos and Counterrevolution: After the Arab Spring.” This section follows the cycle of revolution and counter-revolution in Egypt since the fall of Hosni Mubarak.