Middle East

By  
Laura Kasinof
March 18, 2021
Ten years ago, on March 19, 2011, I walked into a tent in the antigovernment protest encampment in Sanaa, Yemen, known as Change Square. I...
By  
Jehan Bseiso
February 28, 2020
This year marks nine years since the Syrian uprising spiraled into full-fledged war. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been...
By  
Nick Turse
January 6, 2020
On February 4, 2002, a Predator drone circled over Afghanistan’s Paktia province, near the city of Khost. Below was al-Qaeda’s founder...
By  
Preethi Nallu
November 30, 2019
Into the late afternoon hours, the blistering light gave way to soft, horizontal rays that crisscrossed over Lebanon’s Beqaa valley. The...
By  
Nick Turse
November 8, 2019
They called it Castle Black, an obvious homage to the famed frozen citadel from the HBO series Game of Thrones. In the fantasy world of GoT...
By  
Nick Turse
September 10, 2019
Do you remember July 8, 2011? Where you were? What you did? Whom you talked to? Anything at all? I couldn’t pin down one single thing for...
By  
Nick Turse
June 28, 2019
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch . TRIPOLI, Libya -- Sometimes war sounds like the harsh crack of gunfire and sometimes like...
By  
Lital Khaikin
May 16, 2019
This is the final installment in a multi-part examination of Israeli nuclear development in the Negev Desert. Part One can be read here ,...
By  
Lital Khaikin
May 5, 2019
This is the third installment in a multi-part examination of Israeli nuclear development in the Negev Desert. Part One can be read here ,...
By  
Lital Khaikin
April 25, 2019
This is the second installment in a multi-part examination of Israeli nuclear development in the Negev Desert. Part One can be read here ,...
By  
Lital Khaikin
April 6, 2019
This is the first installment of a multi-part examination of Israeli nuclear development in the Negev Desert. Part Two can be read here ,...
By  
Taylor Miller
January 20, 2019
The aim of this project is to experiment with the creation of a counter-hegemonic travelogue and alternative cartographies of lived space...
By  
Ahmed Hezam
December 14, 2018
The eyes of the world, and most certainly those of Yemen’s severely traumatized populous, have been fixed on the peace consultations in...
By  
Ahmed Hezam
October 24, 2018
The humble little solar power system and small TV my elderly mother and her friends gather around every night in Wadi Bana, their village...
By  
Michael Busch
August 2, 2018
As Jamie Stern-Weiner notes in his introduction to Moment of Truth , a new collection of essays on Israel-Palestine from OR Books , the...
By  
Michael Bronner
July 18, 2018
As Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates continue their calamitous assault on Yemen's lifeline - the Red Sea port of Hodeidah,...
By  
Valérie Gruhn
June 22, 2018
Valérie Gruhn was an emergency room nurse with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) near Mosul, Iraq, from March to June...
By  
Suchitra Vijayan
June 4, 2018
"I lay between the soldier's big boots, and he took out his knife...He raised the knife with his two hands high over his head and plunged...
By  
Anna Reumert
May 15, 2018
At a cemetery in Beirut, soldiers from the French colonial army--including the Senegalese triailleurs-- lay buried. Little is known of the...
By  
Greg Shupak
February 22, 2018
An excerpt from Greg Shupak's new book, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media , out now from OR Books . 15 Million Jews and a...
By  
Anonymous
February 7, 2018
I woke up late, as usual, my days a mix of sleep, worry and joblessness. I sat in front of the TV trying to catch the latest news on the...
By  
Inshah Malik
January 12, 2018
A dispatch from a middle class neighbourhood in Tehran In the evenings, children play in Khoshi (Happy), an alleyway in western Tehran...
By  
Michael Bronner
June 13, 2017
On the night of June 9, Saudi-led coalition jets conducted huge airstrikes on Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, which had been relatively quiet in...
By  
Melissa Rodriguez
April 21, 2017
The recent deadly chemical attack on Syria and the subsequent tomahawk missile retaliation shows no immediate end to the now six-year-long...
By  
Hasheemah Afaneh
April 19, 2017
Remember the Name My name is a refugee From Haifa, Acre, and Jaffa, But I have no idea What these places are like. My grandparents told me...
By  
Gabrielle Spear
March 24, 2017
The first of its kind in modern Iraqi literature, Iraq + 100: Stories from a Century After the Invasion , compiles speculative fiction from...
By  
Betsy Joles
March 14, 2017
Nejla and Maya stand in their Istanbul bedroom clad in neon workout gear with a laptop open in front of them. A YouTube video shows a peppy...
By  
Warscapes
December 13, 2016
Under Siege by Mahmoud Darwish Autoplay next video Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time Close to the gardens...
By  
Jessica Ling
October 27, 2016
October 27 marks the 85th birthday of celebrated Egyptian feminist, writer and doctor, Nawal El Saadawi. With a bibliography consisting of...
By  
Bethan Staton
September 27, 2016
There’s no images of the separation wall in Chapter 31: An Exhibition About the Future of Palestine. Depictions of grim concrete...
By  
Ahmed Hezam Al-Yemeni
September 15, 2016
Peace Direct’s local peace building expert for Yemen (and previous Warscapes contributor), Ahmed Al-Yemeni, recently returned home after 12...
By  
Jessica Rohan
September 9, 2016
Award-winning writer Susan Abulhawa is the author of Mornings in Jenin and The Blue Between Sky and Water . She is the founder of the NGO...
By  
Jessica Rohan
September 9, 2016
Editor's note: Dareen Tatour's trial scheduled for September 6th could not proceed due to the lack of an Arabic translator for Dareen's...
By  
September 1, 2016
Dareen Tatour has been charged with incitement to violence based on a poem posted to Youtube. She is one of over 400 Palestinians arrested...
By  
Dareen Tatour
September 1, 2016
In prison, I met people too numerous to count Killer and criminal, thief and liar, the honest and those who disbelieve, the lost and...
By  
Jessica Rohan
August 31, 2016
Award-winning writer Naomi Shihab Nye on the campaign to free Dareen Tatour, the Palestinian poet under house arrest for writing a poem and...
By  
Ashraf Fayadh
July 27, 2016
Asmaa Azaizeh and Ala Azzam perform the poem "A Hoarseness in the River's Flow" by Ashraf Fayadh, translated by Mona Kareem below. It's...
By  
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
July 26, 2016
Nurit Peled-Elhanan is an Israeli academic, activist, and a laureate of the Sakharov Prize for Human Rights and the Freedom of Thought...
By  
Mohammed Kadalah
June 28, 2016
It was a winter night when I sat in a café with four friends and heard on the news that Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, president of Tunisia, had...
By  
Warscapes
June 27, 2016
“I suspected one could sometimes learn more as a wanderer than as a journalist.” Belén Fernández hitchhiked through Lebanon in 2006 and...
By  
Aqil Shah
June 21, 2016
Madiha Tahir and Mahvish Ahmad, graduate students at Columbia and Cambridge Universities respectively, have responded to my article on...
By  
Jehan Bseiso
May 25, 2016
From urgently written poems in response to war in Gaza or deaths in the Meditarranean to poignant and incisive social media posts, Jehan...
By  
Sabrina Toppa
May 17, 2016
On August 29, 2012, in Yemen’s eastern Hadhramaut province, a U.S. drone struck the village of Khashamir. The strike allegedly killed...
By  
Melissa Rodriguez
April 28, 2016
The United Nations’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry has recently raised allegations against the Syrian government, stating...
By  
Shiyam Galyon
April 19, 2016
The horror of siege is that it is a manufactured famine, and its miseries are anticipated and slow to manifest. The United Nations, along...
By  
Steve Shaw
April 17, 2016
As the UK government continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia despite warnings from human rights groups that British-made weapons are being...
By  
Mary von Aue
April 13, 2016
“Palestine may not be in the atlas,” Nasser Abufarha once said, “But we have put it on the shelves.” Not too long ago in 2004, there wasn’t...
By  
Douglas C. MacLeod, Jr.
April 10, 2016
A caliphate, according to Muhammad Qasim Zaman in the Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World , “symbolizes…the classical history of...
By  
Eyad Houssami
April 4, 2016
A Russian airstrike near Idlib last autumn all but obliterated the set of my first – and last – public theater performance in Syria. Fresh...
By  
Shiyam Galyon
March 14, 2016
In the five years since the Syrian Revolution began, the country has endured a multi-faceted conflict and a massive humanitarian crisis...
By  
Shimrit Lee
March 7, 2016
Kamal Aljafari remembers when Jaffa was transformed into civil war-torn Beirut. Under the direction of Menachem Golan, the production team...
By  
Belén Fernández
March 3, 2016
During a recent drive along the Lebanese border with Israel, I posted a photograph to Facebook taken from the south Lebanese town of...
By  
Arwa Damon
February 22, 2016
From the Turkish side of the border I could hear the low rumblings of explosions, the sound rolling across the northern Aleppo countryside...
By  
Jessica Rohan
February 18, 2016
Silent Protest Against Extrajudicial Assassinations - Hadhramout, Yemen from Warscapes on Vimeo . View Bawazir's statement of intent for...
By  
Kafa Al-Hashli
February 10, 2016
On the outskirts of the city of Little Aden in southern Yemen, a 25-year-old young man lives with his mother, sharing the worries, sorrows...
By  
Soulaf Abas
February 9, 2016
Until 2012, Soulaf Abas painted mostly landscapes and insects. Her work is emotive, warm, impressionistic yet controlled. Her paintings...
By  
Alice Walker
February 9, 2016
Happy Birthday, Alice Walker!
By  
January 25, 2016
Today marks five years since the Egyptian people launched the mass movement, galvanized around the occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square,...
By  
Max Ajl
January 21, 2016
The United States’ founders were taken with the idea that they were building a New Jerusalem. Rhetoric of a City on the Hill animated the...
By  
January 5, 2016
“The [Bahraini] Khalifa family are oppressors and Sunnis are not responsible for their actions. They are not Sunnis, they are tyrants. The...
By  
Naomi Dann
December 17, 2015
A recent article published in The New York Times by Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, profiled vintners in the Israeli-occupied West...
By  
Moataz Nasr
December 14, 2015
There’s a map of the Middle East that hangs in the Leila Heller Gallery today, and upon entering the room, it’s hard to avoid its sparkle...
By  
Mark Bou Mansour
December 3, 2015
by Mark Bou Mansour
By  
Greg Shupak
December 2, 2015
In a recent essay for Dissent entitled “The European Crisis,” Michael Walzer offers a case study in liberal imperialist ideology. The...
By  
Kafa Al-Hashli
December 1, 2015
Radicalization and extremism among youth continue to percolate in the southern Yemeni city of Aden, with the recruitment and planning of a...
By  
Léopold Lambert
November 24, 2015
They called your apartments and gardens guerrilla strongholds. - June Jordan, Apologies to All the People in Lebanon (1989) On the evening...
By  
Belén Fernández
November 16, 2015
Two of the four chapters of Charles Glass’ new book, Syria Burning: ISIS and the Death of the Arab Spring , begin with jokes. In the first...
By  
Arpita Mandal
November 12, 2015
Between September 30 and October 1, BBC News and Al-Jazeera Asia ran headlines such as “ Indian man lynched over beef rumors ” and “ Indian...
By  
Hashem Abushama
November 10, 2015
It is problematic to bottle the Palestinian struggle and history into numeric stages. Over the past several weeks, international media have...
By  
Nadwa Al-Dawsari
November 9, 2015
The Saudi-led coalition pummeling Yemen has announced that its campaign is in the final stages - preparing to declare "victory," some...
By  
November 8, 2015
“Now we have to start from scratch again. It’s so devastating,” said the filmmaker Khadija Al-Salami who has been fighting for girls and...
By  
Deepali Srivastava
November 8, 2015
More than 6 months ago, I had flirted here with the idea that come 2019, when India goes to vote in the world’s largest exercise of its...
By  
Max Ajl
November 3, 2015
Dew drops as dual use remote sensors; mechanized micro-drones the size of wasps wandering the skies; and cannons blasting water at such...
By  
Ilya Budraitskis
October 20, 2015
Ilya Budraitskis: It has been several days since the start of the Russian military operation in Syria and the goals and strategy of this...
By  
Max Ajl
October 6, 2015
The U.S-Iranian nuclear negotiations—described in polite but dishonest company as the P5+1/Iran negotiations, to conceal the central U.S...
By  
Megan Krementowski
October 4, 2015
October 3rd and 4th, 1993 mark the dates of the Battle of Mogadishu also known as the Day of the Rangers. The battle was fought by forces...
By  
Andrew Ryder
September 23, 2015
Lynne Huffer and Falguni A. Sheth have critiqued the response to the European refugee crisis that would rely on simple humanitarian...
By  
Asiya Haouchine
September 22, 2015
Today marks thirty-five years since the start of the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted eight years, the longest conventional war of the twentieth...
By  
Hatem Bazian
September 11, 2015
The recent New York Times article “ ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape ”, exposing the group’s attempt to provide a religious...
By  
Warscapes
September 7, 2015
Warscapes editors choose poems that reflect on home, exile, journeys, war and humanity in light of the current refugee crisis. Crossings By...
By  
Mohammed Nabulsi
August 27, 2015
“Crawling on our knees so as to gain the sympathy of official Western quarters will do nothing to diminish our alienation from the world."...
By  
Shiyam Galyon
August 25, 2015
This past week, Al Jazeera Plus uploaded a video on Facebook featuring producers Sana Saeed and Tarek Abu-Esber entitled “Is the US at war...
By  
Léopold Lambert
July 30, 2015
Part 1: Hannibal Directive On July 2, 2015, architect and intellectual Eyal Weizman gave a lecture at the Médecins Sans Frontières...
By  
Habib Wayand
July 24, 2015
The first official face-to-face talks between the representatives of the Government of Afghanistan (GoA) and Tehrik-e Taliban Afghanistan (...
By  
Belén Fernández
June 16, 2015
Last month, the New York Times published an article by Isabel Kershner that was not entirely distinguishable from an Israeli army press...
By  
Francesca Recchia
June 11, 2015
We arrive late, as the sun is going down. The warm light of dusk embraces the landscape and glistens on the white stone of the buildings...
By  
Sami Shalom Chetrit
June 2, 2015
Editor's Introduction: There is a Zuni story, translated and transcribed by Dennis Tedlock ( Finding the Center , University of Nebraska,...
By  
Carl Drott
May 25, 2015
This article is primarily based on interviews conducted in Syria and Sweden between August 2013 and January 2015. For the sake of...
By  
Warscapes
May 12, 2015
The author, a Yemeni journalist, asked that her name be withheld for the security of her family. Our correspondent pauses to watch tracer...
By  
Rijin Sahakian
April 6, 2015
Sada was founded nearly five years ago to support young, college-level art students in Baghdad. This generation of artists is living in a...
By  
Shimrit Lee
April 2, 2015
"We who came out of Unit 8200, men and women reservists past and present, declare that we refuse to take part in activities against...
By  
Francesca Recchia
April 1, 2015
As the Islamic State continues its bloodly advance across Syria, Kurdish Iraq and the region more broadly, questions about the decades-old...
By  
Ahmed Hezam
February 25, 2015
Last week, President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, who became head of state of The Republic of Yemen in 2012 (the result of a one-candidate...
By  
Shelly Kittleson
February 18, 2015
It was the more than one hundred bodies of young men found in the Queiq river nearby in early 2013 that induced former rebel commander Abu...
By  
Andrew Ryder
February 2, 2015
The January tragedy at the Charlie Hebdo office has led to several vociferous debates on a range of topics: freedom of expression, French...
By  
Jason Huettner
January 28, 2015
Clint Eastwood's American Sniper has amassed a staggering $200 million as of this week. Adapted from the best-selling memoir by Chris Kyle...
By  
Naomi Dann
January 13, 2015
As 2014 came to a close, the Palestinian Authority made two controversial moves in the international political arena that have sparked many...
By  
Najwa Ali
December 19, 2014
Editor's Introduction Najwa Ali’s poem, “If shore, then traffic” seems to apply itself to the reader just at that point where perception...
By  
Jason Huettner
December 12, 2014
The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's executive summary on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation program has been met with...
By  
Will Fysh
December 4, 2014
Recent beheadings of foreigners held captive by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have prompted several major media outlets...
By  
Matar Ebrahim Matar
December 4, 2014
Bahrain, an absolute monarchy and a US-designated major no-NATO ally (MMNA), is nonetheless considered by the US government to be a...
By  
Iason Athanasiadis
November 25, 2014
Soleimanieh, Iraq Try walking away from a refugee in need. He’d just been explaining to me how a muddy, overcrowded camp for the internally...
By  
Gareth Davis
November 11, 2014
Ten years ago today, the news reports announced the death of Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). After...
By  
October 21, 2014
Violence is a key ingredient of human storytelling: from our first oral tales, violent acts have heightened audience attention and...
By  
Gareth Davies
October 18, 2014
This October, Sweden became the first western European nation to formally recognize Palestine as a state . Whilst other eastern European...
By  
Meena Alexander
October 17, 2014
Editor's Introduction The 17th Century Kabbalist, Nathan of Gaza, speculated that before the world came into being, there were, in the...
By  
Carl Drott
October 13, 2014
For nearly a month, fighters from the mainly Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) have kept Islamic State (IS) forces at bay outside...
By  
Akil N Awan
October 2, 2014
The well-known US security expert, Brian Jenkins, famously declared in 1974, that “ terrorism is theatre ”. And over the last few weeks,...
By  
Louise I. Shelley
September 19, 2014
Editor's Preface My first conversations with Louise Shelley, a professor at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and the...
By  
Asim Rafiqui
September 4, 2014
Asim Rafiqui on art institutions and their collusion with the politics of imperialism. This below is the sort of cultural whitewash that...
By  
Allison Pytlak
August 28, 2014
Last week, the U.S. government announced that it had completed destruction of Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpile. This complex...
By  
Franco Galdini
August 24, 2014
One has to hand it to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Since the outbreak of what was initially a popular revolt against his regime in...
By  
Andrew Ryder
August 22, 2014
Recent days have seen an upsurge of signs of solidarity between African-American and Palestinian struggles. On August 17, an open letter...
By  
Anne Nivat
August 18, 2014
On August 7, the United States re-engaged in Iraq. The sudden air strikes make one thing clear: that the US has no idea what to do about...
By  
Christiane Wilke
August 14, 2014
Originally published in Critical Legal Thinking . In Gaza and elsewhere, those who politically support anti-occupation politics are easily...
By  
Ammiel Alcalay
August 11, 2014
You know as well as I do that a people under occupation will be unhappy, that parents will fear for the lives of their precious children,...
By  
Ahmed Hezam
August 3, 2014
After Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Nansur Hadi delivered a speech the night of Eid al-Fitr calling for national reconciliation based on core...
By  
Russ Wellen
July 30, 2014
This winter, to the surprise and relief of many, Iran agreed to limit its uranium enrichment to a concentration of 20 percent as part of an...
By  
July 28, 2014
Where is Um Hana tonight? The tanks rolled into Beit Lahiya weeks ago, the air exploding around them. At first I pictured her and her four...
By  
Warscapes
July 10, 2014
Slit Lips by Samih al-Qasim I would have liked to tell you The story of a nightingale that died. I would have liked to tell you The story...
By  
Naomi Dann
July 2, 2014
When does political art advance a political agenda, and when does recognizing the political as art strip it of political power? Does...
By  
Josh Hutson
June 23, 2014
Editor's Introduction “The doctor says the problems are the chemicals in my brain,” begins Josh Hutson’s poem “Red Spices.” Indeed, the...
By  
Ahsan Sayed
June 20, 2014
Media coverage of recent military advances by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is misguided. Many analysts and pundits have focused...
By  
Kevin Alexander Davis
May 28, 2014
“So, we, too, are statues, but we never stop crushing one another in the name of the one who made us. We are statues whose permanent...
By  
May 15, 2014
On May 26 and 27th Egypt will hold presidential elections. While Egyptians are going to the voting booths, Lebanese dancer and...
By  
May 4, 2014
Editor's Introduction Marcel Proust writes of being in his bedroom and hearing what seems to be a riot in the street outside. Then, his...
By  
John Berger
April 26, 2014
In an address to the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature (2008) John Berger gives a moving reading of Ghassan Khanafani's "Letter...
By  
Alex LeMire
April 1, 2014
The Internet is more than just a tool to access information, we use it every day to communicate, express ourselves, and connect ourselves...
By  
March 30, 2014
Just weeks after the US invaded Iraq in March of 2003, narratives about the conflict began to flood into publishing houses. Although there...
By  
Russ Wellen
March 27, 2014
In the course of telling “The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,” the subtitle of his authoritative new book Manufactured Crisis (Just...
By  
Ahsan Sayed
March 26, 2014
Turkey’s slide into authoritarianism appeared to continue last week when a court ruling banned Twitter. The verdict was handed down in...
By  
Michael Bronner
March 25, 2014
I had a sense of déjà vu reading a New York Times piece recently – the distinct feeling I’d read the same piece before, or at least a...
By  
Jason Huettner
March 20, 2014
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro's recent article on NPR , posing the question of which location is "more" sexist, the Middle East or Brazil,...
By  
Claudia Moreno Parsons
March 12, 2014
Is poetry the answer to war? Of all the systems of communication we have, one of the most effective in considering and talking about the...
By  
Laura Kasinof
February 21, 2014
During outbreaks of violence at antigovernment protests, the truth is often clouded by accusations and blame. Responsibility for who fired...
By  
Belén Fernández
February 16, 2014
Nine years ago this past Friday, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and twenty-two others were killed in a massive explosion on...
By  
Belén Fernández
January 11, 2014
As Lebanon accrues more carnage to its violent CV—most recently with the deadly bombings in downtown Beirut and the southern suburb of...
By  
Patrick Sykes
November 15, 2013
While security considerations have always been a part of the urban design process — and are arguably becoming more so — few modern cities...
By  
Fayeq Oweis & Susan Greene
September 26, 2013
When students at the San Francisco State University voted unanimously to erect a mural representing Palestinian culture through the complex...
By  
shared by The Palestinian Museum
September 26, 2013
Post by The Palestinian Museum .
By  
Ammiel Alcalay
September 26, 2013
It is remarkable to what extent almost anything having to do with the Middle East in this country--be it political, cultural, historical or...
By  
Daniel Barenbolm
September 26, 2013
Edward Said was many things for many people, but in reality, his was a musician's soul, in the deepest sense of the word. He wrote about...
By  
Sumana Roy
September 16, 2013
Drowning: 16 December, 1971 ‘Yahya Khan drowned the two-nation theory.’ Tikka Khan (1) , we only went looking into the water to stare at...
By  
Grace Halden
September 13, 2013
Currently, the news is saturated with reports of mounting death tolls as clashes between protestors and the military reach new heights in...
By  
John F. McCreary
September 11, 2013
The Syrian government has accepted a Russian proposal to put its chemical weapons under international control to avoid a possible U.S...
By  
Bhakti Shringarpure
June 1, 2013
A couple of years ago, I interviewed Fatma El-Mehdi , an activist for the Western Sahara independence movement in its long struggle to...
By  
Andrew Ryder
April 15, 2013
The life’s work of Jacques Derrida, often referred to by the name “deconstruction,” advanced a new way of reading. Emphasizing the deferral...
By  
Dina Omar
March 14, 2013
Ghassan Zaqtan’s paralyzing poetry, translated by Fady Joudah, is laden with ruminations on death. “I’ve been dead for a long time, as you...
By  
Abdulkareem Kasid
March 13, 2013
extinct dinosaur blind bat frightened rabbit crawling worm eagle (the aged eagle) cunning fox evasive serpent all underway up Alice’s path...
By  
Sarah Garland
March 10, 2013
Drawing on her own experience of working among refugee families, author and illustrator Sarah Garland composed her graphic novel for...
By  
Myrna Nader
March 6, 2013
Always Coca-Cola , the debut novel by Lebanese writer Alexandra Chreiteh, centers around three friends, Abeer and Yasmine, university...
By  
Anne Nivat
February 26, 2013
As is the case with all long wars that take place far from home, we’ve grown bored of Iraq, the epicenter of media attention during the...
By  
Feroz Rather
February 18, 2013
What deeply dissatisfies Anna, Doris Lessing’s protagonist and surrogate in The Golden Notebook, is her inability to use the novel to make...
By  
Adil E. Shamoo
February 7, 2013
All indicators are pointing to a looming sectarian civil war on Iraq’s horizon. It is possible to avoid this civil war, but so far, the...
By  
Benjamin Hollander
January 24, 2013
The question of the existence and validity of the Palestinians as a people historically tied to a specific land has been the absurdist...
By  
Andrew Ryder
January 7, 2013
The 1967 Arab-Israeli war began on June 5 with a surprise assault on the Egyptian air force. By its completion, this pre-emptive Six-Day...
By  
Meena Alexander
December 20, 2012
Editor's Preface These new poems by Meena Alexander, taken from her chapbook Impossible Grace (Centre for Jerusalem Studies, 2012), give us...
By  
Moustafa Bayoumi
December 1, 2012
"It's funny!" the hotel manager in the brown suit said to me while laughing. I had been staying in downtown Cairo, steps away from Tahrir...
By  
Andrew Ryder
October 11, 2012
The ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people has rarely been given the moral weight more readily accorded to European historical...
By  
Anna Neistat
September 10, 2012
A young nurse in Aleppo’s Dar Al-Shifa hospital methodically turned the pages of her massive notebook, giving me names of people killed and...
By  
Carsten Stormer
August 27, 2012
Nothing can be heard except the uncanny drone of a helicopter circling over the town. Apart from that, all is quiet. Twelve activists are...
By  
Amor Eletrebi
August 15, 2012
There were chants, chants… and chants, scattered around each corner of Tahrir. The revolution was in check while politics were playing out...
By  
Benjamin Hiller
August 13, 2012
QAMISHLO, Syria: When Rad Mecid Sexmus, 40, became the latest Kurdish shahid (martyr), killed securing a checkpoint in this northern town,...
By  
Muriam Haleh Davis
August 7, 2012
A theorization of the present is often a thankless task. The combined forces of serendipity, human agency, and political jockeying tend to...
By  
Bhakti Shringarpure
July 20, 2012
The deliberate destruction of monuments is an act as age-old as man’s ability to build those very monuments. The past decade and a half has...
By  
Alizah Salario
June 17, 2012
“We call them wookies.” I was on the subway, reading. A man glanced over my shoulder, and I could feel him reading along with me. I can’t...
By  
Myrna Nader
June 6, 2012
Unsurprisingly, given the conflict being reported in Syria today, Fadi Azzam’s debut novel Sarmada has been heralded, in certain literary...
By  
Kafa Al-Hashli
May 11, 2012
As her family hastily prepared to flee its home in Abyan, a province in Yemen’s south, in the wake of a surprise attack on the local...
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Gert Van Langendonck
February 28, 2012
The last thing I told Rémi Ochlik was: "Be safe, OK? You've already won your World Press Photo." That was on a Wednesday, one week before...
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Shaun Randol
February 23, 2012
Review of Emna Zghal’s Solo exhibition, Plato/Pineapple at Miyako Yoshinaga art prospects , New York City, February 2 – March 10, 2012 When...
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Marie Colvin (1957 – February 22, 2012)
February 22, 2012
Sunday Times correspondent and veteran war reporter Marie Colvin was killed in a shelling attack on the besieged Syrian city of Homs...
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Amor Eletrebi
February 8, 2012
One Year of Revolution For the past few months, before the massive outpouring of the 25th of Jan, Tahrir lived the ugly reality of being a...
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"How To Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone" by Rosie Garthwaite is reviewed by Michael Busch
December 7, 2011
One of the least remarked upon aspects to the story of modern conflict has been war's transformative influence on the trajectory of...