Middle East & North Africa Archives

Activism

Against Innocence

Unravelling the myth of the depoliticized child

March 4, 2026 • by Alexandra Magearu

1. In my early twenties, I was captivated by the idea that creative processes can return us to the boundless dreamscapes of our childhood. Only back then, I thought, could we afford to experience the world somatically. Not yet captured by social conventions, our bodies had the potential to become everything. ...

Activism

Putting Everything on the Line for the Palestinians

An eyewitness report from Israel

March 4, 2026 • by Mitchell Abidor

I spent the summer of 2025 in a state of rage about events in Israel. Every day, I read in the liberal daily Haaretz of settler attacks in the West Bank on Palestinians and the Israeli activists who were defending them. Rage has long been my normal state, but I ...

Putting Everything on the Line for the Palestinians

Colonization

A House in the Middle of the Road

The cannibal colonization of homes and roads during Palestine’s Great Revolt

March 2, 2026 • by Chris Harding

I spent the summer of 2025 in Bayt Lahm (Bethlehem), conducting archival research in the Jacir family’s historic dar, a beautiful two-story home built in the nineteenth century from Jerusalem stone. Taking a break one afternoon, I watched a short film, Mehdi Amel:The Colonial Mode of Production (2024), by the ...

Genocide

Palestinians in Their Own Words, Their Own Genres

A review of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

November 14, 2025 • by Coleson Smith

With the release of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide (Verso, October 2025), editors Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro bring us a powerful addition to a lamentable literary genre: the genocide anthology. Comprising more than 20 works of poetry, art, essays, and reportage by 23 contributors—many of them Palestinian—this volume ...

Palestinians in Their Own Words, Their Own Genres

History

Judah Magnes: Binationalism as Political Theology

A reminder of a sacred myth

October 7, 2025 • by Manousha Dhiwaghar

Judah Magnes, rabbi, orator, pacifist, and founding Chancellor of the Hebrew University, has long haunted the political margins of Israeli and Palestinian history. Too Zionist for the anti-statist left, too pacifist for the militarizing Yishuv, and too binational for a nation determined to consolidate, Magnes occupies a strange position in ...

Judah Magnes: Binationalism as Political Theology

Activism

A Lost Utopia

A review of Göran Rosenberg’s Israel: A Personal History

October 7, 2025 • by Coleson Smith

In a speech delivered to the United States Congress on July 25, 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu issued a sharp retort to protestors against Israel’s genocide in Gaza: They call Israel a colonialist state. Don’t they know that the Land of Israel is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prayed, where Isaiah and Jeremiah ...

Genocide

The Pulse of Palestinian Identity in New Jersey

Reflections of a genocide survivor

June 24, 2025 • by Anonymous

As a genocide survivor who had relocated to New York from an open-air prison in Gaza in August 2024, I wondered what it would mean to be a Palestinian from the perspective of Palestinian Americans. Was there a space in America that kept them connected with their Palestinian identity? Where was ...

The Pulse of Palestinian Identity in New Jersey

Colonization

How Israel Freezes Palestinian Salaries

Clearance revenues have got to go

May 14, 2025 • by Lamees Farraj

Israeli occupation of Palestine oppresses the Palestinian people using every possible tool and method—including control over people’s livelihoods. Some of this economic warfare is highly visible: the destruction of economic infrastructure in Gaza, the prevention of Palestinian laborers from accessing the Israeli job market, and the restriction or denial of ...

Literature

Whitman, Spiritual Decay, and the Last Light of American Faith

In dark times, the sacred work is not to flee but to testify

May 14, 2025 • by Yahia Lababidi

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the ...

Whitman, Spiritual Decay, and the Last Light of American Faith

History

The Vision of Hegemony Driving Israel’s Regional Policy

From “periphery doctrine” to open domination

April 28, 2025 • by Emmanuel Guerisoli

Over a long twentieth century of regional tussles, Israel’s local foreign policy focus has shifted from preventing the emergence of a regional hegemon toward a campaign for outright domination. The strategy has shattered the Middle East’s fragile and imperfect status quo, the stability of which was closely connected to the ...

The Vision of Hegemony Driving Israel’s Regional Policy

Middle East & North Africa

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

A new book by Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

March 3, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025) is a book that will cause much outrage among some of its intended audience: fellow Jews. If there is one thing to which many Jews cleave, it is to our history of victimhood, and the purity that ...

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

Genocide

The Self-Orientalization of Israeli Politics

Why “the only democracy in the Middle East” is cozying up to authoritarian regimes

February 19, 2025 • by Assaf David and Arie Dubnov

Israel has often been described as the only democracy in the Middle East. This perception—flawed and problematic as it is—has been central not only for Israel’s defenders abroad but also for many Jewish Israelis’ self-perception. The power consolidation of an extreme coalition of right-wing political parties in recent years, coupled ...