Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Muhammad Hussein
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Remembering Israel’s Siege of Jenin
What: The Israeli military’s siege and invasion of the Palestinian Jenin refugee camp during the Second Intifada, resulting in at least 52 Palestinians being indiscriminately massacred and over 13,000 made refugees again. When: 3 April – 11 April, 2002 Where: Jenin, northern West Bank What happened? As the Second Intifada raged on throughout...
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After decades of status quo, can Pakistan remain a neutral player on the world stage?
When Pakistani Prime Minister, Imran Khan, hit out at the European Union and Western envoys who urged him to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, asking if they thought Pakistan was their “slave” and enquiring why similar demands were not made to India, it cemented a precedent that had...
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Russia is daring to destroy the current world order, like Daesh and others before it
A fortnight into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the advance of the “special operation” is not going as rapidly or easy as the Kremlin thought it would. While Russian forces – whose losses stand at over 11,000 already – still desperately attempt to take the capital, Kyiv, and are resorting...
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Remembering the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait and the Highway of Death
What: The withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, resulting in Iraq’s acceptance of UN terms and resolutions following seven months of its occupation of its small Gulf neighbour. This led ultimately to the decline of Saddam Hussein’s power and set the stage for his fall and death over a...
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Amid an American decline, China is winning the Middle East
Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union and that bastion of communism just over thirty years ago, the United States and the western world have still not lost their fascination with that old rival superpower. Throughout the three decades as a proudly interventionist force with near-total supremacy on...
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UK government welcomes genocidal apartheid upholders
When hundreds of students at the University of Cambridge gathered on Tuesday to protest the Israeli ambassador to Britain Tzipi Hotovely’s speech at the Cambridge Union, cutting it short and causing her to flee the grounds, it became clear that her track record would not be forgotten any time...
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To prevent a second Bosnian genocide, Turkey may finally militarily intervene
Many see Turkey as an increasingly interventionist force in its surrounding regions, but also as a mediating force. From its military interventions into Syria and Libya to its backing of Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Ankara has worked to establish its own assertive foreign policy using new military capabilities...
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Under biomedical security states, Israeli apartheid may soon go global
Almost two years ago, I penned an article highlighting the possibility of governments around the world – particularly Western democracies – using the spreading Covid-19 pandemic to implement a series of harsh restrictions on their populations in order to grant themselves sweeping new powers in a taste of totalitarianism. Back...
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Despite his gratitude to Soleimani, Assad is clamping down on Iran’s presence in Syria
Two years after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in a US missile attack at Baghdad Airport, the legacy of the late commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is still disputed. His critics insist that he was a war criminal who was responsible for the deaths of...
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The West is engineering a neo-colonial starvation of Afghanistan, for women’s sake
Barely eight decades ago, while it was fighting the Nazis’ fascism, the British government under Winston Churchill was simultaneously orchestrating and engineering one of the worst famines in human history. As a result of Britain’s imperial policies, and with the excuse of wartime in 1943, around 3 million natives...
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Cryptocurrencies may be the last hope for those in the Middle East
Everything in existence will be assimilated into the online world. Some things already have been. This has proven true with business, shopping, services, social life, journalism, warfare and with the recently-announced ‘metaverse’, perhaps even our lives. So it was only a matter of time before money itself was integrated...
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Winners of Palestine Book Awards 2021 announced
Middle East Monitor’s flagship annual literary awards ceremony – the Palestine Book Awards (PBA) – has entered its 10th year today, as awards were handed out to the winning authors and books in the much-awaited event....
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One politician is steering Britain to the far-right
Few politicians in Britain’s ruling Conservative Party are as controversial and unpopular as Home Secretary Priti Patel. Not the former health minister Matt Hancock, not the housing and communities minister Michael Gove, not even the notoriously blundering Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but Priti Patel. In just two years as home...
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The Middle East looks likely to be a focal point for the post-pandemic ‘Great Reset’
Almost two years since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic it is worth reviewing what has happened. With lockdowns around the world, preventative measures varied from country to country; theories about the origins of the coronavirus and its consequences were many. Apart from the development of vaccines and the...
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Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said
If there was one figure central to postcolonial studies and the intellectual force behind the Palestinian meeting with Western academia, it was undoubtedly the late Edward W Said. Although he was an American citizen –his father having fled to the US to escape Ottoman conscription in World War One...
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Remembering the Wadi Araba Treaty and Jordan’s ‘cold peace’ with Israel
What: The signing of a peace treaty between Jordan and Israel, which ended over four decades of conflict. When: 26 October 1994 Where: Wadi Araba, Jordan-Israel border What happened? The major role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the 1967 war it fought with its allies Egypt and Syria against Israel (known...
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The world will regret bringing Assad in from the cold
When Jordanian King Abdullah II spoke with Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, on the phone earlier this month, it set a precedent that thawed a decade of ice between the two. A week prior to that, Amman had fully re-opened its main border crossing with Damascus, and the intelligence chiefs...
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‘Little Palestine’: How History Will Remember Assad’s Siege of Yarmouk
Over the course of the ongoing decade-long Syrian conflict, documentation of the war and its effects has always been desired by the outside world...
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By ignoring Lebanon’s fuel crisis, the Gulf States let Hezbollah lead the way
Lebanon has had a rough ride over the past year: the failure to secure a viable government; the catastrophic Beirut blast; then the economic crash which caused its currency to go into freefall. On top of all of this looms Hezbollah, which is ever-present within the crumbling Lebanese political...
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US-trained death squads are the dark legacy of the war on terror
There are relatively few truly world-changing events, but the 9/11 attack on New York’s World Trade Centre in 2001 was one. Regardless of the numerous theories that have surrounded it or the obvious and undisputable fact that revenge has been taken against innocent people directly and indirectly worldwide, it...
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Turkish ultranationalists should know that Assad is their enemy, not Syrian refugees
Ever since the stabbing of a Turk by two Syrian refugees in the Altindag neighbourhood of Ankara in early August, relations between the two communities have changed. Almost a decade of near-continuous migration to Turkey, rising unemployment and a tumbling economy broke through the barriers and erupted that night,...
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Even love is forbidden under Israeli apartheid
Israel’s apartheid system directed at the Palestinians is well documented. Within Israel’s officially-recognised borders — which the state has never actually declared — as well as across the occupied Palestinian territories, the people of occupied Palestine have long faced systematic discrimination which denies them the same rights afforded to...
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The Taliban won legitimacy through armed struggle, now it must earn it through diplomacy
When provincial capitals fell one after another last week, surrendering to the Taliban and relinquishing the glittering mansions of the warlords who fled the country, it was clear to many that the battle for Afghanistan would soon be over. Contrary to predictions that the group’s entry into Kabul would...
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Lobbying in Britain’s Conservative Party illustrates the dark ties to the Gulf alliances with Israel
When the extent of former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s involvement in lobbying for the investment company Greensill Capital was revealed by the BBC’s “Panorama” programme this week, the revelations went far beyond his role in the scandal. It goes back years but the investigation was only launched properly...
