More than six months into the greatest crisis to grip the Middle East for a generation, it is sometimes hard to find words that adequately describe its scale and intensity.1 As I write, Israeli troops are poised to invade Rafah… Continue Reading
As the bodies of Palestinians piled up in the Gaza Strip, United States president Joe Biden told reporters that the end of the conflict would only come with a “two-state solution” and the creation of a “real” Palestinian state alongside… Continue Reading
A review of Revolution is the Choice of the People: Crisis and Revolt in the Middle East and North Africa, Anne Alexander (Bookmarks, 2022), £12 Since 2019, the world has been witnessing a “third cycle of revolt”, following the anti-globalisation… Continue Reading
Sudan has experienced a sharp development of its revolutionary movement in response to the deepening crisis of the state and society since a military coup on 25 October 2021. The coup saw the Sudanese civilian opposition parties summarily ejected from… Continue Reading
On 4 August a massive explosion shook Beirut port when a neglected storehouse of ammonium nitrate blew up, catapulting Lebanon onto the front pages of the global media. The volatile chemical was being stored next to the country’s main grain… Continue Reading
On 2 April 2019, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika was forced to resign.1 In scarcely more than one month, a massive popular movement that had emerged for the first time on 22 February managed to get rid of the ageing and… Continue Reading
From Algiers to Beirut and Baghdad to Khartoum, it appears that revolution is once again “the choice of the people”—as a slogan echoed by tens of thousands on protests in Sudan puts it.1 Meanwhile, the temperature of social and political… Continue Reading
In March 2011 the Arab Spring arrived in Syria. Syrians had lived under the totalitarianism of the Asad family, first with the father, Hafez al-Asad (1971-2000), followed by the son, Bashaar al-Asad, for 40 years.1 This included a state of… Continue Reading
On 9 November 2014 Palestinian activists in villages near Jerusalem made a symbolic breach in Israel’s apartheid wall, their way of marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.1 The Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees said: “No matter… Continue Reading
The military coup of July 2013 was a serious setback for the revolutionary movement in Egypt.1 For army leader Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi it was an act of rescuing the revolution: for Egypt’s radical activists it was a counter-revolutionary offensive aimed to… Continue Reading