A decade has now slipped by since a man named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid on Dec. 17, 2010. Bouazizi, a street vendor, took this extreme step after policemen harassed him for trying to survive. Not long after, thousands of people in this small Tunisian town gathered…
Forty-seven years ago, Egypt and Syria launched a massive surprise attack on Israeli forces dug into fortifications along the Suez Canal and Golan Heights. The ‘limited’ Arab objective was to recapture both strategic areas that had been seized from the two Arab states in Israel’s victorious 1967 War. Re-armed with modern – but by no…
The standoff taking place in the Eastern Mediterranean, despite attempts on the part of the international community to reduce its intensity, is unfortunately not calming down. In the beginning, in September, the first preconditions arose for Ankara to tone down its demonstration of intransigence in its efforts to gain access to potential gas reserves in…
When the UAE and Bahrain officially normalised relations with Israel on 15 September, US President Donald Trump hailed “the dawn of a new Middle East”. Egypt is today waking up to what this new era spells for it. There are two types of disaster for Egypt contained in the implicit bid of the UAE to become…
As one Gulf state after another embraces formal ties with Israel, some have looked to the Arab League to condemn normalisation. Yet to understand why the league will do nothing of the sort, one has to go back to its founding. The League of Arab States was founded in 1945 at the instigation and planning…
Turkey has taken major steps over the past few years to significantly strengthen its position in the Mediterranean, with the aim of showing its neighbors in the region along with its NATO allies that Turkey plays a key role there. Ankara has been focusing much of these efforts on protecting its interests in Libya, with…
