In 1996 a task force, led by Richard Perle, produced a policy document titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” for Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then in his first term as Prime Minister of Israel, as a how-to manual on approaching regime change in the Middle East and for the destruction…
Gulf Arab countries have nowhere to look for a bailout of their own private sector, like in the UAE, once the envy of the Arab world, as the banks just can’t pull it off. New friendships can flourish as underdogs like Morocco come out winners. But what about Iran? It’s often said that the Achilles’…
Abna’a Gaza (the Children of Gaza) is a status given to Palestinian refugees who fled from the Gaza Strip to Jordan in 1967. They fled during the 1967 war and consequent Israeli occupation of Gaza. Today, over five decades later, these Palestinians who originally fled to Gaza from their homes in greater Palestine in 1948…
Take Jordan (or Lebanon) as an example: Both have a broken economic model. One, (Lebanon), has had its huge deficits financed by expatriate remittances; and the other (Jordan), has had its budget deficits (6% of GDP), until now covered by annual stipends provided by Gulf States and the US (the EU provides relatively little financial…
Two years after Russian President Vladimir Putin came to blows with his then prime minister Dmitri Medvedev over a Russian abstention from a UN resolution which paved the way for the fall of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, a mysterious – but high quality – documentary appeared on the internet in Russia. A mysterious documentary…
There’s a déjà vu feeling to this year’s wave of protests across the Arab world. It’s not that this year saw the toppling of the leaders of Algeria and Sudan as a result of popular revolts, a harking back to the 2011 protests that overthrew the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. It’s that…
