The War on Drugs in Israel: Detoxicating “Outsiders Within,” Intoxicating Foreign Enemies

Chapter 6 - Faba bean

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Introduction: Power and Knowledge in the Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa Sherine Hafez and Susan Slyomovics Part I. Knowledge Production in Middle East and North Africa Anthropology 1. State of the State of the Art Studies: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa Susan Slyomovics 2. Identity and Difference in the Middle East and North Africa: A Review Essay Seteney Shami and Nefissa Naguib 3. Anthropology's Middle Eastern Prehistory: An Archaeology of Knowledge Jon W. Anderson 4. The Pragmatics and Politics of Anthropological Collaboration on the North African Frontier Paul A. Silverstein 5. Post-Cold War Politics of Middle East Anthropology: Insights from a Transitional Generation Confronting the War on Terror Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar Part II. Subjectivities: Youth, Gender, Family and Tribe in the Middle East and North African Nation-State 6. Anthropology of the Future: Arab Youth and the State of the State Suad Joseph 7. The Memory Work of Anthropologists: Gendered Studies of Conflicts and the Heroic Life in Middle East and North Africa Sondra Hale 8. Rejecting Authenticity in the Desert Landscapes of the Modern Middle East: Development Processes in the Jiddat il-Harasiis, Oman Dawn Chatty 9. Notable Families and Capitalist Parasites in Egypt's Former Free Zone: Law, Trade, and Uncertainty Christine Hegel-Cantarella Part III: Anthropology of Religion and Secularism in the Middle East and North Africa 10. Will the Rational Religious Subject Please Stand Up? Muslim Subjects and the Analytics of Religion Sherine Hafez 11. Defining and Enforcing Islam in Secular Turkey Kim Shively 12. Sharia in Diaspora: Displacement, Exclusion and Anthropology of the Displaced Middle East Susanne Dahlgren 13. A Place to Belong: Colonial Pasts, Modern Discourses, and Contraceptive Practices in Morocco Cortney L. Hughes Part IV: Anthropology and New Media in the Virtual Middle East and North Africa 14. Our Master's Call: Mass Media and the People in Morocco's 1975 Green March Emilio Spadola 15. The Construction of Virtual Identities: On-line Tribalism in Saudi Arabia and Beyond Sebastian Maisel 16. Youth, Peace, and New Media in the Middle East Charlotte Karagueuzian and Pamela Chrabieh Badine References Contributors Index

Following the recently evolving downturn in the Greek economy, there is an opportunity to build a new Hellenic scientific institution for neglected infections of poverty located at the geographic center of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. While today populations who live in poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia suffer from the largest public health impact from the world's neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) [1], [2], it is astonishing to some that many of these same diseases also disproportionately strike the impoverished populations living in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In Europe, a 2011 analysis found surprisingly high rates of NTDs among the more than 150 million Europeans who live below the poverty level [3]. Especially in the Balkans and elsewhere in southeastern Europe, as well as in Turkey, several former Soviet-bloc countries, and among the Roma, today there are high rates of parasitic infections such as echinococcosis, toxocariasis, toxoplasmosis, and trichinellosis, as well as a number of important bacterial infections such as brucellosis and congenital syphilis (Table 1). Many of these NTDs are zoonoses transmitted from animals and linked to breakdowns in veterinary public health, especially in Eastern Europe [3]. Fallout from the war in the Balkans and the collapse of communism among the former Soviet republics represent key socioeconomic determinants of these infections [3]. Table 1 Major NTDs of Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. Similarly, in the Middle East and North Africa, high rates of some of these same parasitic infections are endemic, in addition to fascioliasis, leishmaniasis, and schistosomiasis [4]. Important viral infections have also emerged, including dengue and Rift Valley fevers [4]. Many of these NTDs are also zoonoses transmitted from livestock and other domestic animals and are on the rise as a result of breakdowns in veterinary health and unrestricted trafficking of animals across unsupervised borders [4]. Most of these infections are concentrated among the more than 60 million people who live in the Middle East and North Africa on less than US$2 per day [4]. In terms of the largest number of cases of these conditions, destabilized countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen suffer the most from NTDs [4]. The NTDs are forgotten diseases that disproportionately afflict the forgotten poor. Indeed, these neglected infections can even trap the poor in a cycle of poverty because of their ability to stunt child growth and intellectual development, affect pregnancy outcome, and reduce productivity [1]. While the world's attention appropriately turns to completing the Millennium Development Goals by lifting the poorest people in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia out of poverty, we must not leave behind the poorest and forgotten people of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. A key step to addressing these neglected infections of poverty would include establishing a new center for research in order to conduct fundamental and translational research on the major NTDs affecting areas of poverty in southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa; ideally, these activities might also include product development activities for a new generation of neglected disease drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines. In some cases, new products for veterinary use must be developed as new tools to halt zoonotic transmission. Greece represents an intriguing location for such a center of excellence (Figure 1). This nation is centrally located between Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa and therefore is in a position to undertake unique studies on the ecology, transmission, and epidemiology of the NTDs across the region. A recent example is the changing of ecology of brucellosis and other zoonoses with increasing transmission in the Balkan Peninsula [5], as well as the re-emergence of vivax malaria in Greece [6]–[8]. Greece has also become one of Europe's major gateways for immigrants arriving from Africa and the Middle East [9], [10]. Equally relevant is the devastating recent downturn in the Greek economy, including a stifling level of unemployment that is reaching 50% among young people together with dramatic cutbacks in government services and new austerity measures [11]. There are real concerns about the future of Greece's ability to maintain its previously robust scientific research infrastructure. Indeed, there have already been severe cuts to science budgets and salaries at leading Greek scientific institutions, with the anticipation of additional cuts and consolidations likely [12]. Figure 1 Map of Greece, At the same time, there is every reason to anticipate an emergence or re-emergence of NTDs in Greece just as we have seen in other areas of economic collapse and post-conflict in Europe and the Middle East. European Union or private support of a Hellenic center of excellence for NTDs could help to fend off declines in Greek biomedical science and prevent a potential brain drain to northern Europe, Australia, and elsewhere, while simultaneously providing urgently needed research and development for a nation that for centuries has bridged the cultures of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Such an NTD center could be established by expanding infrastructures in existing centers such as the Hellenic Pasteur Institute, which is conducting important research on leishmaniasis and other NTDs [13]; the Foundation of Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) [14]; or the Hellenic Center for Disease Control and Prevention (HCDCP) [15], among others. It is important to point out that such a program should occur within the context of overall increases in financial support for Greek scientific institutions, and possibly even European Union funding. A Hellenic center for NTDs is not a panacea, but it would be a welcome and potentially transformative institution that would address a pressing neglected disease problem linked to poverty and destabilization in the region. It could also provide urgently needed research and possibly new antipoverty drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines benefiting impoverished people and their animals everywhere. Such a center could promote global, neglected disease research much as other pan-European institutes in Germany (EMBO - European Molecular Biology Organization), Switzerland (CERN – European Center for Nuclear Research), and Italy (ICTP – The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics) have promoted outstanding studies in molecular biology, physics, and other key scientific areas. A Greek center for NTDs would go a long way to fostering urgently needed research and reducing poverty and disease.

List of Tables - List of Figures - Preface - Prospects for Middle Eastern and North African Economies: An Overview N.Shafik - THE CHANGING INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT - The World Economy and Its Implications for the Middle East and North Africa, 1995-2010 E.M.Riordan, U.Dadush, J.Jalali, S.Streifel, M.Brahmbhatt & K.Takagaki - The Arab Economy, the Uruguay Round Predicament, and the European Union Wildcard I.Diwan, C-P.Yang & Z.Wang - The World Trade Organization, the European Union, and the Arab World: Trade Policy Priorities and Pitfalls B.Hoekman - ECONOMIC GROWTH, THE STATE, AND THE PRIVATE SECTOR - From Boom to Bust-and Back? The Crisis of Growth in the Middle East and North Africa J.Page - The State and Economic Transition in the Middle East and North Africa J.Waterbury - Supporting Private Sector Development in the Middle East and North Africa R.E.Anderson & A.Martinez - SECTORAL ISSUES: HUMAN RESOURCES, POVERTY, AND THE ENVIRONMENT - A Human Capital Strategy for Competing in World Markets F.L.Golladay, S.E.Berryman, J.Avins & L.Wolff - Poverty in the Middle East and North Africa W.van Eeghen - Environmentally Sustainable Development in the Middle East and North Africa H.Mohtadi - Environmental and Natural Resource Management in the Middle East and North Africa B.Larsen

Contents of the report are as follows: Long-term economic development: challenges and prospects for the Arab countries by Mustapha K. Nabli. Reform complementarities and economic growth in the Middle East and North Africa by Mustapha Kamel Nabli, and Marie-Ange Veganzones-Varoudakis. After Argentina: was MENA right to be cautious? By Mustapha K. Nabli. Restarting Arab economic reform by Mustapha K. Nabli. Democracy for better governance and higher economic growth in the MENA region? By Mustapha K. Nabli, and Carlos Silva-Jauregui. The political economy of industrial policy in the Middle East and North Africa by Mustapha K. Nabli, Jennifer Keller, Claudia Nassif, and Carlos Silva-Jauregui. The macroeconomics of labor market outcomes in MENA by Jennifer Keller, and Mustapha K. Nabli. Challenges and opportunities for the 21st century by Mustapha Nabli. Labor market reforms, growth, and unemployment in labor-exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa by Pierre-Richard Agenor, Mustapha K. Nabli, Tarik Yousef, and Henning Tarp Jensen. Economic reforms and people mobility for a more effective EU-MED partnership by Ishac Diwan, Mustapha Nabli, Adama Coulibaly, and Sara Johansson de Silva. Cruise control, shock absorbers, and traffic lights by Mustapha K. Nabli. Trade, foreign direct investment, and development in the Middle East and North Africa by Farrukh Iqbal, and Mustapha Kamel Nabli. Making trade work for jobs by Dipak Dasgupta, Mustapha Kamel Nabli, Christopher Pissarides, and Aristomene Varoudakis. Exchange rate management within the Middle East and North Africa region by Mustapha Nabli, Jennifer Keller, and Marie-Ange Veganzones. How does exchange rate policy affect manufactured exports in MENA countries? By Mustapha Kamel Nabli, and Marie-Ange Veganzones-Varoudakis. Public infrastructure and private investment in the Middle East and North Africa by Pierre-Richard Agenor, Mustapha K. Nabli, and Tarik M. Yousef. Governance, institutions, and private investment by Ahmet Faruk Aysan, Mustapha Kamel Nabli, and Marie-Ange Veganzones-Varoudakis.

This paper presents an empirical application and analysis of the social contract in countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The paper suggests a simple operational model that synthesizes a social contract's three main characteristics: participation, protection, and provision, between a government and its citizens. This empirical "3-P" framework allows investigating the role that government provision and protection may have on citizen participation, which is particularly pertinent given the political and economic development of countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The paper compares the evaluation of the health of the social contract in countries in the Middle East and North Africa region to that of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The empirical evidence shows that the social benefits provided to citizens through improved delivery of basic services have come at the cost of impaired political participation. This feature of the social contract in the Middle East and North Africa may be considered one of the root causes of the social turmoil some countries have been struggling with in recent decades. Digital transformation is a potentially powerful channel through which the relationship between government and citizens can improve, and the paper finds that it has a three-year lagged positive effect on the quality of the social contract in the Middle East and North Africa and the effect is inversely U-shaped. This suggests that structural and institutional improvements are needed in countries in the Middle East and North Africa for the quality of their social contract to reach levels comparable to those of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The primary aim of this dissertation is to provide a critical analysis of the scholarly literature on the long historical, social and cultural processes that characterized Jewish-Arab coexistence in the Muslim Arab societies of the Middle East and North Africa. For this purpose I survey:
\nA. a large body of primary sources that have for the most part not been available in Hungarian. These include: parts of medieval Muslim, Christian and Jewish travelers’ itineraries and diaries, British and French diplomatic correspondence, documents from the British and US Intelligence Services and the Alliance Israélite Universelle archives, WZO correspondence and my interviews with Syrian and Iraqi Jews living in Israel.
\nB. a substantial amount of analytical and exploratory literature that provides theories and hypotheses formulated by highly qualified and experienced scholars in a number of fields. These scholars include Heinrich Graetz, Ignaz Goldziher, Raphael Patai, H.Z. Hirschberg, Y. Ben-Zvi, S.D. Goiten, S.W. Baron, Bernard Lewis, Norman A. Stillman, and W.P. Zenner.
\nOn the basis of my survey I then examine the veracity of several rather wide-spread assertions popular in western liberal scholarly circles, such as:
\na. In the Muslim Arab world, Jews on the whole fared better than they did in Christian societies.
\nb. The breakdown of a presumably peaceful Jewish-Arab coexistence was caused by the appearance of the great powers and/ or European Zionists in the Middle East and North Africa
\nGiven the multi-faceted scholarship on the coexistence of the two communities, a multi- disciplinary approach is best suited for this project. In particular, I will be utilizing methods deriving from disciplines such as theology, social and cultural history, cultural anthropology, ethnography, and social psychology.
\nThe dissertation is structured into three main parts.
\nIn the first part, I provide an overview of Jewish-Arab relations during the period starting from the emergence of Islam and ending with the appearance of the great western powers in the Middle East and North Africa. I examine closely the socio-psychological and theological roots of anti-Jewish sentiment in Islam, I provide an overview of the life and possibilities of the Jewish communities in the Omayyad and Abbasid caliphates, and explore life under the relatively more tolerant shiite Fatimid rulers. After analyzing the situation of the Jews in Andalusia, I discuss the overly idealized image of the “Arab–Jewish Golden Age” commonly found in scholarship, including in the influential work of Heinrich Graetz. By contrast, I explore the political, social and theological reasons underlying the harsh persecution of the Jews in North Africa under foreign monarchs, and portray the life of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire from a socio-economic and a cultural-anthropological perspective.
\nThe second part of the dissertation deals with the new challenges of modernization introduced by the European colonialists, which restructured the Middle Eastern and North African societies, leading to economic and social competition between the Muslim majority and the despised minority groups. This situation created a fertile soil for the European-born political anti-Semitism, which, together with the extant social tensions, resulted in the emergence of blood libels, which were without precendent in Arab lands, and accusations of blasphemy at the end of the 19th century. The spread of the Jewish conspiracy theory after the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Arabic [Cairo, 1925], the adoption of fascist and Nazi ideologies by the Arab nationalist movements (Baath, Muslim Brotherhood, Phalanges Libanaises, etc.), and the anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist political activities of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husseini, all led to the cumulative insecurity of the Jews in Arab lands and eventually to the pogroms during the Second World War.
\nIn the third part of this study, I examine the responses that Jews in Arab lands made to the challenges of modernization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These responses took several distinct forms:
\na. A European type of assimilation, whose main supporter was the French Jewish world organization, the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle, which contributed to the transformation and reformation of Jewish education in the ME and NA. This assimilation resulted in the appearance of a highly westernized new generation that distanced itself from the surrounding Arab culture.
\nb. Participation in the Arab national revival, which was the most common response among the Jewish upper class in Egypt. I provide a brief overview of Jewish involvement in Egyptian government, politics, the Arab media and literature.
\nc. Political Zionism, whose promoters were the European Zionist Jewish immigrants, and Jewish refugees, who fled from Palestine to other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. In contrast to the European Jewish religious circle, the Sephardi community leaders embraced the Zionist idea enthusiastically, as did a large number of Oriental Jews. In my analysis I also touch on the contradictory attitude of the WZO toward the Zionist activities of the Middle Eastern and North African communities.
\nIn the post-war era, the Zionist response became the most relevant one after the Holocaust and prior to the birth of the modern state of Israel, especially given also the flare up in anti-Jewish sentiment in the Middle East and North Africa, and the cold reception that French and British societies gave to westernized Jews from the former colonies.
\nArab-Jewish coexistence can be described as the peaceful cohabitation of a master and a servant, i.e. Jews in Arab lands lived relatively peacefully, preserving their religious and communal autonomy by accepting the status of the belittled and often humiliated minority, of the dhimmi and – with some, often disastrous exceptions -, anxiously avoided any interference in Muslim Arab affairs.
\nThe new challenges of the modern era, especially the impact of Western culture on the Middle East and North Africa, have resulted in a twist of this microcosmos. The ensuing cold peace between the two coexisting communities came to an end with the different attitudes and responses to the possibilities of the emerging globalized world.

Histories of gender in the modern Middle East and North Africa have flourished in the last three decades, fueled in part by JMEWS. Yet much of this work is circumscribed by the nation-state, which remains the primary framing for discussions of women’s activism and gender-based reform. Existing scholarship includes glimpses of women collaborating across national, regional, cultural, and linguistic boundaries but rarely foregrounds these transnational connections or emphasizes how formative transnational spaces and conversations were in shaping gender norms. This roundtable brings together the work of gender historians whose research collectively ranges from Morocco to Afghanistan, and traces a variety of connections across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Its five short essays highlight modes of movement, organizing, and exchange across borders, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We demonstrate the many ways in which women in the Middle East and North Africa collaborated with one another and with women in other world regions in the name of national independence, women’s rights, and economic justice, often shaping gender norms in the process. But should all modes of cross-border collaboration be described as “transnational”?One area of debate that the roundtable addresses is whether “transnationalism” is the best analytic mode for studying women’s activism across local and international borders. While thinking entirely beyond the national has its own historiographical value (Ludden 2003), transnationalism as a methodological approach begins with the nation, then demands that scholars think above and below it in ways that have the potential to challenge its solidity and salience as a category of analysis. Pursuing a transnational approach, we acknowledge the nation as a salient political unit while refusing to be confined within it, whether in linguistic, spatial, or ideological terms. Another key concept running through these essays is “transnational feminism,” which foregrounds feminist cross-border collaborations in the name of disrupting systems of power (Mohanty 2013). During the colonial era, many feminists in the Middle East and North Africa engaged in transnational organizing in opposition to colonialism. More recently, transnational feminist organizing in the Middle East and North Africa has been anticapitalist, prodemocracy, and has often sought to end US military occupation in the region.This roundtable also touches on questions of what counts as “transnational” activism and the scales on which it operates. Our essays reveal how micro and macro transnational feminist organizing contributed to reshaping gender norms in the wider Middle East. Marya Hannun’s work reconstructs a web of feminist organizing that connected Afghan women with women from Cairo to Bombay. Nova Robinson’s piece reveals how Syrian women collaborated with US and Swiss feminists to try to secure representation from the “East” on the League of Nations’ Committee of Experts on the Legal Status of Women. Anny Gaul’s research demonstrates that multiple generations of Moroccan women activists engaged with ideas and movements circulating through the Middle East and beyond as they advocated for liberation. Focusing on these models of exchange and activism encourages new spatial frameworks for understanding women’s organizing. Lucia Carminati’s essay addresses such frameworks by asking how the inherent transnational nature of certain spaces, like the Suez Canal, impacts gendered subjectivities and histories in unique ways. Finally, Gülşah Torunoğlu’s essay addresses the promises and limitations of transnationalism as a method of analysis, and discusses “relational comparison” as an alternative analytic lens through which to scrutinize the interconnected feminist networks in the Middle East prior to the 1920s.In addition to highlighting the circuits and exchanges of people and ideas, this collection of essays in conversation with one another demonstrates how a transnational approach can push gender history in the Middle East and North Africa in exciting new directions. Questions that animate this roundtable include: In what ways did feminisms in the Middle East and North Africa transcend the nation and even the region during the interwar period, a time when the nation-state emerged as the default vehicle through which patriarchy was wielded and contested? What were the geographic limits of these connections? How does the fact that women of a certain class around the world had more in common with one another than they did with those who shared their national frames shape our writing of women’s history? How do these divisions endure in the present debates around global feminist movements? Our essays do not definitively answer these questions. However, we suggest that a denationalized analysis of feminism can give us a clearer picture of women’s movements and subjectivities in the early twentieth century, within and beyond national contexts. We hope that our collective exploration about the potential benefits and challenges of transnational analysis sparks further debate and inquiry.

BackgroundThe Middle East and North Africa, is one of few regions where the number of new human immunodeficiency virus infections is increasing. The present study aimed to estimate the attributable burden of unsafe sex and drug use in Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome in the Middle East and North Africa countries.MethodsWe used the Global Burden of Disease data 2017 to estimate the attributable mortality and disability-adjusted life-years to unsafe sex and drug use in Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome in the Middle East and North Africa countries (21 countries) from 1990 to 2017 by region, sex and age. The percent change was calculated at three time points by country and sex.ResultsThe rate of Disability-adjusted life years/100,000 attributed to drug use for Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome increased 1.10 (95% CI: 0.75–1.71) to 13.39 (95% CI: 9.98–18.17) in women of Middle East and North Africa countries from 1990 to 2017, and there is an increasing trend in Disability-adjusted life years attributable to drug use for Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome in men. The rate of Disability-adjusted life years/100,000 attributed to unsafe sex for Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome increased in women of Middle East and North Africa countries, 5.15 (95% CI: 3.34–8.07) to 53.44 (95% CI: 38.79–75.89); and 10.06 (95% CI: 6.61–16.18) to 46.16 (95% CI: 31.30–72.66) in men. Age-standardized mortality rate attributed to drug use and unsafe sex for Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome increased from 1990 to 2017 in both sex in Middle East and North Africa countries.ConclusionThe rate of Disability-adjusted life years /100,000 and age-standardized mortality rate attributed to unsafe sex and drug use increased in Middle East and North Africa from 1990 to 2017. While most of such countries have traditional cultures with religious believes, such increase need to be addressed in more depth by all policy makers.

As gas demand rises and operators turn to Unconventional gas reservoirs for new supplies, the need to optimize the capacity and recovery potential from this type of reservoir has risen. These Unconventional gas reservoirs represent a vast, long-term, global source of natural gas and have not been appraised in any systematic way. Unconventional gas resources—including tight sands constitute some of the largest components of remaining natural gas resources in the Middle East and North Africa. There is an emerging focus on tight gas reservoirs in the Middle East and North Africa to feed the growing energy needs in this region and save the oil from conventional resources for export and generation of hard currencies. The greatest challenge for tight gas is to generate economic flow, so technical capabilities are needed for effective development and production of tight gas reserves, such as mineralology/geology, geomechanics, petrophysics, well engineering, and hydraulic fracturing. During the last decade, 3-D seismic, horizontal drilling, and improved fracture stimulation have had significant impacts on tight gas production in many basins in the Middle East and North Africa. In this paper we will present a documentation of all the tight gas reservoirs available in the Middle East and North Africa, the challenges of developing these difficult resources, the role of modern technologies in managing tight gas and improving recovery factors, and highlight the best strategies for field development in tight gas reservoirs to capitalize on the promising potential of these reservoirs. The objective of this paper is to prepare data base to document all the tight gas reservoirs in the Middle East and North Africa and study the impact of technology on tight gas reservoir development in the emerging region.

Seasons of Change: Arab Spring and Political Opportunities

This Oxford Handbook on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is an extensive high-quality scholarly enterprise covering much of the essential ground on the modern history of the region by a team of well-informed scholars. It is, however, unfortunate that this collection of essays is tainted by an ideological predisposition that tends to undermine its overall credibility with a mission of academic activism and political advocacy. In the epilogue concluding this encyclopedic compendium the editors spell out their objective noting that “it is incumbent on MENA scholars to act on their better knowledge and keep breaking the epistemic injustice that still shrouds Palestine and the region as a whole” (694).This, therefore, is a collective work explicitly designed to explain and analyze the MENA region in terms dedicated to the re-education of the reading public, who have ostensibly been misled by scholars and pundits (the “international commentariat,” in the words of the editors [xxiii]) who misinform and disinform to create the “epistemic injustice that still shrouds … the region.” This writing of history does not necessarily serve the pursuit of knowledge and truth. This is a brand of “academic activism” that does not seek to enrich human knowledge for knowledge's sake but to effect political change. That, of course, may be a noble cause in its own right, but it is only partly related to scholarship.Between the introduction, “Toward a History of the Present,” and the epilogue, “Revolutionary Times in Contemporary History,” there are seven sections, each including between three to six essays. “Foundations” begins with the environmental history of the region moving on through the nineteenth century of economic change, religious reform, and cultural revival, and culminating with the constitutional reforms in Turkey and Iran in the early twentieth century. “Formations” addresses the MENA region after World War I, focusing on the European mandates, nationalism, and sectarianism, Kemalism in Turkey, and fascist movements in other parts of the region in the interwar years. “Legacies of War and Revolution” is devoted to the emergence of the post–World War II MENA region with studies on Communism in the region, the emergence of Nasserism, the Algerian struggle for independence, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Iran and its revolutions.Sections on “Neoliberal Authoritarianisms” and “State, Law, and Gender” cover the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and delve into issues such as rethinking the political economy of oil, media as method in the age of revolution, Syria's economic history, gender in post-invasion Iraq, “sextarianism” in Lebanon, current affairs in Israel/Palestine, and new approaches to the anthropology of Islamic movements. The last two sections, “From Protest Movements to the Arab uprisings” and “Crisis and Collapse” engage in subjects such as the uprisings in historical perspective, Tunisia's history between liberation and renewal, the Arab youth of the twenty-first century, the “New Turkey,” the Kurdish quest for democratic self-governmentin Syria, and, finally, Libya's path to collapse.All in all, thirty-three essays on well-chosen subjects provide an inclusive and comprehensive view of the modern and contemporary history of the region. There are, of course, other topics that were not included. Needless to say, no compendium could possibly be all-inclusive. One subject that could have and should have been addressed is refugees, and not only the Palestinian refugees from 1948, but especially the more recent waves of refugees. These have arisen from crises, civil wars, and collapse in various parts of the region. The region is home to 5.4 percent of the world's population but is the original abode of 37.5 percent of the world's refugees, who pose an extremely difficult social and political challenge to the affluent countries of Western Europe.European countries have become the havens of desire for many millions of these destitute migrants, with far-reaching implications for the political, social, and economic future of Western Europe. Another subject that should have been addressed in depth is that of demographic trends and the linkage between population growth and domestic crisis and upheaval.The introduction, crafted in the Marxist analytical straightjacket of the editors, places regional developments almost entirely in the hands of extraneous factors. The editors accuse the UN Arab Human Development Reports of paternalism toward the people of the region, but are guilty of it themselves. The local peoples are reduced to the role of hapless victims in a grand design composed by the forces of international capitalism in which they have virtually no agency, other than for the masses to take to the streets in rebellion.The more neoliberal economists, multinational companies and pliant national governments have moulded international law and the nation state form in order to “encase [and] inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy,” the less people trusted their political systems and the rule of law. (xvii–xviii) Surely demographic trends and unmanageable population growth are more directly responsible for regional developments than the machinations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.When it wasn't the multinational companies and their allies it was the great powers, who determined the regional course of events. “The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 destroyed a fledgling secular republic while the US-orchestrated and co-funded Mujahidin resistance against Soviet occupation planted terrorist seeds for 9/11” (xvii). The United States, therefore, essentially brought the attack on the Twin Towers upon itself by planting its terrorist seeds, while the Soviets engaged in the destruction of “a fledgling secular republic.” Secular liberation movements in the region, like the PLO or the FLN, have been in decline for decades. There are no secular republics anywhere in the MENA region and it strains the imagination to believe that the one that was just about to emerge in Afghanistan, of all places, was nipped in the bud by the Soviet invasion. As the Taliban almost effortlessly took over Afghanistan in August 2021, within just days after the withdrawal of US and other foreign forces, one can only wonder whatever happened to the secular republicans of Afghanistan since the departure of the Russians over thirty years ago.Elections in the West, according to the “extraneous forces” school, have a greater impact on the Middle East than centuries of domestic historical, social, cultural, and religious developments. Thus, the “elections of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and US President Ronald Reagan in 1980 paved the way for violent economic, political, military, and cultural ‘rollback’ at home and abroad” (xviii). These events were followed by the demise of the Soviet Union, which gave free rein to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to implement austerity measures. Their policies … dismantled the social fabric and gutted the welfare state the world over. With organized labor and trade unions curtailed, the most destructive forms of organized resistance to globalization have come from xenophobic and identitarian movements, exacerbated by spectacular acts of non-state and state terrorism. (xviii) Islamic radicalism, therefore, like everything else in the region is mainly the work of foreign powers and their collaborators in the institutions of global finance.The credibility of the UN Arab Human Development Reports, which over the years placed much more responsibility for the Arab predicament on local causes such as the chronic deficits in political freedom, in first world education systems and in gender equality, is undermined by citing the “harsh criticism in Western academic circles of the reports' developmentalist underpinnings, paternalist attitude, and for providing intellectual ammunition for foreign intervention” (xx).Developments in the region, in the minds of the editors of this volume, were not, at least in major part, a consequence of the actions and inactions of the peoples of the region, demographic trends, and rapid population growth, declining standards of living, radical politics, gender inequalities, Islamism and sectarianism, a general failure to modernize successfully, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, but almost solely the influence of extraneous forces like the great powers, the World Bank, the IMF, the multinationals, and Israel.Only marginally to the impact of the extraneous forces is there mention of a rather cryptic, incidental, and almost insignificant “alliance between some oppressive regimes and certain types [my emphases, A.S.] of conservative religious scholars [which] led to interpretations of Islam, which serve the government, but are unamicable to human development” (xix). But religion and the Islamic and Islamist phenomena, in their various forms, are ubiquitous in the public domain, in the schools, and in politics, and not just incidentally in some isolated instances of repressive regimes and certain types of conservatives.Bernard Lewis, reduced and discredited by the editors as “the late orientalist and neocon consultant” (xxiii), noted half a century ago that to “understand anything at all about what is happening in the Muslim world at the present time and what has happened in the past, there are two essential points which need to be grasped. One is the universality of religion as a factor in the lives of the Muslim peoples, and the other is its centrality.”1Indeed, there can be no substitute for the knowledge of the historical, linguistic, and cultural background of the peoples of the MENA region, to truly understand and appreciate the Middle East of our times and its profound political and social undercurrents. This is not about Middle Eastern exceptionalism. Exactly the same would apply to all of the peoples in all regions of the world. ISIS, the editors maintain very correctly, “is the product of dictatorial regimes, failed economies, broken educational systems, and extreme hopelessness, out of which a search for an Islamist utopia was born” (xxiv).But where does the historical responsibility for these developments lie? Centuries of history matter for the MENA region, just as centuries of history matter for everywhere else. They offer a wealth of analytical and explanatory value far more than the incidental elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan or the malevolent machinations of international finance.Editors accuse “right wing pundits and born-again atheists” (whoever they may be) of taking their cues from Lewis to cast ISIS as “the true face of modern Islam and, indeed, Islam as a whole” (xxiii). Lewis made no such presumptuous attempt to define any “true face.” Indeed, there is none and it is not for Lewis, pundits of whatever stripe, nor the editors to define this “true face.” It is for Muslims to define the “true faces” of Islam, just as Jews and Christians define their respective multiple faces. Needless to say, there are no precise definitions of the true faces of Islam, Judaism, or Christianity. They are imagined by their various sages, clerics, political activists, and believers in general, and there are almost as many versions as there are interpreters.Fortunately, not all the essays are in lockstep with the paternalistic “extraneous forces” model set out by the editors. The article by Nader Sohrabi on the “Constitutional Revolutions and State Formations in Comparison: Iran and Turkey” is a case in point. It compares the two Middle Eastern cases with constitutional settings outside the Middle East, it discusses the shared religio-political traditions in other Middle Eastern countries and the common geopolitical threat of European imperialism, and analyzes the divergent political features of the Ottoman Empire and Iran. Though in both countries there are critical inputs of outside forces it is the local players who dominate the narrative and it is clearly the Turks, on the one hand, and the Iranians, on the other, who are the key actors. Even though there is the Public Debt Administration in Turkey and the Russian and British intrusion in Iran, it is the locals who are the leading players and not the foreigners.Two military strongmen rose from the ashes of these constitutional revolutions: Atatürk and Reza Shah. Though identified officially and popularly as the founders of modern Turkey and Iran, they were very different personalities. As Sohrabi concludes: The “respective state-building programs of Atatürk and Reza Shah were part of the agendas of the preceding constitutional movements and their rise could be understood only in that light.” But the two leaders differed considerably. While Ataturk was an enlightened dictator in a republican setting, Reza Shah was more of a despot, according to Sohrabi (87).Raz on “Dodging the Peril of Peace: Israel and the Arabs in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War” is at the other end of the spectrum. Raz outdoes the editors. In their introduction, they note that Palestine is at the core of the “epistemic injustice” in the MENA region. It is at the epicenter of regional developments and the cause of the region's chronic instability. As we learn from the introduction, “Israel expanded its territory after the June 1967 war, blocked Palestinian national aspirations, and destabilized the region” (xxvii). Thus, unprovoked and out of the blue, Israel expanded its territory in 1967 and destabilized the region.As Raz shows, it is invariably all about Israel, with the Arabs as victims at the hands of their belligerent neighbor. The Israelis have no saving grace. They are duplicitous, deceptive, mean, aggressive and are possessed by an insatiable territorial appetite. For them, land for peace is a peril to be dodged, as the title of the essay declares. Raz's essay is a mirror image of the propaganda that Israeli right-wingers produce on the Palestinians, cherry-picking evidence in bad faith (for some stories there is no evidence), truncating quotations, quoting out of context, and supplying malicious translations. There is no empathy for the subject, no effort to explain, only to condemn. This is pamphleteering rather than historical analysis. There is hardly a paragraph without some cause for a corrective comment. A few examples will have to suffice.Premier Eshkol expressed “great desire” to keep the Gaza Strip although, according to Raz, “he had difficulty explaining why.” Perhaps “because of Samson and Delilah,” Eshkol said (271). Examining the source shows that Eshkol had no difficulty with the explanation, but Raz chose not to share it, intimating that Eshkol was some kind of bible-bashing buffoon. Eshkol had a reputation for both wit and wisdom. Samson and Delilah were obviously Eshkol's jest. The real explanation was a sentence later when Eshkol observed: “when you see the map, with the Egyptian finger of the [Gaza] Strip” (pointing to Tel Aviv), “you want to keep the Strip for yourself. But this is a rose with many thorns. There are 300–400 thousand Arabs there.”2Raz also quotes Moshe Dayan on various issues. “The true reason for storming the Golan was, according to Dayan's retrospective admission, strong pressure from leaders of kibbutzim in the Galilee who craved the fertile land of the area” (271). This retrospective admission is in a seven-page-long, especially revealing, interview. Of the seven pages Raz chose one sentence out of an inconsistent text, hardly a source on which to base such an unequivocal determination as “the [one and only] true reason” for taking the Golan.In the interview Dayan does say that the kibbutzim pressured the government to take the Golan because they wanted the land. But when questioned by the interviewer on whether he really meant to say that all that motivated the kibbutzim was their desire for more land, Dayan prevaricated and contradicted himself within the space of one paragraph: “That is not what I am saying. Of course, they wanted the Syrians to disappear out of their sight. They had suffered a lot from the Syrians … The Syrians who faced them were soldiers who shot at them and naturally they did not like it.” But, all the same, he was “absolutely certain” that when they approached the government to take the Golan, what drove the kibbutzim was their craving for the land and nothing else.3So even Dayan had a moment's hesitation on what he thought the kibbutzim really wanted, not to mention Israel's generals and ministers in the cabinet for whom there were many other political and strategic considerations, beyond the farming land for the kibbutzim. Israel's subsequent reluctance to withdraw from the Golan was related to the strategic importance of the Heights, looking down on Northern Israel facing west, and on the road to Damascus facing east. It had precious little to do with the orchards, the cattle ranches, and the wineries, with all due respect to the farmers.Israel, we are told, “set its heart on Sinai, too, particularly Sharm al-Sheikh at the southern tip of the peninsula, overlooking the Straits of Tiran—the gateway to the Israeli port of Eilat. ‘Better Sharm al-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm al-Sheikh,’ Dayan famously stated” (271). Interestingly, though, and well known to Raz, Dayan himself thought this was a foolish statement. When confronted about it in the same retrospective interview quoted above by Raz, Dayan retorted angrily: “So I said it. So what? … Only fools quote things and hang on to them as if they were the Torah [given] to Moses from [Mount] Sinai … Only donkeys don't change their minds.”4On June 19, 1967, the Israeli cabinet passed a resolution “that seemingly proposed” a withdrawal from the occupied Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights in return for contractual peace with Egypt and Syria, respectively. But, Raz reveals, there was a catch, a typically Israeli “deceptive move.” The resolution provided that the peace accords should be “based on the international borders and the security needs of Israel” in to Israel to of Sinai and the Israel, Raz was far less than it wanted to the real however, in for contractual peace with Israel did in withdraw from of the Sinai and It is especially the that this is no Raz still case as if the peace over years There was nothing about the cabinet Israel's security needs were not “a They were as of 1967 in UN and part and of the peace with which made the withdrawal from Sinai Israel was also in the to withdraw from the Golan Heights in for peace with such a was because of the failure of the to to which Israel would and, more the of Israel and to on Israel's on security and the of The failure did not on an Israeli to new Palestinian after These refugees were as to them from the refugees. The Raz them for the by the Israelis was and not which who The by Raz, is as as stories are just Raz an according to whom the Israelis two on the of the June war, for on that could to the for in the of an Egyptian This to say the The of Israel's forces were on the Egyptian which was but a from Israel's home to most of its the of population was in the over on the would have been far more to Israel than to much to Israel's military and to its the of the June War Israel engaged in with Palestinian who in in the to the Israel's pursuit of the their especially in of the of the Arab The of the them in to of the and the PLO the of the Palestinian all this was Israel's This in which the are no more than of the Israeli with virtually no role in the of their own national is need not be a of Israel nor of Israel's occupation of the Bank to be to provide a more of the of Israeli which are not a of and It would be a challenge to any in the international from ISIS to Iran and North and anywhere and everywhere in policies could be solely as a of and the of Raz, “The and by is a of This is an and of Turkey, through the of the local as the key players in the of the The IMF, the World Bank and the are not even and a is the has both in its domestic and in its of foreign and the essay an of the of over the last years. Turkey was no the for countries in the world. The political has been from a to one of This has a of social and political that has destabilized the and one half of the that do not for the and was by as a of for and policies were designed to to a while The of religion as a to and the own base has become a part of a background of and the failed attempt of a for to the through This effort was less than a cultural and social on a with the original state-building of the at the of the republic.” pursuit of a Turkey in image was designed to the and its republican the civil and with the of over the was “the core and of the all the while from its own The the has over was a of the religious the of state the that the foreign affairs Turkey of the has from its with the European Union, and the United The international Turkey from the to Turkey as a major in the Arab and Muslim world. This has since the failed as have the of the military and foreign who the Western with who a to the East, foreign with an on a and Islamist of the attempt has been by of for the with himself in the role of “the But in to “he has made himself into a more on less to the of and over an and destabilized this is an if the can and the ideological the does offer a comprehensive and high-quality collection of essays covering a of topics and as such will still to be a very and of the modern Middle East and its historical

Two decades after the fall of the shah, Iran is still going through a long and frequently interrupted post-revolutionary transition, which has a significant impact on the country's politics and its external relations. This paper discusses the implications of Iran's foreign policy on security in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region with a specific focus on the national security of Egypt. The study was carried out in Egypt and North Africa, and it studied a sample of 50 adult male and female professors who specialize in Iranian affairs, politics, and diplomats. The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of Iran's foreign policy in the MENA region. The specific objectives of the study were: 1) to examine the current situation of Iran's foreign policy on security in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA); 2) to assess how Iran's foreign policy on security in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) impact’s on Egypt's stability and; 3) to investigate strategies being used by Egypt to navigate security challenges and improve relations with Iran. The study is based on the shock theory. Data gathered from interviews and questionnaires using both qualitative and quantitative research methods have been used in the research. After gathering the data, they were analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative techniques. The findings of the study indicate that security challenges in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are highly complex and are influenced by various factors such as politics, history, economics, and religion. The insights contained herein form the basis for understanding how Iran's foreign policy affects regional security and geopolitical stability, thereby necessitating context-dependent measures to address contemporary security threats in the MENA region.

The peace process were any indication of the state of policy making in the Middle East and North Africa one might as well abandon any hopes of inspiring policy change in the desert. The types of think tanks one might find in the Middle East and North Africa depend largely on the relative degrees of democracy that exist from country to country. One interesting element to the policy research landscape that may be unique to the Middle East and North Africa is the existence of research corporation. A significant number of civil society think tanks in the Middle East and North Africa have had occasion to conduct research or training programs for government officials under contract. The development of nongovernmental, nonprofit policy research institutes, or civil society think tanks, represents an opportunity to fundamentally change the nature of policy making in the Middle East and North Africa.