World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Is there a Palestinian, or Arab, conception of Israel that we can look to for guidance in the future? Could such a notion keep pace with the diplomatic efforts currently underway? Two theories currently seem to dominate the discourse, especially in Lebanon: the first revolves around Israel as …

This is nothing new; Iran is structurally split into “identity and politics.” This complex dynamic branches out of this binary into several social and cultural forces and groups, majorities and minorities, center and periphery, reformist and conservative, conservative and neo-conservative... a…

When President Donald Trump first launched his bid to stop the war in Gaza most observers expected another attempt at making the impossible possible. After all another ceasefire in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages had been unveiled and unraveled a few months earlier. Thus, the initial…

Every year, the controversy around the Nobel Prizes is centered in the same two categories: the Peace Prize and the Literature Prize. Never has there been a torrent of polemics about the award for medicine, for example, nor has there even been broad outrage about the recipient of the award in…

The proliferation of arms has returned to the forefront in Sudan once again. Shots were fired following an altercation between a man and a group affiliated with an armed faction at the entrance of Atbara City Hospital, and two people were killed and two others were injured. Although the…

The war in Gaza has ended, but the same can’t be said about the others. Three fronts remain open. In Lebanon, a fragile truce holds, while sporadic exchanges of fire continue with Yemen’s Houthis. Meanwhile, Iran remains the major front, having been on alert since last June following the twelve-day…

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) famously said that “Life begins on the other side of despair.” That is, hope often emerges in moments of despair. It is always darkest before dawn, and faith that anything is possible drives us. Is the dawn of the Middle East about to begin after a…

When Donald Trump was first elected president, foreign policy seemed like the zone of greatest danger, the place where a political novice promising to remake the world order was most likely to blunder into true catastrophe. Instead, Trump’s first-term foreign policy was broadly successful, with…

While the next phases of the Gaza agreement and its implementation are shrouded in ambiguity, the broad trajectory of the Levant, as we can gather from this agreement and others, is not obscure. The un-regrettable demise of an entire ecosystem of forces and ideas, after it had tasked itself with…

US President Donald Trump lost the battle for the Nobel Peace Prize. In another sense, however, he did not, winning his bet on a “peace deal” in Gaza, though he didn’t really win that either. This is not “a play on words;” these are the facts. As for the Nobel Prize, Trump may have taken his…

The “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent genocidal Israeli war that went on for two years were a pivotal moment for Middle Eastern politics and security. This period demanded the development of new, more effective, flexible, and robust approaches to…

The Middle East has been witnessing unprecedented developments, and today it will witness another. The analysts will debate; one will talk about the historic moment while another will say it was a new dawn. The skeptics will say that one must not rush to conclusions and must instead wait to see the…