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"I asked them if they could find any government in the world that likes the things I say."

 text messages buzzed between mobiles in quick succession, drawing woops of joy and thumbs up from astonished Syrians

"Perhaps the Saudis will have to build a whole village for Arab presidents once they run out of villas," joked a taxi driver

the usual babble of conversation was subdued as customers sat quietly but intently watching the TV broadcasting images of flames pouring from Egypt's ruling party's head office, a Soviet-era building much like many of those that house the state institutions in their own capital

Since 2011, I’ve noticed anti-Semitic books, eg Protocols of the elders of Zion etc have greatly decreased in popularity among Cairo’s book sellers. This is not to mention anti-Jewish conspiracies significantly declining in everyday discourse. A big contrast with the 1990s/2000s.

The Mubarak regime banked on keeping the population focussed on external matters (and imaginary threats), to distract them from internal failings. If it meant the conflation of Zionism with Judaism, then so be it. The 2011 Arab uprisings were a watershed moment because it turned Arab heads from the direction of the external to the internal. The Arab tyrant was now seen as the worst conspiracy imposed on the population.

On the cultural level, Egypt underwent a reconciliation with its Jewish past, which spawned films and an unusual but welcome enthusiasm with Egyptian Jewry.

the history of automation goes back some 900 years, when Ismail al-Jazari, a Muslim scholar, invented the first robotics, water clocks and other mechanical devices.

his outstanding machines have now been recreated for The Magnificent Machines of al-Jazari, an exhibition at the UNIQ Expo in Istanbul

“The impact of al-Jazari's inventions is still felt in modern contemporary mechanical engineering,” wrote 20th-century English engineer and historian Donald Hill in his book Studies in Medieval Islamic Technology.

For three weeks Sisi’s image has been trashed by an insider turned whistleblower whose videos from self-exile in Spain have gripped and paralysed Egypt in turn. 

Mohamed Ali is, by his own admission, no hero. One of only 10 contractors the army uses, he is corrupt. He also only left Egypt with his family and fortune because his bills had not been paid. Ali is no human rights campaigner. 

Egypt’s new folk hero likes fast cars, acting, film producing, real estate developing.

take a moment to remember U.S. history (or even a few seconds to do an internet search) and it’s easy to find many examples of far deadlier shootings. It’s a sad reality that most victims of the worst massacres that don’t rate a mention were people of color: Native Americans and African-Americans

there have been much worse atrocities and mass shootings committed against Native peoples going back to the beginnings of our country’s history

The unwelcome title of largest massacre might belong to Bear River, Utah, where at least 250 Native Americans were slaughtered in 1863; Native American historical accounts put the number at more than 450. In 1890, Native American men, women and children were massacred at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 150 to 300.

the Achilles heel of the Israeli media — i.e., its willingness to report communiqués issued by the army as straight news, without any fact checking. Even though the Israeli security establishment has been caught lying on countless occasions, journalists who report for mainstream media outlets continue to accept without question the information they are given about events they neither witnessed nor verified independently

I’ve seen soldiers grab crying children and shoving them into military vehicles, pushing aside their screaming mothers. I’ve seen soldiers grab a young woman by her arms and drag her like a sack of potatoes for several meters along an asphalt road so hot that it melted the rubber soles of my running shoes, before tossing her into a military vehicle and driving away. I’ve had my ankles singed black when a security officer looked me straight in the eyes and threw a stun grenade at my legs. Israeli army sharp-shooters regularly shoot unarmed demonstrators in Nabi Saleh with both rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition. They break into houses and drag people out, arresting them on the claim that they allowed demonstrators to hide in their garden. And then I would go back to Tel Aviv and be told by my friends that I could not have seen what I saw, because “our soldiers” do not behave that way. Soon, I had to distance myself from those friends in order to keep my own emotions in check.

By the time I began going to Nabi Saleh, I had spent about four years reporting on what I saw in Gaza and the West Bank, and watching detachedly as my politics moved ever leftward from the liberal place in which they started, as a consequence of what I saw on the ground. But it was in Nabi Saleh that I lost the last remnants of what I would call — for lack of a word to describe my nostalgia for the idea of a state for the Jews — my Zionism. My radicalization was not only a consequence of witnessing brutal violence perpetrated right in front of my eyes, by soldiers of the army that was supposed to protect me. It was also a result of my seeing the Tamimi family endure that violence week after week, seeing their relatives injured, arrested and killed, and still not coming to the conclusion that the price of resistance is too high. They simply refuse to submit.

Only 0.4% of Israeli Jews under the age of 70 can read the stories in the original Arabic language, he says. He also points to the fact that according to Israel’s National Library, less than 1% of all literature translated into Hebrew was written in Arabic, and 90% of the translators were Jews

The stories of “Amputated Tongue," which all deal in various ways with language deprivation, is written by 57 Palestinian writers from Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and abroad. The impressive compilation of contemporary Palestinian prose was translated into Hebrew according to a unique model by 36 translators, where one Arab and one Jewish translator collaborated. One-third of them were Palestinians. The short stories by some of the best Palestinian writers provide Israeli readers with more than a glimpse of entire lives lived in this land, and of this land.

The project lasted three years. Its goal was to give a voice to Palestinian Arabic society in the hostile climate created by Israel’s right-wing regime that views Arabic as an enemy language — as made abundantly clear in the 2018 Nationality Law, which downgraded the status of Arabic as an official language. The anthology targeted those few Israelis who want to know more about Palestinians but have had little exposure to them until now.

many Americans’ memories of Rabin have long been colored by a relentless media narrative that deprived them of critical perspectives on his life and legacy. In fact, looking back at the Oslo years, the voices of Palestinians — the victims of Rabin’s decades-long career — rarely made it into the pages of influential U.S. publications. Had they been featured, many Americans may have had a more informed opinion about why Palestinians would oppose honoring Rabin.

I focused on opinion pieces for two reasons. First, scholarly analysis of major U.S. outlets has already demonstrated that their news coverage is heavily shaped by pro-Israel biases. Second, opinion pieces are playing a stronger role than ever in shaping our understanding of the news. As one newspaper editor explained, “In a 24/7 news environment, many readers already know what happened; opinion pieces help them decide how to think about it.”

I had expected to find relatively few opinion pieces by Palestinians, and I was correct. But what surprised me was how much Palestinians have been talked about in major U.S. media outlets over the decades. Editorial boards and columnists seem to have been quite consumed with talking about the Palestinians, often in condescending and even racist ways — yet they somehow did not feel the need to hear much from Palestinians themselves.

The scenes emerging from Iran today elicit a mix of reactions across a region still reeling from the dark legacy of the “Arab Spring,” which itself came on the heels of the “Green Movement” protests in the wake of Iran’s 2009 presidential election. Many Arabs cannot help but recall the sense of hope that reverberated from Tunisia to Yemen, only to be shattered by unyielding repression, war, and the resurgence of authoritarianism. Subsequent protest waves, including those that began in 2019 in Lebanon, Iraq, and Sudan, were similarly met with brutality, co-optation, and dissolution.

Over a decade on from the Arab uprisings, the path toward democracy and freedom for youth across the Middle East has become more treacherous than ever, as liberation movements find themselves fighting against stronger, smarter, and more entrenched regimes that have adapted to modern challenges to their domination.

Technologies that many hoped would help to evade state censorship and facilitate mobilization have been co-opted as repressive surveillance tools.

representatives from the Polish Film Institute, which provided Heymann with a grant of NIS 188,000 [$54,500] to make the film several years ago, suddenly insisted upon seeing the film, stormed out in the middle of the screening, and demanded their money back, since the film includes experts who claim it was uncommon for Poles to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Poland finds itself firmly in the grip of an ultra-nationalist right-wing government. Embedded in this regime is a desire to retell the story of the Holocaust by portraying Poland and the Polish people in a better light — and the most effective way of going about this is to clamp down on critics, police the public discourse, and control the historical narrative.

I’m in the throes of an artistic, political, financial, and international crisis. I didn’t know that my film, “High Maintenance,” would create such drama. How could one know? Dani’s work was never executed because of the political situation in Poland. The commissioner of his work, an American Polish Jew living in the United States, was supposed to pay for this big monument. He decided in the end to cancel the project because he realized that the Polish government would take advantage of Dani’s work to convince everybody that Poland was one big righteous nation during World War II, and that everyone was busy risking their lives to save Jews.

The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals

The investigation by +972 and Local Call is based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions.

The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,”

Fuelled by populist politics, a nationalistic press and the apparent desire to confront complex problems with ‘red meat’ and increased nationalism, Tunisia’s President has steered his country on a dark course.

rather than address the core problems facing Tunisia, its President – buoyed by a supportive media – has embarked on a populist witch-hunt of his political opponents and now one of the country’s most vulnerable groups. 

As the UK Government focuses its efforts on pushing through an immigration bill that it itself admits has only a 50% chance of meeting international legal thresholds, there are parallels between both sets of leaderships. Like Tunisia’s President, Rishi Sunak Government is attempting to use populist nationalism and the wilful demonising of migrants as cover for its own gross economic mismanagement and flailing popularity.