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Is a New Palestinian Movement Being Born?
Published by the Atlantic In the months before the Democratic National Convention came to Chicago, the city prepared for massive protests against U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Pundits raced to draw parallels with 1968, when anti-war protesters overshadowed the Democratic convention and helped hand the White House back to the GOP. But history…
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Tehrangeles: No Browsing Please
Published in Liberties In the western region of Los Angeles a long boulevard stretches from the main local campus of University of California in the north to the residential quarters to its south. If visitors to LA make it to Westwood Boulevard at all, it would probably be for a visit to UCLA and its…
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Does Kamala Harris Have a Vision for the Middle East?
Published by the Atlantic The administrations of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have all shared one common foreign-policy desire: to get out of the quagmire of the Middle East and focus American attention on the potentially epoch-making rivalry with China. Even in fiendishly polarized Washington, foreign-policy hands in both the Republican and Democratic…
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Haniyeh’s killing in Iran embarrassed the country. Can Tehran fill its intelligence gaps?
Published in the National On July 24, Iran’s Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib was asked about the achievements during his tenure since 2021. He pointed to Iran’s most immediate security problem, repeated operations by Israel on Iranian soil and its assassination of Iran’s nuclear scientists, and claimed he had solved it. “With the grace of God,…
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Iranian Insiders Warn That Attacking Israel Is a Trap
Published in the Atlantic Iran lobbed hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel in April in the hope of changing the rules of engagement: Israel had struck an Iranian consulate in Damascus, and Tehran sought to deter any further such direct actions against its interests. Those hopes were shattered last week when an operation attributed…
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A Wake-Up Call for Iran
Published by the Atlantic Ismail Haniyeh should have known that Tehran wasn’t a safe place for him to be. What has Israel ever wanted to do on Iranian territory that it hasn’t been able to accomplish? In 2018, it stole the country’s entire nuclear archive. In 2020, it killed Iran’s top nuclear-weapons official. In 2022 and 2023, it reportedly abducted, interrogated,…
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Pezeshkian’s push for a diverse cabinet has exposed divisions in Iran
Published in the National Every time former Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif appears on television, it’s fair to expect some drama or controversy. Such is the nature of the combative career diplomat. Mr Zarif, who has been tasked with picking cabinet ministers for President-elect Masoud Pezeshkian’s incoming administration, ruffled many feathers last week when…
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Netanyahu’s speech proved it’s time for the U.S. to stop enabling him
Published in the Forward If you want to know why so many ordinary people feel cynical about politicians, go no further than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Wednesday address to the U.S. Congress, the fourth in his lifetime. It was a rambling repetition of his familiar themes, particularly that of Israel and the U.S. standing as…
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The Left’s Self-Defeating Israel Obsession
Published in the Atlantic Ask most Americans what DSA stands for and they are unlikely to know the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest leftist organization, with about 92,000 members. But ask about AOC and they are likely to be familiar with DSA’s most famous member: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Bronx-born socialist firebrand known for her fierce advocacy…
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Flaneur: “The Lie We Love”
Published in the Liberties We tell ourselves myths in order to live with ourselves. Historians have the unpleasant responsibility of making that a little more difficult for us than it would otherwise be. This is a story about such a myth, and about the truth it obscures. Guatemala was not a country at peace in…
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Iran’s Supreme Leader Is Worried
Published in the Atlantic Iran has taken a turn that hardly anyone could have seen coming a few short months ago. For years, Iran’s reformist faction has languished in the political wilderness, banished there by hard-liners more aligned with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and by a disillusioned electorate convinced that its votes did not matter.…
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Masoud Pezeshkian: Iran’s new president
Published in Majalla Earlier this year, Iran was headed to its scheduled parliamentary elections. As has become common in recent years, the elections were severely restricted. Under the Islamic Republic, polls have never been free and fair, and a vetting body called the Guardian Council, whose members give their primary fealty to Supreme Leader Ayatollah…
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In Iran, the Big Winner Is None of the Above
Published in the Atlantic Since the death in May of President Ebrahim Raisi, Iran has been in the throes of a surprise electoral contest. Not for the first time, one of the loudest campaigns has belonged not to any of the candidates, but to opponents of the regime who advocate boycotting the vote. Among those…
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An Iranian presidential hopeful wants a coalition with Italy’s Meloni, but why?
Published in the National Iranian hardliners, known for their devotion to the Islamic Republic and its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sometimes like to accuse their opponents of being modelled after westerners. But last week, it was a hardliner presidential candidate, who on a televised debate, praised a European head of government and called for…
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Even the Iranian Election Is About Trump
Published in the Atlantic A specter is haunting Iran’s presidential election—the specter of Donald Trump’s return to office. Although Trump has been out of the White House for more than three years, he seems to come up more than Joe Biden, and more than other foreign politicians, in debates among the six candidates in the…
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Iran’s new Assembly of Experts ready to pick new Supreme Leader
Published in Al Majalla When a country’s head of government dies in a dramatic helicopter crash, one naturally expects a bit of shock and changes to the schedule. Yet nothing, it seems, can stop the bureaucratic clock of the Islamic Republic. On 21 May, Iran’s Assembly of Experts began its meeting as scheduled, but in…
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Even if he loses, Pezeshkian provides much-needed hope to reformists
Published by the National Iran has been in the throes of a presidential election campaign since Sunday, when the Guardian Council announced the final slate of candidates to run for the second-highest office in the land. The Guardian Council, a panel of jurists and clerics appointed by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, decides who is allowed…
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The Fundamentalist, the Technocrat, and the Reformist
Published by the Atlantic The Soviet despot Joseph Stalin once said that it is not the voters who matter most in elections but those who count the votes. When it comes to elections held in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the real power belongs to the small body of clerics and jurists called the Guardian Council, which…
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A nuclear negotiator takes the helm of Iran’s foreign ministry. So what’s next?
Published by the Atlantic Council With the dramatic death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash on May 19, much attention is being paid to the race to replace him. But the chopper ride included another high-ranking official: Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the foreign minister who has now been replaced with his deputy, Ali Bagheri…
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Will Iran’s next president be a hardliner like Raisi or a moderate like Rouhani?
Publish in the National The death of Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash this month shocked the nation. But this shock has quickly given way to an intense struggle between various political factions vying for the second-most powerful job in the country, after that of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. With an election to pick…