Middle East

Looking for an Arabic translation of a favorite line, I found myself on a treasure hunt.

Israelis and Palestinians alike are traumatized people who love the land and deserve to live there in peace.

Our role in the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran

What did the Moral Majority and the Islamic Revolution have in common?

Amos Oz feared that fanaticism was rising in Israel as well as in the West.

The United States has been engaged for decades in a seemingly endless series of wars and military operations.

Bacevich provides another case of the fraught dream of managing history that Reinhold Niebuhr critiqued.

Aid organizations are overwhelmed by the scale of the current mass migration from the Middle East. So the work has fallen on other volunteers.

As Rusty Foster would say, the takes are in. Everyone’s got something to say about global terrorism, ISIS, and refugees, and some of it is even worth reading.

If you’re only going to read one longer piece, I recommend this one by Scott Atran and Nafees Hamid.

With Christians in Iraq and Syria on the brink of destruction, Walter Russell Mead wonders if Christians in the West will do more than wring their hands.

He says we can either help Christians in the Middle East flee persecution and start new lives elsewhere, or we can help them “fort up”—create “redoubts,” or enclaves that they can defend by force.

"What's going on is a nation-building process. It's similar to what happened at the end of World War I, when major empires were destroyed."

Is anti-Semitism on the rise? It's hard to quantify, and data vary across regions. But a vicious anti-Semitism persists in Europe and the Middle East.

“Two things about my own life became clear: I really did understand both sides, and I didn’t understand them at all.”

Gerard Russell’s account of disappearing Middle Eastern religions has an elegiac quality. It’s heartrending and often infuriating.

Historically, the region from the Danube to the Euphrates and from Belgrade to Baghdad is religiously complex. Our modern map is a product of decades of violence and ethnic cleansing.

The question isn't how frightening ISIS is. It's what actual threat it poses—and how to contain that threat without causing more harm.

Juan Cole tells the backstory of the revolutions in North Africa, exploring events in the context of their cultural setting. His conclusions are optimistic yet grounded in realism.

Nathan Deuel shows us things few readers will have seen or guessed at. His stories take us places that are familiar yet unknown.