PHILADELPHIA – December 10, 2024 – The Winter 2025 edition of Middle East Quarterly contains original, ground-breaking, and accessible articles by Middle East specialists, along with book reviews.
In “Vindicating the Poisoned Chalice: Iran’s Creeping Invasion of Iraq,” Ofra Bengio looks into Iran’s growing power and reach in Iraq. She notes the “unprecedented strategic shift in the Iran-Iraq relationship, which has transformed Iraq into a quasi-vassal state of Iran.” She observes that Iran “has pursued its objective through a calculated, gradual strategy of encroachment across religious, cultural, economic, ideological, political, and security domains,” and concludes that “Iraq serves as a case study for examining Iran’s broader expansionist ambitions throughout the Middle East and beyond.”
In “War With Israel: Comparing IS and Al-Qaeda,” Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi observes the “sharply differing” views of ISIS and Al-Qaeda organizations regarding Hamas and Israel. ISIS, Tamimi argues, “maintains an ideologically purist position as opposed to Al-Qaeda’s expressions of populist solidarity.” Further, ISIS “has continued to emphasize the particular importance of opposing and fighting the Shiites as an essential component of rectifying the course of the Palestinian struggle—a position that is not adopted by Al-Qaeda even as it too is generally hostile to the Shiites.” This difference further affects the two organizations’ views regarding the current war, because of Shia Iran’s support for forces fighting Israel.
In “Why the Palestinian Authority Cannot Allow Free Speech,” Ido Zelkovitz looks at the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) restrictions on freedom of expression in the West Bank. The author contends that these “reflect its increasingly fragile political position. Amidst mounting challenges—a collapsing political system, a dysfunctional parliament, deteriorating economic conditions, and diminishing public support for Mahmoud Abbas—the PA has intensified efforts to maintain control. To this end, the PA has imposed a series of restrictive, often repressive measures, designed to curb freedom of expression.”
In “Turkey’s Demographic Engineering in Syria’s Afrin Region: A Closer Look,” Syrian Kurdish journalist Sirwan Kajjo details Turkey’s project of “demographic engineering” in the predominantly Kurdish area of Afrin in northwestern Syria. He reports that since conquering the area in 2018, Ankara has sought “systematically to alter Afrin’s ethnic composition by resettling Arab and Turkmen families.” He finds Turkey’s demographic engineering strategy in Afrin to be “multifaceted, involving forced displacement, destruction of historical sites, unauthorized settlement construction, and the seizure of agricultural lands and properties.” He argues that “deliberate resettlement of Arabs from other regions into traditionally Kurdish areas in the north threatens to exacerbate tensions, potentially sparking conflict not only in the north but across Syria.”
Book reviews cover a range of topics, including Israeli nuclear policy, the cultural dimension of immigration, the pilgrimage to Mecca, Iranian women, the hijab, and the experience of an Israeli Jew attending a Palestinian Islamic college.
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