Editor's Note

This issue is dedicated to the memory of Ambassador Richard B. Parker, 1923-2011, third Editor of The Middle East Journal.

The dramatic, revolutionary changes that have rocked the Middle East since the appearance of our last issue have caught veteran students of the region by surprise, as they have regional leaders accustomed to public acquiescence in the status quo. The past, at times, seems an unreliable guide to the present and future; so much we thought we knew and understood is being proven wrong. A quarterly such as The Middle East Journal cannot hope to address rapidly changing circumstances, but the online publications and podcasts of regular events sponsored by the Middle East Institute, which may be accessed at http://www.mei.edu, are a convenient way of accessing multiple viewpoints in a revolutionary time. My own comments can be read at the MEI Editor's Blog, at http://mideasti.blogspot.com.

This issue, with its articles researched and written long before the dramatic events of recent weeks, nevertheless helps to provide a depth of understanding of the history and culture of the peoples of the Middle East, more necessary than ever in a period of rapid and unpredictable change.

The issue contains two studies of Syria, one by Professor Joshua Stacher on how to analyze the hereditary succession of the presidency within the al-Asad family, and a more historical article by Professor Joshua Teitelbaum on the early organizational history of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood through 1958.

Two articles deal with issues in modern Israeli society: one, by Professor Willliam F.S. Miles, studies Israeli texts and atlases and how they have dealt with the questions of Israel's borders; the other, by Matt Evans, examines the role of the Israeli media as it relates to the conflict beween secular and orthodox Jews.

Our final article, by Hilde Henriksen Waage, is a historical study revisiting the Rhodes Armistice negotiations between Israel and Egypt in 1949, based in part on newly available documents.

The book review article by Neil Caplan, on Arab and Israeli narratives of the Holocaust, introduces our usual full Book Review section, and of course we have, as always, our quarterly Chronology.

You may have noticed above that this issue is dedicated to the memory of Ambassador Richard B. Parker, the third Editor of this journal, who died on January 7 at the age of 87. A former US Ambassador to Morocco, Algeria, and Lebanon, and author or editor of numerous books, he also served as the third Editor of this publication, as well as serving MEI as a Scholar-in-Residence, and as a member of the Board of Governors and the Board of Advisory Editors. I published a lengthy tribute to Dick Parker on the MEI Editor's Blog, and the whole reminiscence may be found at this blog post from January 9: http://mideasti.blogspot.com/2011/01/ambassador-richard-b-parker-1923-2011.html. I will not repeat all of it here, but do want to pay tribute to his role as Editor of The Middle East Journal.

When Dick Parker took over the pubiction, his predecessor, William Sands, had held the job for 25 years; many people could remember no other Editor. Yet Ambassador Parker quickly put his own stamp on the Journal. He served as Editor for almost seven years, 1981-1987, and returned as Acting Editor for one issue in 1995. He began his tenure with this tribute to Sands:

After 25 years as the guiding spirit of this publication, Bill Sands has retired from his position as Editor ... Although there has been an explosion of publications on the Middle East in the past ten years, and Bill and a few other pioneers carried the torch through the wilderness with very little encouragement and support ...

(The Middle East Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1, Winter 1981)

Although the prologue where those words appeared was at first called "Comment," it was the beginning of what became the "Editor's Note" at the front of the issue, and which has continued since. I don't know how many people bother to read it...