Editor’s Note

In September, amid pomp and celebration, the Middle East Institute returned to its historic home on N Street after two and a half years of renovations. With a new building, a new art gallery, a new logo, new research program, and new colleagues, MEI indeed feels like it is entering into a new era. The Middle East Journal will be launching our next volume with new branding in 2020, but in the meantime, we will continue to bring you Volume 73 with its familiar design.

While we were preparing this issue, we watched with great interest to see if Israel—spotlighted in this issue—might also enter a new era. In the first snap election in the country’s 72-year history, Israel looked like it might choose a new prime minister for the first time in more than a decade under Benjamin Netanyahu.¹

Netanyahu rose to prominence for his eloquence as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s and was elected chair of the right-wing Likud party in 1993. That same year Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin formally entered into the Oslo peace process with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which Netanyahu was an outspoken opponent of. Netanyahu would tell international media that Israel should find “another partner, not the PLO that remains committed to [Israel’s] destruction.”²

Dissatisfaction with the progress of the peace process brought Netanyahu into power for the first time in 1996. As prime minister, Netanyahu continued the Oslo negotiations, but he became famous for dragging his feet and trying to undermine talks. Although he lost reelection to “Rabin’s protégé,” Ehud Barak,³ Netanyahu’s cynicism would appear justified to many Israelis after the collapse of the peace process in 2000, and he would eventually return to power in early 2009, which he has held ever since.

Our first article, “Nobody to Talk to,” by American University’s Guy Ziv, tracks the history of how the notion that Israel lacks a viable Palestinian partner for peace has become axiomatic in Israeli politics for the last two decades. Ziv shares testimony from interviews he conducted with more than a dozen former top-ranking Israeli security officials, who argued that this axiom is not only false but harmful to the country’s long-term security interests.

A second article, “Stuck in the Logic of Oslo,” by Raffaella Del Sarto of The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, looks at how Europe has approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the collapse of the peace process. Del Sarto laments that, despite the situation on the ground, the European Union remains heavily invested in the Oslo process’s distorted “logic,” i.e., that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations should be held within a framework that supposes symmetry between Israel and the Palestinians. She argues that Europe’s policies are stuck due to its fragmented decision-making, the lack of an alternative path, and concerns for stability.

Moving on from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, our third article, by Qatar University’s Justin Gengler and Buthaina Al-Khelaifi, looks at the blockade on Qatar that began in June 2017. “Crisis, State Legitimacy, and Political Participation in a Non-Democracy” compares polls from before and after 2017 to determine the embargo’s impact on ordinary Qataris’ views. The surveys show that, despite their embrace of the country’s nondemocratic government, more Qataris have come to espouse positive views of democracy and political involvement since the blockade began.

Our fourth article shifts gears to Syria’s bloody civil war. Harout Akdedian, with both the Central European University and Portland State University, introduces accounts from dozens of Syrians from a variety of ethnic and religious communities to investigate how sectarianism became such a salient feature in Syria’s civil war. “Ethno-Religious Belonging in the Syrian Conflict” paints a picture of a pre-2011 Syrian society that was aware of the diversity of its communities but not characterized by dehumanizing sectarian politics.

This issue’s final article is a deep dive into an often-overlooked topic in the history of Saudi Arabia. In the 1950s and 1960s, as...