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  • Editor’s Note
  • Jacob Passel

Due to the ongoing threat of the coronavirus pandemic, this issue of The Middle East Journal is the first in our 74-year history that has been produced entirely remotely. This issue includes five articles that — while focusing on more usual areas of inquiry for today’s Middle East specialists: the United States’ role in Arab-Israeli diplomacy, the Islamic State organization (ISIS), and Iran — are all especially rich in their use of primary sources.

Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania returns to the pages of the Journal for his fourth article, offering a new explanatory model of what he calls “The Peace Process Carousel.” Recounting the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama, Professor Lustick shows how US presidents have found themselves caught in a repeating cycle of launching diplomatic initiatives, retreating from them due to domestic political pressure, and then increasing aid to Israel as compensation.

Williams College’s Galen Jackson looks at an earlier episode where a similar dynamic played out. “The Johnson Administration and Arab-Israeli Peacemaking after June 1967” gives a detailed, behind-the-scenes account of how senior US officials deliberated over United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which calls for Israel to withdraw from territories it occupied in that year’s war. Dr. Jackson uses the archival record to show how, despite its support for the principal of withdrawal, the Lyndon Johnson White House supported Resolution 242’s famously ambiguous phrasing and refrained from following up with a diplomatic initiative due to concerns of the Cold War and domestic politics.

Returning for his fifth article in the Journal, Sami Baroudi of Lebanese American University takes a very sweeping look at Arabic-language debates about the ideational sources of ISIS in “On Origins.” Surveying newspaper columns, journal articles, and scholarly books from 2014 through 2018, Professor Baroudi shows how mainstream Arab intellectuals traced ISIS’s ideology back to strands of thought within Islamic history. His article shows how the rise of ISIS disgusted Arab intellectuals so broadly that it led to challenges of long-held beliefs about Islamic tradition, interrogations of the merits of political Islam, and calls for religious and political reform while also playing into preexisting divisions in Arab politics and thought.

Our last two articles follow with a look back to an earlier rupture point in the modern history of the Middle East: the Iranian Revolution. In “They Were Going Together with the Ikhwan,” Freie Universität Berlin’s Siarhei Bohdan looks at how the publications of Muslim Brotherhood thinkers were translated and spread by Shi‘i Islamist activists in Iran as well as Afghanistan from the 1950s onward. Dr. Bohdan adds nuance to preconceptions about the immutability of the Sunni-Shi‘i split, while tapping into the literature on the syncretic origins of the ideology of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, much of which had focused less on overlaps with Sunni groups and more on coalitions between supporters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the political left.

Jaleh Jalili of Rice University provides a more detailed look at this latter relationship in “The Politics of Veiling in Iran and the Nonreligious Left in the Early 1980s.” Through a targeted snapshot of one particular news cycle in the summer of 1980, Dr. Jalili [End Page 175] shows how rival factions of Iranian communists and radical socialists responded to Ayatollah Khomei ni’s introduction of mandatory veiling. The left-wing newspapers’ coverage of the episode reveals how even secular groups that opposed veiling in theory nevertheless tended to prioritize their opposition to those protesting the veil, due to either political expediency, other ideological commitments, or both.

As usual, our articles are followed by the Chronology section. This issue covers a four-month period from November 2019 through mid-March 2020, documenting how the region went from being rocked by tumultuous protests to trying to contain the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. We then have our Book Reviews section, followed by Recent Publications.

This issue marks our last with Associate Editor Alika Alanovna Zangieva, who joined us last year after interning for MEI’s Digital Publications department in 2018, which included several months of...

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