Middle East
Lisa Anderson
The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel: Promise Unfulfilled
By Dahlia Scheindlin. De Gruyter, 2023, 277 pp.
Candid, forthright, and often courageous, this book cuts through decades of bromides, wishful thinking, and unconstructive ambiguity to assess the long and painful struggle to establish democracy in Israel. Scheindlin, a political consultant and polling expert, was an astute guide to the upheavals occasioned by the Israeli government’s proposed judicial reforms in the spring of 2023. In this book, she begins the story of Israeli democracy in the early years of Zionism. She provides a brisk, fresh history, avoiding many of the now hackneyed assessments of the myriad virtues and vices of Israel’s leaders, instead crafting a lucid assessment of the conflicting ideological and political commitments that have weakened democracy in Israel—not least, the decades-long failure to acknowledge, much less resolve, the question of Israel’s relationship with the land and people of historic Palestine. The book concludes before the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, which paused but did not end the debate about democracy in Israel. It is an enormously valuable resource for understanding the Israeli reactions to the attack, as well as the challenges the country will still face when the guns fall silent.
How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare
By Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani and
Ali Vaez. Stanford University Press, 2024, 212 pp.
Economic sanctions are often viewed as preferable to war as a way to alter the strategic decisions of actors who violate international norms. Yet as the authors of this provocative critique suggest, sanctions can often be equally devastating. Whereas “just war” theory forbids inflicting harm on noncombatants, economic sanctions are subject to no such rules or norms. Sanctions can be highly destructive by weakening national economies, undermining health systems, and limiting access to foodstuffs and essential technologies— often strengthening the hand of the very governments the sanctions seek to undermine. Iran has been under increasingly draconian U.S. sanctions for more than 40 years to little apparent effect beyond hobbling the country’s economic development and deepening popular suspicion about American values and intentions. Nonetheless, these sanctions on Iran have mushroomed to include a dizzying array of prohibitions mandated by both the U.S. Congress and the White House and to target a multitude of actors. Compounded by bureaucratic inertia, the complexity of these sanctions makes it easier to keep Iran on the enemies list than to craft policy that would actually invite or reward good behavior.
My Friends: A Novel
By Hisham Matar. Random House, 2024, 416 pp.
This lyrical novel chronicles the friendship of three Libyans who find themselves in unexpected exile in London for what proves to be 27 years. Matar’s gentle storytelling captures the fear, loneliness, anger, and forbearance of very different young men thrown together by longing for their families, for familiar landscapes, and for the lives they had expected to lead. In a remarkable evocation of the daily experience of alienation and adaptation, Matar conveys how they come to terms with their lives in exile while remaining quietly unreconciled to their fates—still “strapped to the old country.”When the 2011 uprising against the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi erupts, the now middle-aged men confront the decades they have whiled away, stranded far from home, and two join the rebellion.This story is a haunting commentary on the long reach of tyranny.
We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World By Alex Rowell. Norton, 2023, 416 pp.
An eccentric but provocative retelling of the modern history of the Arab world, this book mixes insider accounts with sometimes far-fetched speculation to weave an entertaining story. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ruled from 1952 to 1970, helped reshape the political landscape of the Middle East. Rowell finds his fingerprints on virtually all the consequential events of his era. Some tales are useful reminders of an unhappy history—see, for example, what Nasser himself called his “Vietnam,” the civil war in Yemen, in which tens of thousands of Egyptian troops fought during the 1960s—whereas others seem less reflections of Nasser’s policy influence than the long reach of his charisma, such as his apparent endorsement of Libya’s new ruler, the star-struck Muammar al-Qaddafi, shortly before Nasser died in 1970. Rowell has a predilection for stomach-turning descriptions of torture and cruelty in prisons across the region, not all of which can be attributed to Nasser, and for what Rowell admits are “educated guesses” about the Egyptian president’s role in the many coups of the day in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Nonetheless, this is an engaging account of an important era in modern Middle Eastern history.
Building a New Yemen: Recovery, Transition, and the International Community
Edited by Amat Al Alim Alsoswa and Noel Brehony. I.B. Tauris, 2023, 248 pp.
This collection of essays is a useful primer on the politics and economics of Yemen, now mired in war and dysfunction. Although the authors do address the “fragmented interventions”of various international players, from the United States to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (Iran does not figure prominently), most of the contributions are devoted to detailed and instructive discussions of tangled local political alliances and the severe economic challenges with which any postwar settlement will
have to contend. One essay offers a useful description of the history of the Houthi political movement and its tortured relationship with various local governments. Another assesses the scandalous decline in living standards across the country, no matter who is in control. Damning descriptions of international aid programs whose donors seem not to have known or cared whom they were supporting intersect with equally negative assessments of local political venality and economic greed. It is hard to conjure a happy end to this story, but this book provides a clear-eyed appraisal of where a conclusion to Yemen’s long era of war will have to start.