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Perspectives Papers

Perspectives Papers provide analysis from BESA Center research associates and other outside experts on the most important issues pertaining to Israel and the Middle East.

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The series of blows the US administration has dealt to the Palestinian Authority over the past year, from the announcement of the “Deal of the Century” to the normalization accords between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan, has led to an attempted reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. The Istanbul Agreement signed on September 24 reflects a rare commonality of interests between the two organizations, which understand the mood of the Palestinian public and are again trying to achieve unity even at the possible cost of Hamas taking over the PA and the PLO.
France has declared a state of emergency following the recent terrorist attack in Nice, and violent demonstrations are being held across the Arab and Muslim worlds amid calls for boycotts and terrorist attacks against France. Exacerbated by the severe economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, this crisis reflects France’s failure to integrate its Muslim minority and to set and enforce clear boundaries against anti-democratic and separatist tendencies within it.
Israel’s recent normalization of relations with the UAE and Bahrain changed the rules of the game in the region. The winners so far are Israel and Gulf Arab states. The losers are the Palestinian Authority, Turkey, Qatar, and Iran. The historic normalization of relations even has opponents inside Israel in the form of Arab-Israeli Knesset members, whose unanimous opposition represents the interests of the Palestinian Authority more than the interests of their own constituents.
No major power has attempted in earnest to mediate the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis, and some have actively participated in keeping the situation ablaze. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan have been actively preparing for hostilities, but Armenia finds itself at a political and military disadvantage.
While government officials and others have alleged a strategy that involves Russian-sponsored security organizations in recent escalations in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, these claims are largely misconceptions. The conventional wisdom fails to recognize these structures as representing alternative security perceptions held by Russia and other participating states rather than traditional NATO-style military alliances.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 posed a challenge to analysts and scholars. How could the election of so politically inexperienced a candidate, one with a highly controversial personality and a political orientation that differed from that of all his predecessors, possibly be explained? Most of the explanations tend to focus on the socio-economic and cultural grievances of primarily working-class white people from the Midwest and the South. These factors are also considered to exercise major influence on the rise of the “America First” orientation in Trump’s foreign policy. But the international context is also an important factor, and it is often overlooked.
The Turkish lira sank to a record low on October 22—a new blow for the Turkish economy, which has been battered by the coronavirus pandemic. The Islamist government led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is pursuing an increasingly daring neo-Ottoman policy throughout the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, a push that is motivated in part by the need to help the economy bounce back.
The vast, uninterrupted territory that contains North Korea, China, Pakistan, and Iran has greater geostrategic importance today than ever before. Of the two outermost countries of that territory, an anonymous senior US administration official recently said that "Iran and North Korea have resumed cooperation in the framework of a project on long-range missiles that includes the transfer of core components."

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