Eight years after mass demonstrations began in Cairo, some observers wonder whether President Abdel Fattah el-Sis has led his country any differently from how his ousted predecessor Hosni Mubarak would have had done. Taking a different tack, many others have argued that the Middle East would have followed a dramatically different trajectory had Yitzḥak Rabin or Anwar Sadat not been assassinated. Martin Kramer, seeking to shed light on these questions, examines a series of transitions of power in the last 100 years of Middle Eastern history. He begins with the case of King Faisal I of Iraq, who died unexpectedly of heart failure in 1933:

If there is to be a resolution to the conflict between the Jewish state and a putative Palestinian one, writes Jonathan Michanie, it won’t start with drawing lines on maps or restrictions on where Jews can build houses, but with the Palestinian Authority (PA) abandoning its official anti-Semitism. The PA can, in this regard, learn much from those Arab nations that have recently made peace with Israel: