Senior Editor, Democracy in Exile, and an analyst of Middle Eastern affairs.
In 2025, Democracy in Exile, DAWN's Journal, covered a wide range of topics across the Middle East and North Africa, with particular and continuing focus on Gaza and the broader Israel-Palestine conflict. The journal focused heavily on local Palestinian voices in the Strip and across the Occupied Palestinian Territory amid so-called "ceasefires" and the brutal Israeli genocide, aiming to provide our readers with perspectives as lived through the eyes of those experiencing the situation on the ground.
Yet, like previous years, Democracy in Exile elevated both local and expert voices across the region, ranging from the coordinated U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran in June to worsening political freedoms and civil liberties in countries as diverse as Jordan, Tunisia, and the Gulf monarchies. Similarly, our team highlighted ongoing conflict and post-conflict dynamics in Syria, Libya Yemen through op-eds, roundtables and other digital publications.
The journal continued its long-running interviews with leading voices focused on human rights, democracy and U.S. foreign policy across the region and at home, from former U.S. official Robert Malley to pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil. Highlighting Democracy in Exile's further range, our team published book reviews, poetry and local dispatches, ensuring broad coverage of the region's cultural, political and security dynamics.
As 2025 closes and 2026 begins, our team at Democracy in Exile hopes that our top articles across the year highlight the experiences and perspectives of those in and from the region, alongside the interests of our readers. From these perspectives and our desks, we cannot thank you enough for your support for Democracy in Exile, now and in the future.
1- How Western Media Has Manufactured Consent for Atrocities, From Iraq to Gaza
By Assal Rad
The world has changed a great deal since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Social media, smartphones, independent journalism and citizen journalists in Gaza have shown Americans, and everyone around the world, what the U.S. government and media have tried to hide. As Israel commits atrocities in Gaza with U.S. weapons and tax dollars, it is time for Western journalists to rectify the mistakes of the past and report the truth.
2- 'The Exceptions Have Become the Rule.' Naomi Klein on Trump, Gaza and the End of the 'Liberal Order'
Interview by Omid Memarian
3- A Region Holding Its Breath: After the Israel-Iran War
By Yahia Lababidi
If the leaders in Washington and Tel Aviv believe that bombs can purchase obedience, they have misread the grammar of history. Violence may cow a people for a season, but it does not give shape to order. It does not mend what has been broken. It cannot build what it destroys.
4- Starvation by Design: How Israel Turned Gaza's Siege Into Famine
By Ghada al-Rozzi
Gaza is more than a strip of land under siege. It is a mirror held up to the world's collective conscience. The question is not whether famine will be declared officially—it is already here—but whether the international community will allow hunger to be leveraged as a legitimate weapon of war.
5- Ten Years After Saudi Arabia's Intervention in Yemen, There Is Only Irreparable Loss
By Afrah Nasser
For Yemenis, the past decade has been a cascade of wasted years, shattered hopes and unimaginable suffering. The youngest generation has known nothing but the horrors of this brutal conflict. In gatherings today, people recount everything they have had to endure. A mother points to her 9-year-old son: "I gave birth to my son in a hospital while coalition bombs fell on the funeral hall. Remember that day? That's when he was born." Another father calmly describes how he lost his teenage son to a bullet fired by a Houthi sniper in Taiz. Yemenis joke darkly that by the time there is any real redress for all the war's destruction, it won't be enough to just rebuild. They would need these lost 10 years given back to them—an impossible demand for an irreparable loss.
6- Assad's Fall in Syria Confounds the UAE's Staunchly Anti-Islamist Agenda
By Mira Al Hussein
Instead of recalibrating its approach, the UAE will likely double down on its hard-line stance in the name of authoritarian stability. Yet this inflexibility risks further isolating the UAE from the shifting dynamics of the region, as it persists in advancing its narrow, anti-Islamist vision that is increasingly at odds with the complex and fluid realities of the Middle East.
7- "Tomorrow is Yesterday:" Robert Malley on his New Book with Hussein Agha, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, and October 7
Interview by Alexander Langlois
The best guide to the future is what happened yesterday. And that, to dig a little more deeply into what we've lived through—the peace process, the Oslo process, the U.S. mediated negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians—in many ways turned out to be a con game. A charade.
8- Trump's Geopolitical Blackmail of Jordan Puts King Abdullah in a Bind
By Sean Yom
However things play out in Gaza, this tense episode illustrates a useful lesson in unintended consequences. Autocratic rule in Jordan was built on generations of generous U.S. support that gave its monarchy vast autonomy to govern however it wanted. It is difficult to imagine how the kingdom would fare without American dollars and arms, because it has seldom had to do so. If the U.S. exits this patron-client relationship now—for instance, by threatening to abandon Jordan entirely should it refuse Trump's ridiculous idea for forcibly relocating Palestinians from Gaza—the country has no back-up plan.
9- The U.S. Department of State's Bahrain Human Rights Report is Woefully Inadequate
By Drewery Dyke and Sayed Yusuf Almuhafdha
Bahrain's [human rights] report distorts developments in 2024, overemphasizing and inventing positive developments without acknowledging issues and cases that previous reports highlighted. The State Department reiterates the opaque and ambiguous legal provisions relied upon by the Government of Bahrain (GoB) to carry out arbitrary arrests: namely, "public morals," "defying authorities" and "national security." The 2024 report describes these subjects as "sensitive" instead of acknowledging that such laws aim to control public spaces and suppress essential freedoms—even those of children.
10- A Crisis of Statelessness: Inside Kuwait's Mass Revocation of Citizenship
By Ahmad Benswait
It is not just vulnerable, law-abiding women whose rights are being sacrificed for the sake of the ruling Sabah family and its empty gestures about Kuwait's so-called political openness. It is any claim that Kuwait is committed to a shred of democracy, the rule of law or fundamental rights and freedoms at all.
11- The Rise and Demise of America's Only Sanctions on Israel
By Mohsen Farshneshani and Sarah Leah Whitson
The Biden administration's failure to follow through on its executive order revealed how fragile and ineffective sanctions programs become without White House resolve. As the Trump administration signals an imminent return to his first-term policy of abandoning the West Bank—and now Gaza—to ethnic cleansing and annexation, other countries must step up, as seen with the formation of The Hague Group, which was established to enforce International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court rulings against Israel. It is essential that those in Israel-Palestine driving expansionist policies designed to dispossess and displace Palestinian civilians face meaningful consequences.
12- 'I Was Put in Jail for Being Palestinian.' Mahmoud Khalil on Protest, Liberation and Political Prisoners
Interview by Omid Memarian
"A lot of people think that what's happening is very far from our doors. They are so wrong," Khalil says. "It's literally at our door. What's happened to me is a testament to that."
13- The Death of Amr: Portrait of a Genocide
By Chris Hedges
Amr's uncle shows me a video of Amr's mother keening over his corpse.
"My son, my son, my beloved son," she laments in the video, her left hand tenderly stroking his face. "I don't know what I will do without you."
They buried Amr in a makeshift grave.
14- A Displaced Routine under Genocide: A Day in My Life as a Palestinian
By Yahya al-Masri
Through it all, we remember who we are: a people who have been displaced, oppressed and crushed under the weight of history. But we are also a people who resist, endure and never forget. We carry our past with us. We build our future one step at a time. For in the heart of darkness, there is always hope.
We continue. We survive. We dream of a new dawn.
15- The Threats to Syria's Political Transition: A Democracy in Exile Roundtable
Featuring Lina Sergie Attar, Amr Al-Azm, Loubna Mrie, Thanassis Cambanis, Ambassador Frederic C. Hof, Line Khatib, Mohamad Bazzi, Steven Heydemann, Sam Heller, Ammar Azzouz and Ola Suliman
The way forward is not through changing flags or pledging blind loyalty to new leaders—it's through finding common ground and seeing each other as Syrians for the first time. – Lina Sergie Attar
16- A Decade in Exile: Watching Egypt Slip Further Into Repression and Ruin
By Maged Mandour
No one is safe—from Egypt to Gaza—because the world has proven unwilling to stop the repression, torture and murder of innocent life. Autocracy and injustice thrive and spread when leaders fail to halt their advance or hold autocrats accountable.
17- The Trump Administration is Enabling and Exploiting the Saudi Regime's Repression
By Yahya Assiri
This deterioration of rights in Saudi Arabia is not only a Saudi tragedy but a global warning. The normalization of repression and the acceptance of state violence create a world that worships raw power—the kind admired by Trump and enacted by MBS. To remain silent is to endorse a return to darkness. Every person, institution and government that fails to stand with human dignity becomes complicit in this alarming retreat from justice and humanity.
18 – Will Hamas Disappear with Disarmament or Politically Rebrand?
By Ola Almadhoun
Today, Hamas faces no choice but to alter its core ideology and strategy if it wishes to secure a place in the political landscape acceptable to the United States, Israel and the Arab region.
19- In Gaza, My Two-Year-Old Daughter Has Only Known War and Destruction
By Shadi Salem
Massa did not choose to celebrate her birthday in war, but she was born in Gaza, where children grow up too soon, where innocence is tested in the harshest ways, and where celebrations are never what they should be.
20- Harvard Shouldn't Whitewash War Crimes in Gaza by Hiring Brett McGurk
By Harrison Mann
The very least Harvard and other elite institutions can do is stop laundering the reputations of the architects of an ongoing, generational atrocity.
