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Mediating the Arab Uprisings speaks to several varied issues. From journalistic coverage and conflict/war reporting across the region to the representation of specific discourses on competing networks, the book is an extensive contestation of different levels of mediation.

The Poorer Nations takes up the story from the OPEC price hike in 1973, alongside the New International Economic Order (NIEO) debate of that year and the formation of the G7 the following year, through to the defeat of the Third World Project, to the formation of the BRICS group and the transformations in the South from below—including the Bolivarian initiative and the Arab Spring. It fills in the story left hanging at the end of The Darker Nations.

It is not a comprehensive history of US Middle East policy, or even of US policy on Palestine. Instead, it focuses on three “moments”: one is the period 1978-82; another is the 1991-93 negotiations; and the third is the last two years of Obama’s first term. I saw that the specific patterns of US bias in favor of inflexible Israeli positions, which we had seen in our negotiations with the Israelis under Bush and Clinton, were precisely mirrored before that in the Carter and Regan administrations, and that little or nothing has changed under this president.

I had just finished my book on the Green Movement, Iran, the Green Movement, and the USA: The Fox and the Paradox (2011), when the Arab Spring started, and it was only natural for me to continue that reflection into a wider domain. The Arab world is a second homeland to me. For the decades that I have not been able to go back to Iran, the Arab world, from Morocco to Lebanon and Syria down to Egypt and the Persian Gulf states, have been like home to me. Palestine in particular is central to my moral and imaginative geography. So everything—from my scholarship to my politics—came together for me to write this book.