On May 28, 2026, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program (JKISP) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted a seminar with Yossi Melman, a longtime intelligence and security correspondent for Haaretz and author of ten books on Israel's intelligence community, including the New York Times bestseller Every Spy a Prince. Amichai Magen, Director of JKISP, introduced the talk, and Or Rabinowitz, Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies, led the conversation. Melman said Israel's 2026 war plan against Iran included an attempt to install former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a regime-change figurehead, an idea Mossad had cultivated for years through contacts made during his foreign travels. The plan collapsed when a strike meant only to kill Ahmadinejad's guards wounded him instead, a scheme Melman called "ludicrous," noting that Iranian intelligence already suspected Ahmadinejad of being compromised. He pointed to the assassination of Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, on the war's first day as an example of the tactical side of Israeli intelligence working exactly as it should. Turning that kind of precision into a lasting strategic outcome is the part Israel keeps failing at, Melman said.

Asked to connect this pattern to October 7th, Melman discussed the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Egypt staged repeated military drills along the border before its real invasion and trained Israeli intelligence to expect nothing. Melman said the same pattern held in Gaza. Female spotters had warned for weeks about unusual activity along the border, but their commanders told them to report only what they saw, not what they thought it meant, and Hamas had activated and deactivated emergency communications twice in the weeks before the attack, so that when the real signal came, Israeli analysts dismissed it as another drill. Mossad, Shin Bet, and military intelligence were still arguing over who was responsible for Gaza nearly two decades after Israel's 2005 withdrawal, and Melman said that confusion over jurisdiction was part of the failure as well. Asked whether Israel deliberately strengthened Hamas to weaken the Palestinian Authority, Melman said yes, since Hamas, unlike the Palestinian Authority, will never be negotiated with, which made it a useful tool for a government that wanted to keep the Palestinians divided. The biggest threat facing Israel right now, Melman said, is not Iran, Gaza, or Hezbollah, but rather the country's own internal polarization.

On May 26, 2026, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program (JKISP) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted a panel titled "Cross-Sectoral Mobilization in Defense of Democracy," part of a series on global democratic resistance organized in collaboration with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School; the Cornell Center on Global Democracy; Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania; the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame; the Democratic Futures Project at the University of Virginia; and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Amichai Magen, Director of JKISP, moderated alongside Ben Yoel, an incoming postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL for the 2026-27 academic year. They were joined by three founders of Israel's Protest Headquarters, the coordinating body behind the 2023 movement against the government's judicial overhaul: Yossi Kucik, former Director-General of Israel's Prime Minister's Office; Orni Petruschka, a former fighter pilot turned tech entrepreneur; and Advocate Dina Zilber, former Deputy Attorney General of Israel. Zilber said the crisis represented a shift “from policy conflict to regime conflict.” The government's plan would have let politicians pick judges and override Supreme Court rulings, among other changes, and Zilber said that went well beyond a normal reform. Kucik added that the Headquarters decided early on that its founders would act as enablers, not leaders. There were two hundred separate protest groups with their own methods and politics, he said, and no one person could have run all of them. The group adopted the Israeli flag and national anthem as symbols. They branded the government's plan a "judicial coup," and Kucik said they decided early on to stay nonviolent and to fight specific policies rather than try to topple the government outright.

Petruschka said funding came in approximately equal thirds from crowdfunding, Israeli philanthropists, and the Jewish diaspora. Zilber credited a volunteer network of 150 legal academics for writing up plain-language explanations of each proposed law as it came out, which provided “a nationwide civics lesson.” Petruschka said many protests around the world would benefit from the headquarters model. One concern for protest movements worldwide, according to Zilber, is the need to turn civic energy into political power, since voters choose parties, not protests. They also need a governing plan ready for the day after they win; Zilber pointed to Poland as a case where that did not occur. Kucik expressed concern that the Headquarters’s refraining from adopting an explicit goal to topple the government may have cost momentum. However, he noted the protests’ success; for example, an attempt to fire the defense minister over Haredi military conscription brought around a million people into the streets within minutes and pushed coalition partners towards near-defection, leading Netanyahu to draw back on his reforms. Petruschka said the movement's momentum was cut short by October 7th, redirected toward wartime relief, and has since folded into the campaign for Israel's coming elections.

On May 21, 2026, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program (JKISP) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted Ambassador Daniel Shapiro for the latest installment of its Israel Insights webinar series. Ambassador Shapiro, a distinguished fellow with the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, joined Amichai Magen, Director of JKISP, and Or Rabinowitz, Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies. Ambassador Shapiro described the Trump administration as caught between three unappealing options on Iran's nuclear program: an ongoing stalemate over the closed Strait of Hormuz, military escalation that risks a global economic crisis, or a far weaker nuclear deal than Trump has demanded. He discussed similar issues of refusal to disarm obstructing negotiations in Lebanon, where Hezbollah's refusal to disarm blocks normalization despite new talks among ambassadors in Washington, and Gaza, where Hamas's refusal to disarm has stalled the transition to non-Hamas governance.

On U.S.-Israel relations, Ambassador Shapiro said Israel's standing in American public opinion is the lowest he recalls, primarily due to the toll of the Gaza war, but also due to the rightward drift of Netanyahu's coalition and Netanyahu's history of partisan relationships within U.S. politics. He outlined the difference between legitimate debate over the terms of U.S.-Israel security assistance and arguments that question Israel's existence as a state. Looking ahead to Israel's elections, expected between September and October, Ambassador Shapiro argued that rather than a pro- versus anti-Netanyahu split affecting the outcome, votes will be affected by public opinion on whether the government succeeded against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran; Israel's eroded international standing; and the ultra-Orthodox exemption from military service. Asked to close with his thoughts on Israeli-Saudi normalization, Ambassador Shapiro, drawing on his direct involvement in pre-October 7th talks and a return trip to Saudi Arabia in December, explained how the widening Saudi-UAE regional rift and the unresolved Iran war further complicate Riyadh's existing conditions for a deal.

On April 16, 2026, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program (JKISP) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted political theorist Tomer Persico for the 20th installment of its Israel Insights webinar series. Persico, a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and Senior Research Scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, joined Amichai Magen, Director of JKISP,  and Or Rabinowitz, Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies, to trace liberalism's surprising roots in Zionism's founding — including the once-overlooked fact that Menachem Begin's Herut party, not the ruling socialist left, was Israel's most consistent liberal force in its early decades — through its 1990s peak and into its present crisis. Persico argued that liberalism's troubles stem not from failure but from success: having become "the only game in town" after the Soviet collapse, it lost the ideological competitors that once distracted from its core weakness, namely that liberalism is an arrangement rather than a story, and cannot tell people who they are or where they belong. That vacuum, he said, is now filled by populism on the right and identitarian politics on the left, and in Israel, by religious fundamentalism.

Pressed by Magen on whether liberalism can defend itself against illiberal threats — from autonomy's corrosion of community to AI's challenge to human-centered politics — Persico argued that liberalism must be paired with complementary sources of meaning, such as tradition, religion, and nationalism, rather than trying to supply its own story. Turning to Israel's coming elections, he criticized Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, calling them fundamentalists pursuing a theocratic "halachic state," and argued the Likud has shifted from a liberal to a populist party under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since 2015. He said the liberal camp must reclaim patriotism and Judaism itself from the religious right, rather than cede both. "We can have authentic, real Judaism as secular people, or as liberal religious people," he said, warning that failing to do so risks producing "a Jewish Iran."

At a moment marked by war, regional fragmentation, and mounting uncertainty across the Middle East, the Program on Arab Reform and Development (ARD) at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted a wide-ranging conversation between historian and Middle East scholar Joel Beinin and Hesham Sallam, CDDRL Senior Research Scholar and ARD Associate Director.

The discussion explored how the region’s current crises fit within longer historical trajectories, and what they may signal for the future of political order, state power, and social movements in the Arab world.

Throughout the conversation, Beinin situated contemporary wars and political ruptures within broader histories of authoritarianism, imperial intervention, and the erosion of regional political cohesion. The discussion ranged from the legacies of the post-9/11 era to the fragmentation of the Arab regional order, the failures of democratization, and the global rise of the far right.

Here are five major takeaways from the discussion:

1. The current moment is not simply another regional crisis — it reflects the fragmentation of the Arab order itself.

One of the central themes of the discussion was that today’s regional turmoil differs fundamentally from earlier periods of instability. Beinin argued that while the Arab world has long experienced cycles of war, authoritarianism, and external intervention, the current period is distinctive because the very idea of a coherent “Arab world” has weakened dramatically.

As Beinin put it, “A quarter of a century ago, you could still talk about the Arab world with a certain sense of unity… and today, increasingly, it doesn’t.” He stressed that this fragmentation is not merely geopolitical but also political and ideological. Regional powers now pursue sharply divergent agendas, while many traditional centers of Arab political and cultural influence have declined.

Egypt occupied a central place in this analysis. Beinin argued that Egypt, historically viewed as a political and cultural anchor of the Arab world, can no longer plausibly play a regional leadership role. He described the Egyptian regime as deeply constrained by debt crises, Gulf dependency, and intensifying authoritarian rule. Meanwhile, Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) increasingly shape regional politics, albeit without the broader political legitimacy or cultural influence once associated with Cairo.

The result, according to Beinin, is a region characterized less by shared political trajectories than by fragmentation, competing alignments, and increasingly localized struggles for survival and authority.

2. The legacies of the post-9/11 era continue to shape U.S. policy toward the Middle East.

Early in the conversation, Sallam read aloud a passage from President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, warning that the United States “will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” Sallam then revealed that the quotation was not from President Donald Trump, but from Bush in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

The exchange set up one of the discussion’s recurring themes: the persistence of interventionist frameworks in American political discourse on the Middle East.

Beinin argued that much of contemporary U.S. rhetoric surrounding Iran reproduces assumptions and narratives that shaped the run-up to the Iraq War. “None of it was true when they said it about Iraq,” he remarked, “and none of it is true when they’re saying it about Iran.”

More broadly, he suggested that the post-9/11 political climate fundamentally reshaped how the United States discussed the region. Reflecting on the years after the September 11 attacks, Beinin described g a political atmosphere in which attempts to contextualize regional dynamics were frequently dismissed as apologetics for extremism.

The conversation repeatedly returned to the dangers of reducing regional politics to moral binaries or civilizational narratives. Instead, Beinin emphasized the importance of historically grounded analysis attentive to state interests, political economy, and international power relations.

3. The authoritarian restoration after the Arab uprisings has become deeper and more punitive.

Another major takeaway concerned the aftermath of the Arab uprisings of 2010-2011 and the broader trajectory of authoritarianism in the region.

Beinin argued that states such as Egypt and Tunisia have emerged from the post-uprising period with harsher and more consolidated forms of authoritarian rule than existed prior to 2011. “Any kind of political, civil, even to some degree cultural resistance has been stamped out,” he said, citing the expansion of surveillance, imprisonment, and repression.

Yet the discussion also rejected the simplistic notion that the Arab uprisings were meaningless failures. Beinin pointed to later protest waves in Sudan and Algeria during 2019–2020 as evidence that activists and civil movements had absorbed important lessons from the earlier uprisings.

In Sudan in particular, he argued, protest movements understood that “the army is not on the side of the people,” reflecting a deeper awareness of how military institutions could derail revolutionary transitions. At the same time, Beinin stressed that regional interventions by Gulf powers played a major role in undermining these movements. He described how competing regional actors backed rival military factions, contributing to fragmentation and ultimately overwhelming civilian political forces.

The broader implication was that authoritarian resilience in the Arab world cannot be understood solely through domestic dynamics. Regional rivalries, external funding networks, and transnational counterrevolutionary alliances all play a central role in shaping political outcomes.

4. The Middle East’s crises are increasingly tied to a broader global rightward shift.

While much of the conversation focused specifically on the Arab world, Beinin consistently situated regional developments within broader international trends.

He argued that the current moment reflects not only regional disarray but also the rise of increasingly exclusionary and authoritarian political currents globally. Beinin pointed to “a hard lurch to the right” in multiple countries, including Israel, India, and parts of Europe.

This international dimension, he suggested, has profound implications for the Middle East. The rise of nationalist and authoritarian politics globally has helped normalize more extreme forms of militarism, ethnonationalism, and state violence. It has also weakened many of the international norms and institutions that once constrained state behavior, however imperfectly.

The discussion of Israel occupied a particularly important place here. Beinin linked Israel’s rightward shift to broader transformations in global politics. At several points, the conversation underscored how the wars in Gaza and Lebanon cannot be understood in isolation from these wider ideological and geopolitical currents.

Rather than treating the Middle East as uniquely unstable or exceptional, Beinin repeatedly encouraged the audience to see the region as deeply connected to broader crises of democracy, inequality, nationalism, and authoritarianism unfolding globally.

5. Historical perspective remains essential in moments of upheaval.

Perhaps the most important theme running through the conversation was methodological rather than purely political: the insistence on historical perspective in moments of crisis.

At the outset of the event, Sallam emphasized that the purpose of the discussion was “not to chase after the headlines,” but rather to “take the long view” and place contemporary developments “in conversation with scholarly research and debates.”

Throughout the conversation, Beinin repeatedly cautioned against analyses driven solely by immediate events, media cycles, or simplistic geopolitical narratives. Instead, he urged audiences to understand contemporary wars and political transformations as products of longer histories involving colonial legacies, state formation, authoritarian restructuring, social movements, and international intervention.

The discussion ultimately offered no easy optimism about the region’s future. Yet it also rejected fatalistic portrayals of the Arab world as uniquely doomed to instability. Instead, the conversation highlighted the importance of historical memory, critical scholarship, and political analysis capable of connecting contemporary crises to deeper structural processes.

A full recording of the conversation can be viewed below: