Behind the barricades
IN A YEAR of fulfilled expectations and confounded hopes, false dawns and long darkness, honest agreements and broken promises -- a year, in sum, both like and unlike any other, a year in which everything was less and more than what it seemed -- the Intifada exploded. History is rife with such moments: just when everything, it appears, is firmly under control, the actors who a moment before had been preparing to exit stage left throw away the script, and step forward.
--read on--

See Intifada in focus

Focus 2000:

Year of the Intifada
The party's over. Hani Shukrallah peers through the smoke

Ending the fiction
For Israel and the Palestinians, 2000 will be remembered as the year when war as diplomacy finally became diplomacy as war -- whether in the occupied territories or south Lebanon. Graham Usher in Jerusalem looks back and ahead

Democracy and its discontents
The parliamentary elections served as a magnifying glass that revealed the best and worst of Egyptian political life. Osama El-Ghazali Harb takes stock

Along the fault lines
The liquidity crisis is not just about money. Mahmoud Abdel-Fadil reviews a year of recession, and finds its roots go back in time

Déjà vu, take two
In appropriately postmodern fashion, a year of US politics has left spectators with a severe case of suspended disbelief. Ervin Hladnik-Milharcic has already seen the remake

Overturning the idols of inertia
This was a year of refreshing changes; but what of the challenges we failed to meet in 2000? Gamal Nkrumah contemplates a divided Third World

Struggling for alternatives
Samir Amin seeks possibilities beyond unequal partnerships and neoliberal conspiracies of silence

Gyrating intellects
Youssef Rakha recaps four seasons of culture in the public sphere