分类： politics

Three months is all it took for 30-year-old Abhijeet Dipke to rise from obscurity to national fame – a level of public recognition that most grassroots Indian activists and politicians spend a lifetime chasing, and many never achieve at all. Today, Dipke is the public face of India’s viral Gen Z ‘cockroach protests’, a grassroots movement that has already forced a high-profile government concession and emerged as one of the most significant challenges to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration in recent years.

After 12 months of sustained legal challenge and widespread public advocacy, King’s College London (KCL) has reversed its disciplinary suspension of Egyptian student activist Usama Ghanem, who was penalized by the institution for his public pro-Palestine organizing. The outcome marks a landmark turning point for student activists across the United Kingdom who have pushed back against institutional crackdowns on Palestine-related political speech and protest. Ghanem, a former political refugee who fled Egypt after being imprisoned with his father and brother for opposing the Egyptian government in 2020, framed the ruling as a broader victory rather than a personal win. In an interview with Middle East Eye, he emphasized that the win extends beyond his own case. “After a year-long legal and public battle, I can now say that we took on a 200-year-old institution and we won,” Ghanem stated. “This sets a new precedent that university crackdowns on pro-Palestine speech and protest ought to be overturned.” The activist stressed that the reversal of his suspension is a victory for the dozens of other KCL students who have risked their academic standing to participate in pro-Palestine advocacy, as well as for student organizers across the UK and Western nations who have opposed restrictions on Palestine-focused activism. “But this is not a win for me. It is a win for the 25 other students who have put their degrees on the line,” he said. “This is their win, and the win of every single student at KCL, in London, across the UK, the West and beyond who campaigned against this crackdown.” Ghanem’s case carried uniquely high stakes due to his fragile immigration status in the UK. As someone who already faced persecution and imprisonment in his home country for political dissent, the suspension threw his right to remain in the UK into question, with Ghanem facing the imminent threat of deportation to Egypt, where he risked torture and further persecution. Documents included in his original KCL admissions application outlined the history of persecution his family faced at the hands of Egyptian security forces, meaning university leadership was fully aware of the risks his suspension posed to his safety, Ghanem confirmed. The reversal of Ghanem’s suspension unfolds against a backdrop of growing national controversy over the treatment of pro-Palestine student activists on UK university campuses, a conversation that intensified after Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza in October 2023. Student organizers and human rights campaigners have repeatedly accused UK higher education institutions of enacting disproportionate, politically motivated restrictions on speech and protest related to Palestinian rights, while university administrations have defended their disciplinary actions as necessary enforcement of existing institutional policies. Data collected last year by Liberty Investigates confirmed that KCL has disciplined more students for pro-Palestine activism than any other university across the United Kingdom. Activists have long argued that the wave of disciplinary action at the institution has created a chilling effect, discouraging students from exercising their right to peaceful protest and political expression. Middle East Eye has reached out to KCL for official comment on the reversal of Ghanem’s suspension, with no response released as of yet.

In an exclusive interview with Middle East Eye held in Eritrea’s capital Asmara, Eritrean Foreign Minister Osman Saleh has leveled a sharp accusation against the United Arab Emirates, claiming the Gulf state is pursuing a strategy of “port imperialism” across the African continent, particularly in the strategic Horn of Africa region.\n\nThe UAE’s two major state-linked port operators, DP World and AD Ports Group, currently hold stakes in or manage port infrastructure across multiple East African locations: Egypt, Tanzania, the self-declared independent Republic of Somaliland (recognized only by Israel), and Puntland, a semiautonomous region of Somalia that defied the central Somali government’s order to sever ties with Abu Dhabi earlier this year. While UAE investment in regional ports has drawn welcome from some host nations, Abu Dhabi’s push to secure port access along East Africa’s Indian Ocean and Red Sea coastlines has faced growing pushback from a number of regional governments. Djibouti terminated DP World’s operating concession for its main container terminal in 2018, and Sudan’s transitional government canceled a 2022 deal that would have allowed AD Ports to build a $6 billion new port on Sudan’s Red Sea coast. The UAE has been widely documented as a key backer of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group facing international accusations of perpetrating genocide and mass atrocities in its ongoing war against Sudan’s regular military.\n\nEritrea itself, a strategically positioned Red Sea nation with more than 700 miles of coastline, offers a clear case study in the wariness many regional states hold toward UAE expansion, even as Abu Dhabi has repeatedly denied any imperial ambitions in Africa. The UAE first established a military base at Eritrea’s southern Assab port in 2016, which it used to launch military operations against the Houthi movement in Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition. But relations between the two nations quickly deteriorated after the base was established.\n\nWhile Eritrea’s independence movement maintained historically warm ties with Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the founding father of the UAE, current Eritrean leadership has clashed repeatedly with UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. A senior unnamed Eritrean official confirmed to Middle East Eye that Asmara rejected a 2016 UAE request to build a shared military base for the UAE and Israel on one of the islands in Eritrea’s Dahlak Archipelago — a proposal that came nearly five years before the US-brokered Abraham Accords formalized public diplomatic ties between the two nations.\n\nUnlike the commercial port operation the UAE runs in Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam, many of Abu Dhabi’s other port acquisitions across the region have come paired with a permanent military presence, most notably at the Berbera port in Somaliland. When asked about DP World’s efforts to enter Eritrea, Saleh made Eritrea’s position clear: “We do not want any foreign power to have a ‘hub’ in Eritrea.”\n\nEritrea and the UAE now find themselves at odds across multiple regional theaters. In Sudan, the UAE backs the RSF, while Eritrea has hosted Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan twice in the two months prior to the interview; the Sudanese military is also backed by Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.\n\nIn the Horn of Africa’s broader power dynamics, Eritrea has found itself increasingly opposed to the growing alliance between the UAE, Ethiopia, and Israel. Eritrea and Ethiopia formed a temporary tactical alliance to fight the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) during Ethiopia’s 2020–2022 Tigray War, a conflict that saw widespread allegations of mass atrocities and war crimes committed by all sides. That alliance has since collapsed entirely, and the two nations are now openly hostile to one another. Ethiopia has accused Eritrea of supporting remnant TPLF factions, a charge Eritrea has repeatedly denied. Tensions have been further exacerbated by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s open claims to Eritrea’s Red Sea coastline. While Eritrea says it is open to negotiating a commercial access agreement for landlocked Ethiopia, Abiy has frequently framed his claims in expansionist, revisionist terms.\n\nIn recent years, Ethiopia has emerged as one of the UAE’s closest partners in the Horn of Africa. Abiy maintains a close personal relationship with Mohamed bin Zayed, Addis Ababa has deployed Emirati-built drones and other weapons systems in its internal conflicts, and multiple independent media outlets including Middle East Eye have confirmed Ethiopia hosts RSF training bases on its territory.\n\nEritrean officials in Asmara say they have observed growing military and political cooperation between the UAE and Israel in Ethiopia. For Eritrea, this alignment echoes a historical pattern: Israel provided military arms to Ethiopia’s Marxist Derg regime in the 1970s and 1980s, weapons that were used to suppress Eritrea’s independence struggle.\n\nSaleh emphasized that Israel and the UAE have already formalized their cooperation in Somaliland, where breakaway regional officials have openly stated they are seeking a permanent Israeli military presence. He drew a parallel between Abiy’s regional ambitions and Israeli expansionism, noting: “[Abiy Ahmed] has a two-waters strategy like Israel. Only for him it is from the Nile River to the Red Sea.”\n\nEven after establishing diplomatic relations immediately following Eritrea’s 1993 independence, and a pivotal 1993 incident where Israel provided life-saving medical treatment to Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki when he fell ill with cerebral malaria, relations between Asmara and Jerusalem have cooled dramatically in recent years. In response to growing regional alignment against Eritrea, Saleh said Asmara made the decision to expel the Israeli embassy and cut formal relations: “We are not antagonistic to Israel, but we just decided we didn’t want any relations.”\n\nSaleh closed by questioning the broader intentions of outside powers in the strategically critical Horn of Africa, asking: “We have to ask why Israel is running to control the Horn of Africa? Why do they need a base in Somaliland?”

In a major escalation of long-simmering bilateral discord, Algeria formally announced Thursday it is severing all diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates, a decision that came after Algiers said it had exhausted every possible avenue to preserve cooperative ties between the two nations.

The Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs outlined the break in an official public statement, noting that the country had repeatedly issued warnings to the UAE over what it describes as persistent hostile actions against Algerian interests. According to the statement, Algeria invested extensive diplomatic effort into drawing Abu Dhabi’s attention to the severe fallout that could stem from its “regrettable and unjustified behavior.”

“Despite these numerous warnings, the United Arab Emirates has persisted in these actions, which have reached a point where they can no longer be considered acceptable or tolerable within the framework of relations between two sovereign states, or remain unanswered,” the statement continued. The ministry confirmed it has formally notified the UAE’s ambassador to Algeria of the decision and issued a 48-hour deadline for the envoy to leave the country.

Tensions between the two North African and Gulf nations have built steadily over recent years, driven by growing Algerian concern over what regional analysts frame as the UAE’s increasingly destabilizing interventionist role across the broader Middle East and North Africa region. As far back as 2023, prominent Algerian daily newspaper Le Soir d’Algerie labeled the UAE a “pyromaniac state” in a scathing headline, condemning what it called the UAE’s harmful meddling along Algeria’s borders.

Over the past decade, the UAE has poured significant funding into authoritarian factions and breakaway movements across the Sahel and North Africa, according to regional security researchers. In war-torn Libya, Abu Dhabi has long backed eastern-based military strongman Khalifa Haftar, a sponsorship that deepened fragmentation within Libya and ripple instability into neighboring Chad, Sudan and Niger.

The UAE has also leveraged its presence in Libya to funnel military and political support to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia that has faced widespread international accusations of perpetrating genocide amid the ongoing Sudanese civil war. As early as April 2024, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune made public comments widely interpreted as a direct rebuke of the UAE, saying: “Wherever there is conflict, the money of this state [the Emirates] is there – in Mali, Libya, and Sudan.”

Tebboune has also made veiled, disparaging references to the UAE as a “dwarf state” that attempts to interfere in regional affairs from which Algeria has already blocked much larger global powers. He notably declined to name the country in those earlier remarks, choosing instead to criticize it indirectly for months before the formal diplomatic break.

Andreas Krieg, an associate professor of security studies at King’s College London, told Middle East Eye that the break was a long time in the making, and that its true significance extends far beyond the severing of ties itself to reveal how Algeria now views the UAE’s regional ambitions.

“Algiers has effectively concluded that Abu Dhabi’s regional playbook – cultivating what I call an ‘axis of secessionists,’ from Haftar in Libya to the RSF in Sudan to the southern movement in Yemen – was being turned toward Algeria itself,” Krieg explained.

Algeria has spent much of 2024 signaling its growing dissatisfaction with Abu Dhabi’s actions. Back in February, Algiers moved to cancel its bilateral air services agreement with the UAE. While no formal official explanation was issued for that decision, most regional analysts agree it was a direct response to the UAE’s continued intervention in territories along Algeria’s periphery.

Krieg noted that Algeria’s sharpest concern stems from suspected contact between the UAE and the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK), an autonomy movement that Algiers has designated a terrorist organization and views as an existential threat to national unity. That suspected contact crosses a clear red line for Algerian leadership, he added.

Earlier this year, when the UAE announced its early withdrawal from OPEC+, Tebboune publicly downplayed the move as a “non-event,” noting that Saudi Arabia remained the core pillar of the oil producers’ bloc, and adding that “the book is closed” on the UAE’s role in the grouping.

“The foreign ministry’s wording is the tell,” Krieg said. “It says the decision came ‘after exhausting all means’ to save the relationship, and it pointedly names no single trigger. That’s deliberate: this wasn’t one incident but an accumulation – the suspected outreach to separatists, the UAE’s military footprint in Libya and the Sahel, and Abu Dhabi’s backing of Morocco on Western Sahara, which for Algeria is the most sensitive file of all.”

“President Tebboune had spent the better part of a year railing against a ‘small state’ bent on stirring trouble; today he just stopped pretending it was anonymous,” Krieg added.

As Israel prepares for its snap parliamentary elections scheduled for October 27, a radical far-right figure with deep ties to a banned terrorist organization is on the cusp of securing a seat in the Knesset, according to reporting from Israeli outlet Haaretz. Tzachi Eliyahu, an avowed adherent of the Kahanist ideology, has secured the eighth spot on the candidate list of Otzma Yehudit, the far-right party led by current Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

Eliyahu’s open alignment with the racist Kach movement is impossible to miss: he carries a tattoo of the movement’s logo on his arm. Kach was founded by Meir Kahane, a radical Jewish supremacist rabbi who was assassinated in New York in 1990. The movement was formally outlawed across Israel and classified as a terrorist organization due to its explicitly racist agenda targeting Palestinians, which included open calls for the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from historic Palestine. The ban came into force in 1994, after Kach supporter Baruch Goldstein carried out a mass shooting that killed 29 Palestinian Muslim worshippers at Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque.

This is not Eliyahu’s first attempt to enter the Knesset. In 2023, when a vacancy opened up following the resignation of Noam party chairman Avi Maoz, Ben Gvir blocked Eliyahu from taking the seat. At the time, Ben Gvir – who has himself been previously convicted on charges of supporting the banned Kach movement – argued that Eliyahu’s visible Kach tattoo would harm the party’s public image, political sources familiar with the decision told Israeli outlet Srugim. A source told Srugim at the time that Eliyahu represented an older, unapologetic strain of Otzma Yehudit’s ideology, describing him as “that kind of Kahanist.”

Current polling, however, points to a strong performance for Otzma Yehudit, with projections showing the party winning between eight and 10 Knesset seats. If the polls hold, Eliyahu’s eighth place slot on the list will guarantee him a parliamentary seat. After the party formally submitted its full candidate list to Israel’s Central Elections Committee earlier this week, Ben Gvir publicly praised the slate, claiming he was “proud that we have the most diverse list in Israel.” Ben Gvir added that all Otzma Yehudit members carry “a lot of love for the people of Israel in our hearts.”

Beyond Eliyahu’s Kahanist ties, he has a long record of controversial and extremist actions. He has publicly expressed support for Elor Azaria, a former Israeli soldier convicted of manslaughter for the 2016 extrajudicial killing of an unarmed, wounded Palestinian man lying incapacitated on the ground in Hebron. In a social media post, Eliyahu called Azaria “the child of us all,” and claimed the soldier was right to “eliminate a terrorist at the scene.”

Eliyahu has also been repeatedly linked to violent clashes with anti-government protesters during Israel’s 2023 mass demonstrations against the Netanyahu government’s controversial judicial overhaul plan, with multiple reports documenting him personally attacking demonstrators. He has also targeted Palestinian journalists: he called for a confrontation with Palestinian Haaretz reporter Hanin Majadli at her home after she expressed support for an Israeli teacher fired for criticizing the Israeli military, writing, “Haaretz won’t fire her, but let’s make sure the police pay her a visit at home.”

Just months ago, in June 2024, Eliyahu joined other far-right activists to raise Israeli flags at the entrance to Kafr Kanna, a Palestinian-majority town in northern Israel. On social media platform Facebook, he spelled out his core political goal: “Our top mission as a government and as a people is to Judaise the Galilee and ensure the Jewish majority in the Land of Israel.”

Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit has already placed the so-called “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip at the top of its election platform, a term widely recognized as a euphemism for forced displacement and mass expulsion of Palestinian people from their land.