PHILADELPHIA – September 1, 2026 – The Fall 2026 Middle East Quarterly (MEQ) features four new research studies: the machinery behind Iran’s antisemitic propaganda, the India-Israel strategic partnership, church politics in the Holy Land, and the case for a unity government after Israel’s October election.
The authors document a 36-language state broadcaster, Holocaust-denial think tanks, Tehran conferences for Western activists and conspiracy theorists, and legal networks that carried the genocide charge against Israel into the United Nations after October 7.
In “Iran’s Islamist Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism (Part 2): The Propaganda Industry” (click here), Ofira Seliktar and Farhad Rezaei map the infrastructure the Islamic Republic built to spread the narratives traced in Part 1. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei framed the effort as a “jihad of information.” The authors document a 36-language state broadcaster, Holocaust-denial think tanks, Tehran conferences for Western activists and conspiracy theorists, and legal networks that carried the genocide charge against Israel into the United Nations after October 7. Israel and the West, they conclude, must treat soft warfare as a critical component of contemporary warfare.
Imran Khurshid charts India’s turn toward Israel in “Strategic Partners in Practice: India and Israel’s Multidimensional Engagement” (click here). Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s February 2026 state visit produced 27 outcomes, including 17 agreements on defense co-production, cybersecurity, and space. Khurshid traces the trust behind them to Israel’s quiet military support for India in 1962, 1965, 1971, and Kargil in 1999, and to Israeli systems deployed in Operation Sindoor in 2025. The partnership, he argues, is pragmatic and interest-driven rather than ideological.
André Villeneuve examines the January 2026 statement by Jerusalem’s church leaders condemning Christian Zionism as a damaging ideology in “Timeless Theology or Dhimmi Diplomacy?: Christian Zionism and Church Politics in the Holy Land” (click here). American Catholic pundits treated it as settled doctrine. Villeneuve argues it was church politics, issued under pressure from the Palestinian Authority and Jordan’s Islamic Waqf and aimed at Lt. Col. (res.) Ihab Shlayan, the highest-ranking Christian officer in IDF history. Behind it stands a growing movement of Israeli Christians who identify as Arameans, serve in the IDF, and see Jewish sovereignty as their best protection.
Villeneuve argues it was church politics, issued under pressure from the Palestinian Authority and Jordan’s Islamic Waqf and aimed at Lt. Col. (res.) Ihab Shlayan, the highest-ranking Christian officer in IDF history.
Colin Winston, a 30-year CIA Middle East analyst, looks beyond Israel’s October 27 election in “For a ‘Big Bang’ in Israeli Politics” (click here). Neither Netanyahu’s coalition nor a narrow opposition government, he argues, can confront Israel’s two gravest internal threats: nearly 1.5 million Haredim who neither serve in the IDF nor receive a modern education, and settler violence that rose 27 percent in 2025 and risks a third intifada. His remedy: a Zionist unity government from Likud to the center-left, minus the Haredi parties and the far right.
The Fall 2026 issue also reviews ten new books (click here), including Patrick Clawson on A Daring Enterprise, Robert Ellis on Suzy Hansen’s From Life Itself, Judith Friedman Rosen on Roy K. Altman’s Israel on Trial, Bruce Maddy-Weitzman on Brahim El Guabli’s Desert Imaginations, and Jacob Goldberg on David Commins’s Saudi Arabia: A Modern History.
The Fall 2026 issue is available now at https://www.meforum.org/meq.
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