One of the leaders of the ‘Nouveaux Philosophes’ movement in 1976, Levy has made contributions to many areas of philosophy. However, he has recently gained notoriety for his prominent and influential opinions regarding humanitarian intervention. As a man with a penchant for war zone tourism, Levy has trotted the glob in response to each new outbreak of conflict; ostensibly in order to attract public attention to the issue (and, arguably, to himself); each time proclaiming his solution to the crisis within a few weeks of arrival. That solution is frequently very similar – the West must intervene.

When the ‘Arab Spring’ reached Jordan in 2011, every local and international news outlet repeated the same message: ‘the people want to topple the regime’. But reflecting on my involvement with Jordan over the years, I wonder which ‘people’ they were referring to. The people off the street didn’t want to overthrow their King. On the street, the protests I drove past on the way to work called for evolution rather than revolution. Public gatherings, often claimed by the media as reaching the tens of thousands, were cancelled on numerous occasions due to low attendance. In stark contrast to the violent force employed in other Arab monarchies, the police were praised for handing out fruit juice to protestors. In fact, I often heard pro-reform bloggers and journalists being criticised as ‘attention-seeking nobodies’. Two years on, and 7,000 street demonstrations later, ‘the people’ have still not toppled the regime. This begs the question: what do the people want? Do the people want to keep their monarchy?

Like the queues in Qalandyia checkpoint and those in front of Laiki Bank, the demonstrations in Nabi Saleh and those in Syntagma Square seem worlds apart. And they are – a military occupation cannot be compared with austerity measures. However, even though there are many differences between the daily lives of Palestinians and Hellenic nations, they face similar bargaining problems and decisions towards the current status quo. In order to consider if they could apply similar solutions to strive for a brighter future, drawing comparisons between these two situations might help us better comprehend the similar bargaining problems they face.

Last Friday, the Oxford Union hosted the first in a series of talks entitled “Head to Head” organised by and filmed for Al Jazeera. In this first talk, Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hassan interviewed the outgoing head of the Yesha Council, Dani Dayan on the subject of Israeli settlements and the prospect for peace between Israel and Palestine. The Yesha Council is an umbrella organization of municipal councils of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and constitutes a formidable force within Israeli politics, pressing mainly for continuity of the settlement program. The talk presented a unique opportunity to question a leading defender of what many regard as one of the most flagrant and persistent breaches of international law by a democratic state today.

Much has been written about how the media misreported the Israeli elections and I want to briefly dispel two particular misconceptions. 1) The majority of Israelis did not vote against Benjamin Netanyahu. Polls indicate quite clearly that a majority of Israelis wanted to see Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Many voters, though, were opposed to the newly created alliance between his Likud Party and former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beyiteinu Party.

Personal, unmediated contact between the West and the Middle East is at an all time low, according to Egyptian tycoon and art collector, Shafik Gabr. His eponymous foundation has responded with an initiative sponsoring exchanges between ‘future leaders’ of the West and the Middle East in an effort to build real person-to-person relations. The UK launch at London’s Dorchester Hotel on November 15th aimed to start defining the deficiencies and potential for real dialogue between the West and the Middle East.

“Our revolution was hijacked,” Mahmoud, a young protestor from Yemen, told me in one of our discussions. “We stand no chance against the established powers in any elections,” said Marwa, another young protestor from Egypt. Mahmoud and Marwa represent millions of similar young Arabs who ignited and led the uprisings in their countries, aspiring for a new future where each one of them will have an equal say in the political process. They are now increasingly disappointed and frustrated with their new reality, and the top reason for their frustration is political finance. The Deepening Democracy report, published by the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy & Security, highlights that “The rise of uncontrolled political finance threatens to hollow out democracy …

The Arab awakening arguably represents the most important transformation of Middle Eastern politics since the end of colonialism. How will the regional powers adjust their foreign policies to the new regional environment is however still extremely uncertain. This uncertainty is partially due to the well-known inability of international relations scholars to make assured predictions, but also to the fact that the dynamics of foreign policy shifts are still widely overlooked and generally misunderstood in the scientific literature. Is ‘foreign policy change’ a mere adaptation to changes taking place in the domestic arena, as argued by most IR liberals? Or is foreign policy behaviour wholly dependent on the international distribution of power, as argued by realists? Or is there room for autonomous decisions that are not only reactions to exogenous sources of change, but are purposive and proactive actions in their own right? The Arab awakening will most likely be a crucial case study to test each of these hypotheses.