On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to allow 3,500 new Israeli settlements in a contested region of the West Bank known as the “E-1 zone,” short for East-1.

E-1 is an “underpopulated” strip of land located between East Jerusalem, which has been occupied by Israel since 1967, and the Ma’ale Adumim bloc, an Israeli settlement located in the West Bank. The E-1 zone is mostly inhabited by Bedouin Arab residents, Zachary Lockman, a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies and history at New York University, told me.

Plans to build Jewish settlements in the E-1 zone have been talked about for years now. But objections from the United States and Israel’s European allies have so far been able to pressure Israel to stop these plans from going forward.

The concerns, experts say, is that such settlements would threaten a potential future peace deal with the Palestinians. And, because they would essentially cut off the northern and southern parts of the West Bank, the settlements could make the creation of a future contiguous Palestinian state even more difficult, if not impossible. 

“That’s why George W Bush and other US administrations, as well as the Europeans, repeatedly sought guarantees from the Israeli government that they would not build in E1,” Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told me.

But the Trump administration has taken a far more indulgent approach to Israel than previous US administrations have — and it seems unlikely to make any meaningful effort to try to thwart Netanyahu’s plans this time around. “Now, with Trump’s apparent blessing, Netanyahu is talking about moving ahead,” Lockman said.

“It may be an election ploy [by Netanyahu] to make his right-wing voters and allies happy,” Lockman said. Israel goes to the polls next week, and Netanyahu — who is facing trial for charges of bribery and fraud — is trying to rally voters to his side. Even so, Lockman added, the prime minister would “certainly like” to move forward with the E-1 settlement plans.

If it happens, though, it won’t just be the future of Israeli-Palestinian peace that will be put in jeopardy. The lives and livelihoods of the Bedouins who mostly populate the E-1 area could also be put at serious risk.

The settlements would further harm Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts

Building settlements in the E-1 zone would “in effect cut the West Bank in half and make any kind of future Palestinian state in the West Bank even less attainable,” Lockman told me.

Cutting the West Bank in half is a significant step toward diminishing any potential future for a recognized Palestinian state. This is because it would ultimately “cement the territorial connection between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim,” Lockman said.

That, in fact, is the entire point of the E-1 plan from the point of view of the Israeli government and other supporters of the settlement plan. “The linking of Jerusalem to Maale Adumim is an overriding Israeli interest,” wrote Nadav Shragai in a 2013 study published by the right-wing Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs research institute.

Cementing this connection, though, would in turn block Palestinian residents from accessing occupied East Jerusalem.

That is partly why Elgindy told me that going forward with this plan would compromise the future of Palestine.

“E-1 was always considered the ‘doomsday’ settlement, the one that would make a future Palestinian state impossible,” he said. He added that, under international law, building these settlements “would be a war crime.”

Essentially, with settlements in E-1, any future “two-state” plan would be unworkable.

“The two-state concept is pretty dead anyway, killed by the massive Israeli settlement project underway since 1967 and the de facto annexation of chunks of the West Bank. But this would be one more big nail in the coffin of that vision,” Lockman said.

Building settlements would also jeopardize the security of the area’s Bedouin residents

The E-1 zone is often described as deserted, or a “ghost town,” but that’s not exactly true. The area is home to 18 Bedouin tribes.

“As elsewhere in the West Bank, Jewish settlements would be built on land taken in one way or another from Palestinians; in this case, the Bedouin would be kicked off lands they’ve lived on for generations,” Lockman said.

This is not the first time Bedouins have been evicted by Israel to build settlements.

To expand Ma’ale Adumim in 1997, Israel kicked out more than 100 bedouin families, forcing them to move to areas less well suited to their traditionally pastoral, nomadic way of life. “Their new plots of land had little grazing space; most were forced to sell their flocks, and now work for Israeli companies as labourers,” the Economist wrote in 2016.

“We’re like fish in the water,” Abu Imad, a leader of the Abu Nawwar tribe, told the Economist. “Our lives are in the desert, and we will die if we’re moved.”

Right-wing supporters of the E-1 settlement plan, on the other hand, argue that it is the Bedouins who are “encroaching” on the area. As Shragai argued in the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs study:

Palestinian and Bedouin settlement is encroaching on this space all the time, the great majority of it illegal: that is, this Palestinian construction is executed without any building permit. According to the Oslo II Interim Agreement, the territory between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim has been designated as Area C, meaning that the powers of zoning and planning were retained here by Israel. Illegal Palestinian construction enables the takeover of vitally important land, some of it within the E1 area.

However, the vast majority of experts in the international community reject this alternative interpretation of the law and the current situation in the E-1 zone.

Indeed, the UN secretary-general in 2015 “voiced concerns at the deteriorating human rights and humanitarian situations facing Palestinian Bedouin and herder populations affected by home demolitions and Israeli plans for ‘relocation’ of entire communities,” and argued that “the transfer of Palestinian Bedouin communities would contravene the obligations of Israel under international human rights law, particularly regarding the rights to freedom of residence and to adequate housing.”

Even worse, many of the Bedouin families who would be forced to relocate if the E-1 settlement plan goes forward have been forced to move and had their homes demolished several times already.

“The demolition has been devastating and our situation is miserable,” Umm Muhammed, a Bedouin woman whose home was demolished in January 2017, told the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “We’re homeless. It’s been psychologically tiring for all of us. I personally feel powerless and unwell. Where shall we go? And how shall we live here?”

Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s long-time former dictator, died Tuesday at the age of 91.

To understand just what a huge role Mubarak played in Egypt, you need to go back to January 25, 2011. 

On that Tuesday, thousands of demonstrators packed the streets of Cairo’s central Tahrir Square demanding Mubarak’s removal from office, as they had done every day for over two weeks. 

“All of us, one hand, asking for one thing: leave, leave, leave,” the protesters sang.

But after 18 long, painful days of protest, Mubarak stepped down. The revolution had succeeded. 

The protests were motivated by a variety of grievances including arbitrary government arrests, widespread poverty, extreme economic inequality, the rising prices of goods, and rampant unemployment among the middle and lower classes.

In the years before the protests began, Amnesty International reported that the government “continued to use state of emergency powers to detain peaceful critics and opponents. … Torture and other ill-treatment remained widespread in police cells, security police detention centers and prisons, and in most cases were committed with impunity.”

To put it simply: The people were tired of the ruling government’s abuse and corruption, and they demanded change.

Like the rest of the revolutions in the region that came to be known as the Arab Spring, the protests against Mubarak were met with immense violence from the government’s security forces.

During the demonstrations, the Egyptian security forces killed at least 840 protestors and injured numerous others according to an Amnesty report. The fatalities included deaths by snipers at the hands of Egyptian police. All in just 18 days.

The brutality continued until Mubarak’s then-Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that the dictator had finally stepped down from office. 

Who was Hosni Mubarak, and what is the “state of emergency law” that he imposed? 

Mubarak’s long journey to becoming Egypt’s longtime dictator essentially began with the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Mubarak was Sadat’s vice president at the time, and found himself unexpectedly thrust into the leadership role. 

After he took office, Mubarak reimposed a “state of emergency law” in the country that granted the government the power to restrict freedom of assembly, arrest anyone deemed suspicious and try them in “special” state security courts, and monitor and confiscate publications, among other things.

The law — which remained in place for the next 30 years (as did Mubarak) — allowed for corruption and political repression to sweep the nation. The 2010 death of Khaled Said, an activist whom many deemed the “martyr of the state of emergency,” provides an instructive look at how the law enabled brutality in Egypt.

According to a report by Amnesty International, police dragged the 28-year-old Said out of an Internet café in Alexandria and beat him in public until he died. This prompted protesters to take to the streets, chanting: “We are all Khaled Said.”

The removal of the emergency law is one of the many things that the protestors demanded in 2011.

The corruption and abuses didn’t end after Mubarak stepped down

In 2012, Mubarak received a life sentence for his crimes, but that was later overturned in an appeals court for lack of evidence. Later, in 2014, he was again put on trial and sentenced to three years in prison — not for all of the above atrocities, but for embezzlement. He was released in 2017.

Although the public succeeded in defeating Mubarak, they didn’t succeed in defeating government corruption and abuse. The current president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is seen as continuing Mubarak’s legacy.

On June 30, 2012, Mohammed Morsi, took office as Egypt’s fifth president after he beat his opponent, Ahmed Shafiq, in the country’s first democratic elections. His time in office didn’t last long, however. Just one year later, on July 3, 2013, he was removed in a coup led by al-Sisi, who then was the Egyptian army chief general.

Al-Sisi resigned from the military and ran in the 2014 elections. He was sworn into office on June 8, 2014.

According to a 2015 report by Human Rights Watch, “since al-Sisi came to power, the authorities have continued to aggressively enforce a de facto protest ban and routinely dispersed anti-government demonstrations with force.”

“Under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s regular police and National Security officers routinely torture political detainees with techniques including beatings, electric shocks, stress positions, and sometimes rape,” reads another Human Rights Watch report from 2017.

Despite this, al-Sisi ran for a second term in 2018 and won 97 percent of the vote, with “little to no opposition” in the elections.

But on September 20, 2019, demonstrators once again took to the streets of Egypt to protest a president they view as another corrupt figure.

And, unsurprisingly, the government responded with force.

Amnesty International reported that “the Egyptian security forces have carried out sweeping arrests of protesters, rounded up journalists, human rights lawyers, activists, protesters and political figures in a bid to silence critics and deter further protests from taking place.”

To this day, nine years after Mubarak stepped down, the politics of Egypt remain corrupt, and the public remains unhappy with the person at the top.

Sudan appears to have taken a disturbing step backward on its path toward democracy.

On Thursday, Sudanese security forces fired tear gas at demonstrators in Khartoum who were protesting the government’s removal of officers and soldiers who’d supported the revolution that overthrew the country’s longtime dictator, Omar al-Bashir, in April 2019.

After the coup against al-Bashir, an 11-member Sovereign Council took over in August; it will first be headed by senior military official Abdel Fattah al-Burhan for 21 months, and then will be chaired by a civilian for 18 months.

This 39-month transitional government is expected to uphold peace and take steps to move the country toward democracy, culminating in elections in 2022. But Thursday’s retaliation against protesters says something different, calling into question the sincerity of the Sovereign Council.

On Tuesday, the Sudanese armed forces released a statement that includes the names of the officers and soldiers who were to be dismissed.

In response, the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), a group that has been an active leader in the revolution against al-Bashir, called for a demonstration on Thursday to protest the discharge of the officers and to demand reform.

The protests were “against the referral of a Sudanese army officer, 1st Lt. Muhammad Siddiq, who supported the protesters during the first sit-in in front of the army headquarters,” Abdelrahman Mohamed al-Gasim, the external relations secretary of the Darfur Bar Association, told me. “The protesters are demanding that he be returned to the army.” 

He added that there are other dismissed troops who also sided with the revolution that he cannot confirm yet. 

On Facebook, the SPA later shared photographs and videos that showed injured protesters and pictures of children who were affected by the tear gas.

Al-Gasim also confirmed those attacks. “The police force used excessive force against protesters by firing tear gas intensively and sometimes clubbing,” he said, speaking to me via direct message on Twitter from Uganda.

The SPA later shared a statement on Facebook condemning the military’s violent response to the protesters.

“The attacks that occurred against the peaceful citizens are completely and utterly rejected … the streets won’t be quiet unless the demands of this procession are fulfilled,” the statement, which I translated from the original Arabic, read.

The crackdown on demonstrators shows the country is still struggling to move toward democracy

On February 11, Sudan’s Sovereign Council signaled that it may be willing to extradite al-Bashir, the ousted dictator, to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague, Netherlands, to face longstanding charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes for his role in the genocide in the Darfur region that began in 2003.

Mohammed Hassan al-Taishi, a civilian member of the Sovereign Council, said at a press conference that the council had “agreed that everyone who had arrest warrants issued against them will appear before the ICC. I’m saying it very clearly.” Al-Taishi didn’t specifically say al-Bashir’s name, but it’s clear that’s who he was talking about.

Al-Taishi emphasized the importance of this step for the democratic future of the country. “We can only achieve justice if we heal the wounds with justice itself,” he said. “We cannot escape from confronting that.”

But the violent response to the protests on Thursday — and the decision, as activists allege, to force out police and military officers who supported the revolution — challenges the sincerity of those sentiments.

If the new sovereign council is retaliating with violence, how much progress has the country really made since the revolution? Is the transitional government just a means to pacify the Sudanese public? 

“This means that the transitional government does not respect the right to protest and freedom of opinion,” al-Gasim told me. It is “a violation of the constitutional government.”

“The era of domination and dictatorship has passed, and the transitional government must respect its legal obligations based on international covenants,” he added.

Correction: An earlier version of the story misstated the location of a source.