Hamas’ recent takeover of Gaza has prompted debate within scholarly and policy circles. The Summer 2007 issue of The Middle East Journal offers critical insight on the ideological evolution of Hamas and the evolution of the unilateral withdrawal movement in Israel, and how Palestinians might think about their own prospective borders. This edition of MEJ also has perspectives on a number of broader geopolitical and historical issues, including an extensive survey of Middle Eastern intellectuals’ response to US policy, through interviews and editorials in the region.

Menachem Klein examines the ideological evolution of Hamas in “Hamas in Power.” The article challenges the approach of treating Hamas as a simple fundamentalist organization. It also argues that Hamas’ ideological transformation was not the result of the international boycott of Hamas’ government, but rather that this development began before Hamas won the elections in 2006.

In “Arab Intellectuals and the Bush Administration’s Campaign for Democracy: The Case for the Greater Middle East Initiative,” Sami E. Baroudi examines a wide swathe of editorials in the Middle East, exploring the source of the negative image of the United States within Arab intellectual circles.

In “Testing the Logic of Unilateral Withdrawal: Lessons from the History of the Labor Zionist Movement,” Nadav Shelef explores the historical progression of the Labor Party’s attitudes towards borders and the evolution of a willingness within the party to accept less than maximalist borders. He suggests that a similar process may arise in Palestinian thinking, but is unlikely to be influenced by Israeli unilateral withdrawals.

Daniel Heradestveit and G. Matthew Bonham look at the impact of the Bush administration’s rhetoric in their article “What the Axis of Evil Metaphor Did to Iran.” Using opinion research conducted in Iran, the authors reveal reactions of prominent Iranian intellectuals to this metaphor and its impact on political discourse in the region.

Using a comparative historical paradigm, Hakan Yilmaz proposes causes for the concept of Turkish exceptionalism within the Islamic world in “Religion, Sovereignty and Democracy: Observations on Islam and Christianity.” He examines experiments with secularization and whether Islam and democracy could be compatible in the case of Turkey.

The issue also contains a review of recent books on the Palestinians and the future of Palestine by Nigel Parsons.