The term MENA—Middle East and North Africa—has become so ubiquitous in policy documents, investment presentations, and academic analysis that it now functions less as an analytical category than as a reflex. It is invoked to explain everything from sovereign risk to youth unemployment, from energy politics to political instability. Yet its very convenience has dulled its explanatory power. Nowhere is this more evident than in the treatment of the Eastern Mediterranean, a region whose dynamics are increasingly misread when folded uncritically into the broader MENA frame.

The distinction between MENA countries and Eastern Mediterranean countries is not pedantic. It is material—and it is becoming more so.

Consider the states that ring the Eastern Mediterranean basin: Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Egypt, and Libya. What unites them is not religion, language, or regime type, but a shared maritime space that has shaped their economies, security dilemmas, and outward orientation for millennia. These are societies historically organised around ports rather than hinterlands, sea lanes rather than oilfields, and diasporas rather than demographic self-sufficiency. Here, geography is not background noise; it is the primary explanatory variable.

By contrast, MENA is largely a post-war administrative artefact. It emerged from the needs of international institutions and Western foreign ministries seeking manageable regional desks. Arabic-speaking countries were grouped together, Iran and Turkey were added for convenience, and North Africa, the Levant, and the Gulf were treated as variations of a single political economy. For certain purposes—Islamic finance, hydrocarbon markets, Arabic-language media—the category remains useful. But as a general analytical lens, it increasingly obscures more than it reveals.

This distortion is not confined to think tanks and investment banks. It is embedded deep within global governance itself.

Consider the World Health Organization. Pakistan—a South Asian country of roughly 240 million people—sits not in the South-East Asia Region, but in the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR), alongside Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. The EMR stretches implausibly from the Atlantic to the Hindu Kush. It is neither Mediterranean nor Eastern in any meaningful geographic sense. It persists because bureaucratic boundaries, once drawn, acquire institutional momentum. Yet this misclassification has real consequences, from pandemic coordination to health financing metrics. If Pakistan can be administratively “Mediterranean” for public-health purposes, it should surprise no one that Lebanon or........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)