Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas mastermind who had the bad luck of crossing paths with a team of 19-year-old Israeli grunts in Rafah on Wednesday morning, was an intractable religious ideologue who saw his life’s purpose in extravagant historical terms. He …
Can Lebanon survive without Hezbollah?
Over the last fortnight, everything has changed in Lebanon. Hezbollah, which had dominated the country’s politics for more than 20 years, has seen its leadership decapitated, its arsenal diminished, its anti-Zionist credentials tarnished. All the while, its civilian base, huddled …
A year of hatred
Of the images I have not been able to clear from my mind over these past 12 terrible months the most tenacious is that of two young women: one in an elegant hijab, one not, laughing for the camera as …
Britain has learned nothing from Palestine
When I walk to my local supermarket in north Belfast, the journey takes me through a Catholic, Nationalist area, marked by Palestinian flags, to the edge of a Protestant, Loyalist area, where Israeli flags flutter, alongside Union flags, from the …
Britain has learned nothing from Palestine
When I walk to my local supermarket in north Belfast, the journey takes me through a Catholic, Nationalist area, marked by Palestinian flags, to the edge of a Protestant, Loyalist area, where Israeli flags flutter, alongside Union flags, from the …
Why Lebanon can’t be saved
In 2018, Henry Kissinger observed that Donald Trump was one of those historical characters who “appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. The same could …
The folly of America First
In his 2017 inauguration speech, Donald Trump made a vow to the American people: “A new vision will govern our land, from this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.” Every decision on trade, taxes and foreign affairs, …
The intellectual dishonesty of Shlomo Sand
I saw Shlomo Sand speak once. It was at a public event in 2008, but I remember him well: a preening man with a leather jacket and a manner of such monumental self-regard that he reminded me of an Israeli …
Hezbollah has made a fatal mistake
The Lebanese border with Israel shimmers with shades of yellow and green. The scene is Levantine pastoral: if Monet were Middle Eastern, this is what he would have painted. It was late October, just weeks after Hamas’s atrocities, when I …
The man who defended Orientalism
“As a young man visiting a Sufi shrine in Algeria,” remarks the writer Robert Irwin parenthetically in an otherwise scholarly essay on medieval Arabic literature, “I once encountered a jinni in the form of a cat.” No further elaboration is …
Iran’s next president will be just as powerless
It took nearly 24 hours for the regime in Tehran to finally confirm that the deeply unpopular and uncharismatic Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and other prominent officials, including Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abodollahian, had died when their Seventies-era helicopter crashed in …
Biden’s secret support for Iran
This past Memorial Day, as Americans honoured their war dead, the Biden administration was running interference for an Iranian regime whose Supreme Leader has described “death to America” as his official state policy. A report in the day’s Wall Street …
Iran is about to double down
It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving man. Ebrahim Raisi’s presidential career represented the worst of the Islamic Republic. As Tehran’s deputy prosecutor less than a decade after the revolution, he was a member of the so-called “death commission” …
Iran is about to double down
It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving man. Ebrahim Raisi’s presidential career represented the worst of the Islamic Republic. As Tehran’s deputy prosecutor less than a decade after the revolution, he was a member of the so-called “death commission” …
There is no solution to the Gaza War
In assessing Israel’s post-October 7 military campaign in Gaza, it helps to recall Clausewitz’s dictum that war, though horrific, isn’t ultimately about killing and destruction for the sake of it but a means for states to achieve their political goals. …