The Chinese rock band Varihnaz is more likely to sing about pesticides and rice than love and loss. Its part-farmer, part-musician bandmates appeal to young Chinese who dream of a simpler, slower way of life beyond the frenzied cities. Its …
Gaza’s children have no future
When I was a boy, growing up in Gaza, we used to play a game called “Arabs and Jews”. Two children would be designated captains and pick their teams, then we would find some sticks, pretend they were guns, and …
Israel’s plan to weaken the Iranian regime
Before Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei set out to conquer the Sunni Arab world in 1989, there were self-imposed rules that set real limits to Arab-Israeli warfare. In all the conflict between Israel and Arab states since May 1948, the world …
The end of Lebanon’s French connection
A day after the Beirut port blast shattered the city in August 2020, Emmanuel Macron arrived in Lebanon as a self-proclaimed saviour. Like JFK in West Berlin, or Fidel Castro in post-revolutionary Havana, the French President toured the streets. Thronged …
Israel and the trials of liberal solidarity
October 7 kicked Israel into terror of body and mind. The savage massacres, unfathomable in themselves; the mounting evidence of rapes, beheadings, immolations; the government’s colossal failure; the nightmare of Israelis, young and old, captive in Hamas tunnels; the foreboding …
Will the Brics inherit the earth?
A momentous global shift is currently underway. One which finds expression today in the Russian city of Kazan where the Brics bloc is holding an international summit hosted by the supposed global pariah Vladimir Putin.
Since the onset of the …
The shallow triumph of Sinwar’s death
At dawn on 22 March, 2004, a half-blind paraplegic cleric was returning home after his prayers in the Mosque in Gaza City when he was assassinated by two low flying Israeli helicopters. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was the founder of Hamas, …
Could killer robots terminate us?
In the summer of 2020, the Afghan military received an unusual report. Transmitted by their US allies, it warned of a possible Taliban attack in Jalalabad, a city in the fertile country’s southeastern plain. Suggesting the assault would come between …
Yahya Sinwar was a monstrous ideologue
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 …
How Netanyahu duped Nasrallah
On 27 September, Hassan Nasrallah was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Beirut. Barely had the bombs dropped than commentators were already describing Nasrallah’s demise as a transformational moment in Middle Eastern politics. And why not? Benjamin Netanhayhu declared that …
India’s lessons in ethnic conflict
It seemed like a perfectly sensible policy at the time, but with the coherence of hindsight, it can now be seen as the first in a concatenation of cock-ups. The year was 1772. The East India Company was in charge …
Reverse racism ruined South Africa
Jan van Riebeeck, commander of the Dutch post at the Cape, ranted in a diary entry of 28 January 1654 that the indigenous people’s misdeeds were hardly bearable any longer: “Perhaps it would be a better proposition to pay out …
Has Israel’s strategy changed?
Largely unremarked amid the drama, risk and controversy of its reaction to the October 7 attack is that, over the past year, Israel has experimented with a new type of warfare: targeting its enemies’ entire command structures. The occasional tactical …