Conflicts Forum

By Alastair Crooke, New Perspectives Quarterly, June 2, 2009
Most Western analysts of political Islam make the same mistake. They instinctively assume that conflict with the West has mainly to do with specific foreign policies, particularly of the U.S. with respect to Israel, the Arab world and Iran, and, if those changed, all would be well.
In […]

By Alastair Crooke, Open Democracy, March 11, 2009
In the mechanistic template imposed by western leaders on the Middle East, of ‘moderates’ who must be supported versus ‘extremists’ who must be isolated and undermined, Hamas has to be painted, by mechanical necessity alone, as ‘extremists’. Hamas has become the ‘extremists’ to answer in neat symmetry to […]

By Alastair Crooke, The Guardian, January 19, 2009
On Saturday evening, Israel announced not a ceasefire - in the sense of an agreement between the parties to end a conflict - but a decision that its forces will unilaterally halt their fire. It said it would await the Hamas response, any timetable for a withdrawal of […]

By Alastair Crooke, London Review of Books, January 15, 2009
‘We have to ask the West a question: when the Israelis bombed the house of Sheikh Nizar Rayan, a Hamas leader, killing him, his wives, his nine children, and killing 19 others who happened to live in adjoining houses – because they saw him as a […]

By Alastair Crooke, Asia Times, January 14, 2009
As Europeans watch the humanitarian disaster in Gaza unfold on nightly news bulletins, many may wonder why this crisis seems to have left their governments groping in such apparent fumbling disarray. The answer is that it is the result of policies pulling in opposite directions - of an […]

By Alastair Crooke, Royal United Services Institute, January 12, 2009
The round of international diplomacy that has just concluded has left this part of the Arab world incredulous, extremely angry and polarised. The demonstrations in Syria this weekend were marked by use of extreme slogans seldom heard in public, and images of Osama bin Laden were […]