Conflicts Forum

Alastair Crooke
Article posted on The Christian Science Monitor
Recognizing that a two-state solution is no longer in the cards opens the way for other paths that don’t depend on Western mediation. It puts to rest the fiction that a Palestinian state will emerge from even the best intentions of the West instead of from the political […]

Alastair Crooke
Article posted on www.foreignpolicy.com
A ‘peace process’ that, from its inception, took Israel’s self-definition of its own security needs as the sole determinate of the walls within which any solution for Palestinians was to be conducted, has reached exhaustion. Based on such a reductive premise, its arrival at this deathly nadir, with no more than […]

Alastair Crooke
Article posted on www.foreignpolicy.com
The ‘weakness’ of Europe — and also that of the US — in the Middle East is not essentially one of waning power and influence. Although the scent of decline always has had a powerful affect in this region, the root of this western debilitation consists of a more profound ailment: […]

Alastair Crooke
Article first published on The Washington Quarterly, June 2010
In his commendably candid interview with Time in January 2010, President Barack Obama noted that managing politics in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict “is just really hard.” The president, however, might well have been speaking about the Middle East as a whole. It is not just the […]

By Mark Perry, Bitter Lemons, April 30, 2009
The wry and oft-repeated saying among senior American military officers is always good for a laugh: “no matter what the question,” they claim, “the answer is always Clausewitz.” Unlike many war theoreticians, Prussian Major General Carl von Clausewitz actually served in the military–fighting Napoleon and spending time in […]

By Alastair Crooke, Le Monde diplomatique, February, 2009
The early Zionists never believed they would be accepted in the Arab world and pinned their hopes on the non-Arab periphery instead, particularly Iran. Israel reversed that policy by opening talks with a weakened Arafat in the early 1990s. But peace with the Palestinians did not happen and […]