Conflicts Forum

Alastair Crooke interviewed by Aisling Byrne, Conflicts Forum, Beirut, November, 2007
Alastair Crooke, former special Mid-East adviser to European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief, Javier Solana, and adviser to the International Quartet, is the Co-director of Conflicts Forum. An edited version of this interview was published by BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, Al-Majdal, […]

A Conflicts Forum Monograph, by Khalid Amayreh, October, 2007
The rise of the Islamic Resistance Movement — Hamas — in the Palestinian Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza provided a challenge for Israel and the West. Israel, the United States and the European Union have responded to this challenge by failing to differentiate Hamas […]

By Mark Perry, Conflicts Forum, June 18, 2007
In “Gaza: Another Mess Made in U.S.,” Rootless Cosmopolitan’s Tony Karon likens the defeat of Mohammad Dahlan’s U.S.-backed Preventive Security Services to an earlier American intervention from decades ago: the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco. His analysis is brilliant, but in truth Karon may have understated the breadth […]

In a speech in London this week (prior to addressing the Baker commission in Washington), British prime minister, Tony Blair, laid out his “whole Middle East” strategy. Blair asserted that addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be at “the core” of such a strategy yet British diplomats are reported as being deeply frustrated that the White […]

By Mark Perry, Bitterlemons, March 2, 2006
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the US government put in place sweeping new laws and regulations “aimed at identifying criminals and terrorist financiers and their networks across borders in order to disrupt and dismantle their organizations.” According to the Bush administration the program has worked beautifully: the […]

By Alastair Crooke, The World Today, March, 2006
James davies wrote in the American Sociological Review in 1962 that what provokes a people to take down its government is not simply deprivation or misery, but an ‘intolerable gap between what people want and what they get’, and that revolutions often come during economic depressions which follow […]