Conflicts Forum

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 […]

By Mark Perry, Palestine Report, September 7, 2005
In 1938, American historian Crane Brinton wrote The Anatomy of Revolution. To this day, Brinton’s book remains the most powerful and influential political treatise on the history and meaning of revolutions. “Anatomy” had an enormous impact, though not simply because it presented a coherent explanatory theory for understanding […]

By Mark Perry, Palestine Report, June 29, 2005
Just two weeks ago — seated comfortably in his well-appointed Washington office — a former senior American foreign policy advisor (who asked that he not be identified by name), gave this judgment of the Bush administration’s policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “What most people around the world don’t […]

By Mark Perry, Bitterlemons, June 2, 2005
It is said that, soon after the signing of the Oslo Accord, Hamas leader Abdul Aziz Rantisi traveled to Tunis to meet with then PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. When they met, Rantisi shouted at Arafat that he had betrayed the Palestinian cause, that he was a traitor to his […]