The West

Israel, Palestine and the mapping of power

by News Sources 02.05.2013

Tristram Hunt writes: ‘It’s almost comical. The idea of maps is to represent reality; here it represents fantasy.” So Professor Bruce Wexler of Yale University comments on how the vast majority of maps in Palestinian and Israeli schoolbooks omit the existence of the other entity. As a result, children on either side of the Green [...]

Read the full article →

The Arab Spring and the West: seven lessons from history

by News Sources 12.19.2011

Seumas Milne writes: There’s a real sense in which, more than any other part of the former colonial world, the Middle East has never been fully decolonised. Sitting on top of the bulk of the globe’s oil reserves, the Arab world has been the target of continual interference and intervention ever since it became formally [...]

Read the full article →

The Arab Awakening is here to stay

by News Sources 12.17.2011

Christopher Dickey writes: Westerners have long felt the need to lecture Arabs about Arab history. “We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know the civilization of any other country,” Lord Balfour told the British Parliament in 1910. “We know it further back; we know it more intimately; we know more about it.” Indeed, [...]

Read the full article →

Arming democracy’s opponents

by News Sources 02.24.2011

The Daily Telegraph reports: Facing budget cuts at home, western arms firms are desperate for a share of the lucrative Middle East market. “The post-financial crisis reality,” said Herve Guillou, president of Cassidian Systems, a subsidiary of European aviation defence group EADS, “is that today it is clearly the Middle East that is seeing the [...]

Read the full article →

The West can no longer claim to be an honest broker in the search for peace

by News Sources 02.13.2011

Gary Younge writes: The events of the last month in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere have challenged the way the west thinks of the Arab world (and how the Arab world thinks of itself). What remains to be seen is the extent to which these ongoing events confront the way in which western powers view themselves [...]

Read the full article →

The fear of freedom

by Paul Woodward 02.13.2011

As the train of democracy gathers steam in Egypt, there are those nearby who seem eager to throw themselves under its wheels. No doubt an observer such as the Israeli historian, Benny Morris, is vain enough to imagine that he is not about to get run over but, on the contrary, hopes his grave warnings [...]

Read the full article →