Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by David Hearst
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Dahlan: Philanthropist or notorious fixer?
About two weeks after the abortive coup in Turkey in July 2016, I reported the allegation from a high-level Turkish security source that the United Arab Emirates had collaborated with the coup plotters, using the exiled Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan as a go-between. I reported the Turkish claim that Dahlan was...
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From royal court to exile: Why MBS wants to silence Jamal Khashoggi
Jamal Khashoggi is a friend of mine, so what I am about to write lacks objectivity. In the many conversations we have had together, and for a long time after he fell out with the new regime in Riyadh under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Khashoggi actively eschewed the label “Saudi...
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From father to son: How the Palestinian struggle is passed from one generation to the next
Only when occupation ends and justice is addressed will the Israel-Palestine conflict be resolved...
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The end of one revolution and the start of another
It is no coincidence that the deadline Qatar was given to comply with Saudi Arabia’s 13 demands fell on 3 July, the fourth anniversary of the military coup in Egypt that ousted the country’s first democratically elected president. The link between the two days was made explicit by propagandists for...
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Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's prince of chaos
When King Salman and his son Mohammed came to power, there was hope of sorely needed leadership in the region. Instead, they may have fragmented it beyond repair...
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Why the campaign against Qatar is doomed
Saudi Arabia and the UAE bit off more than they can chew once they took on Qatar, a country with vast wealth and powerful allies...
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The Trump effect: More dangerous than the man himself
These are dark days. Darkened by the slaughter of children in Manchester. Darkened by the fawning welcome Donald Trump received in Riyadh. But darkened further by the Trump effect, which could be even more dangerous than the man himself. Trump was crystal clear to those Arab leaders who had paid...
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Why Saudi Arabia would rather pay a ransom to Trump than support its own people
The price tag of an audience with Donald Trump is high, and rising. Saudi Arabia has already pledged an estimated $300bn in defence contracts over the next decade and $40bn in infrastructure investment. The final figure, according to some on Wall Street, could yet rise to $1 trillion of...
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Saudi palace coup: the sequel
A Saudi prince needs three sources of power to become king. In order of importance, they are the United States, the royal family, and the Saudi people, although the latter come a distant third in any calculation. This has been the case for every Saudi king since 14 February 1945...
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Trump's Valentine: From the White House to Daesh, with love
George W Bush set the bar high for the accolade of worst US president in history. Before 9/11, he ignored warnings of an impending attack, failed to respond to Hurricane Katrina, withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol lowering greenhouse gas emissions, set the US on a collision course with Russia by...
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Who speaks for Muslims? The Saudis, the Turks or the Germans?
The reaction to Donald Trump’s executive order to ban refugees and Muslims from seven countries has been unprecedented. Flash crowds descended on JFK and Dulles international airports on Saturday. When the New York Taxi Drivers Association held an hour-long protest at Trump’s ban, and Uber attempted to profit from...
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REVEALED: Secret tapes expose Israeli influence over UK Conservative
A senior political officer at the Israeli Embassy in London has been secretly filmed talking about how he would like to “take down” UK foreign office minister Alan Duncan, a vocal opponent of illegal Israeli settlement building in the West Bank. He said Duncan, who is one of the few...
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This is what will happen when Aleppo falls
Whether by habit, or tradition, the US presidential transition is the ideal time to deal with unfinished business. The handover from one administration to its successor offers tempting opportunities to create new facts on the ground in the Middle East. Israel used the transition between George Bush and Barack Obama...
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Saudi Arabia reaps what it has sowed
After squandered opportunities and blunders galore, the kingdom's foreign policy is backfiring across the region and that's just the beginning...
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Good time for a bloodbath in Aleppo? Putin thinks so
It is nearly a year since Vladimir Putin sprung one of his little surprises on Washington by entering the civil war in Syria as an active combatant on Bashar al-Assad’s side. In that time, Russian bombing can claim to have saved Damascus and the regime itself from falling, to have...
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Sisi is a dead man walking
“You want to be a first-class nation? Will you bear it if I make you walk on your own feet? When I wake you up at five in the morning every day? Will you bear cutting back on food, cutting back on air-conditioners? …People think I’m a soft man,...
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Mahmoud Abbas' last stand
The Palestinian president was angry: “No one dictates an opinion to us. We are the decision makers and we are the ones who decide and the ones who implement and no one has authority over us. This is what we want,” he boomed in a video broadcast on Sunday. On the face...
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Is America losing Turkey?
In the dying days of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, the great and the good in Washington scratched their heads and asked themselves: “Who lost Russia?” Post-communist Russia was more fluid than the hordes of economists, missionaries and carpetbaggers who descended on Moscow in 1992 had ever imagined. But the question itself...
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UAE 'funnelled money to Turkish coup plotters'
The United Arab Emirates’ government collaborated with coup plotters in Turkey before the unsuccessful attempt was launched, using exiled Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan as a go-between with the US-based cleric accused by Turkey of orchestrating the plot, sources close to one of Turkey’s intelligence services told Middle East Eye. Dahlan...
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How an iPhone defeated the tanks in Turkey
As the people of Turkey battled for their future, there was a crashing silence from Western leaders whose brand image is democracy. The French consulate had closed two days earlier. Did it know something Turkey did not?...
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Blair and Bush's attempt to reshape the Middle East lit a fire which burns to this day
Like Sykes and Picot a century before them, Blair and Bush tried to reshape the Middle East. It had devastating results....
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It's open season on the Muslim Brotherhood
Last week the Islamic State (IS) devoted 25 pages of its propaganda magazine Dabiq to a “feature” denouncing the Muslim Brotherhood as apostate. “Over the last few decades, a devastating cancer has emerged, mutated, and spread, attempting to drown the entire Ummah in apostasy,” IS said, describing...
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Why Russia and the West can't win in Syria
Ever since the Soviet Union fell, Russia and the US have had an asymmetric relationship. In all its moods – the pendulum has swung from craven pro-Westernism to hostile nationalism – the Russian foreign policy elite has never stopped giving finger-wagging lectures to Western audiences. Russia’s sense of betrayal...
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Exodus and betrayal: How a Syrian Nakba was created
US Secretary of State John Kerry came close to revealing his true thoughts when he was accosted by two Syrian aid workers at a reception in London after the collapse of the Geneva talks last week. The Syrians accused him of doing nothing to protect civilians from the onslaught they...
