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...
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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...
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From father to son: How the Palestinian struggle is passed from one generation to the next
In August 2002, two years into the Second Intifada, Israeli forces closed in on a local Hamas leader in the West Bank village of Tubas near Jenin. Nasser Jarrar was in a wheel-chair having lost both legs and an arm in an explosion. A 19-year-old neighbour of Jarrar, Nidal...
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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...
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Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s prince of chaos
The final act of the palace coup I have been writing about since King Salman took over has just been completed. Everyone was waiting for a coup against Qatar. In fact, the coup was within the kingdom itself. It took place in the middle of the night after fajr, the...
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Why the campaign against Qatar is doomed
It has been apparent for some time that the war against the Islamic State (IS) group and its forebear Al-Qaeda is by no means the only show in town in the Middle East. In fact, for most of the time, the war on terror has been a sideshow. The...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Saudi Arabia reaps what it has sowed
There have been two signs that Riyadh’s grip over its neighbourhood is loosening. The first was a long range missile which the Houthis fired at Jeddah airport, west of Makkah. The second was the election of Michel Aoun as Lebanese president, which was guaranteed by the support of Saad...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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How an iPhone defeated the tanks in Turkey
To mount a coup, senior Turkish army officers from the commando units, land forces, the first and fourth armies, and the airforce went to extreme lengths to seize power. They occupied two airports and closed a third. They attempted to separate the European from the Asian sides of Istanbul....
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Blair and Bush’s attempt to reshape the Middle East lit a fire which burns to this day
Not for the first time recently, Britain woke up to find the clocks had gone back. On Wednesday when the Chilcot report was published, it was to 18 March 2003, the date that parliament voted for war in Iraq. Thirteen years ago, a backbench Labour MP called Jeremy Corbyn addressed the...
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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...