Past Jewish-Arabic coexistence in Palestine teaches us that life in common prevails where “The Other” has a human face. Conflict did not always rule people's minds and hearts and it did not shape Jewish–Arab relations from the start.
The landscape of Jerusalem is some of the most confusing and fractured in the world. Various armistice lines, illegal annexations, settlements, the 26ft Israeli wall, etc. have made it nearly impossible to make sense of the landscape in any coherent way.
A former aid worker who worked in Gaza for two years in the mid-2000s writes to his friends there.
Calling the situation in Israel and Palestine a conflict normalizes it, when in actuality there is a very tilted power dynamic. There is power in this horror, however.
From London to Ukraine, Madeleine Rees reflects on the lessons of the recent Summit to end sexual violence in conflict, and calls upon States to respond by adopting a new approach to conflict prevention, and to revisit the doctrine of the responsibility to protect.
If you care about human life you should be appalled by what is happening in Gaza right now. But you should also be appalled if you are a hardheaded political realist. Or even if you simply love Israel.
There are cogent reasons – international, historical and domestic to Britain – why this year's Srebrenica massacre commemorations are different, and beg painful, difficult questions that demand answers.
The latest effort by the Israel-aligned US to renegotiate the asymmetric power relationships of the Middle East has inevitably failed, with brutal violence following; it is time, as an alternative, for the EU to generalise the rule-based constraint on Israeli action it has tentatively essayed.
Or at least, who cares enough to try to start thinking anew? The region is burning. Apart from the parties to the conflicts who want to win, nobody seems to have any idea of what to do.
The Russian political establishment thinks that Ukrainians are 'traitors to Orthodox civilisation and Russian unity.’ But it is not only Putin’s Russia that is behind the challenge to democracy in Ukraine.
As the climax of the 'marching season' in Northern Ireland approaches, Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire recalls how the cycle of violence was broken when the civil community united during the Troubles and called for an end all the violence. Today she calls upon politicians to listen to the voi
Ayatollah Sistani’s fatwa, urging collective responsibility for Iraq’s religious sites, has been variously construed as a Shi’i mobilization campaign or a nationalist call to arms. But beneath the fatwa’s surface lie deeper roots: the very ruptures and fissures that plague Iraq’s Shi’is.
