From Occupied Palestine

George Habash
DAVID HIRST
Guardian, 27 January 2008

Obituary: Yasser Arafat
DAVID HIRST
Guardian, 11 November 2004

Arafat's guerrillas were always a much greater challenge to the Arab regimes than they were to the Israelis. In theory, the regimes too were preparing to liberate Palestine - but by conventional military means in their own good time. The first "martyr" fell victim, characteristically, to the Jordanian army.

The ominous backlash of an attack against Iran
DAVID HIRST
Daily Star, 13 September 2004

When U.S. President George W. Bush first identified the two Middle East members of his "axis of evil," Iran clearly ranked as a far more formidable adversary than Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Don't blame Arafat
DAVID HIRST
Guardian, 17 July 2004

Camp David failed because Israeli hardliners manipulated intelligence

In his memoirs, the former US president Bill Clinton writes that the Camp David summit, of which this month marks the fourth anniversary, was the greatest failure of his career. And that, he says, was overwhelmingly Yasser Arafat's doing - for, unlike Israeli premier Ehud Barak, who had been ready for "enormous concessions", the Palestinian leader couldn't "make the final jump from revolutionary to statesman".

When the puppet runs the puppeteer
DAVID HIRST
New Statesman, 12 July 2004

Israel and the United States - For years, America has given almost uncritical financial and diplomatic support to the Jewish state. Will a breaking point come one day?

Bush revives the spirit of Balfour
DAVID HIRST
Guardian, 16 April 2004

It was an Israeli commentator who likened George Bush's statement on Ariel Sharon's "disengagement plan" to Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration, the founding charter of what became the state of Israel; but the sentiment is abundantly shared by every Palestinian.

Obituary: Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
DAVID HIRST
Guardian, 23 March 2004

When, in October 1997, the halfblind, almost wholly paralysed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who has been killed in an Israeli air strike at the age of around 67, arrived in Gaza, after being released from an Israeli jail in exchange for Mossad agents caught redhanded trying to assassinate a colleague in Jordan, one Arab commentator likened him to Nelson Mandela.

Jewish fundmentalism
An excerpt from Gun and the Olive Branch
(Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003)
DAVID HIRST
The Nation, 2 February 2004

In the minds of many Westerners, Muslim fundamentalism has replaced communism as perhaps the greatest single "threat" to the existing world order. From this perspective the Palestinian intifada becomes just another episode in a "clash of civilizations." For them, there is an intrinsic link between Palestinian "terrorism" and, say, the al-Qaeda bombing of an American warship off Yemen. Almost totally absent from such arguments is any inclination to examine Jewish fundamentalism, or so much as to ask whether it, too, might be a factor in the conflict over Palestine, one of the reasons why it seems so insoluble.

Bush has thrown open Pandora's box in a paradise for international terrorists
DAVID HIRST
Guardian, 23 December 2003

2003 has been a crucial year for the Middle East, with war in Iraq and the continuing intifada in Israel. The Guardian's acclaimed commentator on the region assesses what happened, what it means, and where it might lead next year

Wagging which way
DAVID HIRST
al Ahram, 23-29 October 2003

Few disputed at the time that Israel was a factor that pushed Bush to go to war on Iraq. Just how much weight it had among all the others was the only controversial question. But what is clear, six months on, is that Israel is now a very important factor indeed in the stumbling neo-imperial venture that Iraq has become.