Israelis believe they have never had it this good. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regularly brags about it. He claims that apart from a few non-conformists, most Arab countries have secretly normalised relations with Israel. Despite their public statements, they have, to all intents and purposes, abandoned the Palestinian cause. But this is not the only…
At the beginning of June, Jordan was shaken by a week of peaceful demonstrations against a project for a fiscal law which planned for a rise in taxes of between 5 % and 25 % for all persons with an annual salary of more than 8,000 dinars ($11,245). The demonstrators, whose quality of life had…
It’s important for bullies to always win. Because once their weakness is exposed they can no longer be bullies. Empires don’t start out as bullies. They start out as the reaction to the last Empire which became a bully after embracing hubris over humility. Empires have to resort to bullying near the end because they…
Listening to Western media and politicians these days, you would never guess that nearly three decades ago the Soviet hammer and sickle lowered for the last time over the Kremlin, replaced by the Russian tricolor. Ironically, the collapse of the Soviet Union – an empire made up of 15 republics encompassing some 12 million square…
The world events of the past days are significant far beyond the apparent divide within the G7 industrial nations. If we imagine the planet as a giant electric force field, the lines of flux are in dramatic reordering as the post-1945 global dollar-based system comes to its disordered end phase. Europe’s political elites are currently…
It has often been said that Israel, since its establishment in 1948, has presided over the “miracle” of making the country’s “desert bloom.” That heavily promoted narrative — which asserts that the Palestinians have long lacked the capacity, knowledge or desire to properly develop agriculture in the region — has often been used as a…
