Tunisia is popular tourist destination in North Africa, a cultural melting pot, with Roman, Arab, and Western cultural influences and European progressiveness. However, Tunisia’s attractiveness as a holiday destination has not been the only reason why the country has been in the news over the past decade. Tunisia was where the wave of color revolutions…
In his diaries, the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote that the area of the Jewish State stretched from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates. The “Greater Israel” (or the “Yinon”) plan, first drafted more than a century ago, entails “weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of a US-Israeli…
He was the prototypical strong man softened by tactical reforms, blissfully ignorant before the fall, blown off in the violent winds of the Arab Spring. Having come to power in 1987 on the back of a coup against the 84-year-old Habib Bourguiba, whom he accused of senility, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was the face of…
When Syrian government soldiers first recaptured the small village of Deir Hafar from Isis in 2017, they found the black-painted but hurriedly abandoned Islamic “court” strewn with piles of documents. These hundreds of pages contained terrible proof of how the Syrian civilians there had behaved under at least three years of Isis occupation. I arrived in…
By the end of the year, the situation has grown more tense. This is particularly true of Algeria which will undergo a change in supreme leadership. The current president is ill, his surrounding and political elites are in a state of uncertainty, the new configuration of alliances is difficult of predict. The situation is no…
The relationship between Rached Ghannouchi, leader of the Tunisian Ennahda party and the Islamist father of the Arab Spring, and Beji Caid Essebsi, the Tunisian president and an “old wolf” from the days of late President Habib Bourguiba, is about as unlikely as the friendship that blossomed between Martin McGuinness, the former IRA chief of…
