Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah was raised and educated in Najaf, Iraq. He studied alongside Sayyed Baqr al Sadr, collaborating with him on a journal at the same time as Baqr’s founding of Hizb al …

Hizballah explained in four parts, over four weeks.  This is the first of four posts on Hizballah. The conventional story is wrong. Hizballah’s survival and tactics were not the result of Iranian design, but of the work of Lebanese Islamic …

There is another thing I have learnt from David Baboulene. It is a learning I immediately grasped. And have been unable to ignore ever since. Nowadays – post Bab, as I like to term it – I can hardly watch …

Dawn in southern Israel. Flat desert light warms the scrubby sand of the Negev desert. A breeze ruffles the branches of the acacia trees shading the low-lying buildings dotted around. The Kibbutz community slumbers peacefully, secure in unquestioning confidence in …

Aristotle  The army has a habit of leaving soldiers in places where the stories make themselves. I started keeping notes. At the time it was for no particular reason. Now I am grateful, the notes jog my memory, fuel my writing.  One late …

The boy peers through the cracked window glass, straining in the half-light of early morning to see the Israeli soldiers below. He lives in a tall, decrepit building in the centre of the West Bank refugee camp in Jenin. The …

Like most, I came to writing by accident.   Divorce was the first real spur. My sojourn in that particular wilderness gave me a great deal to get off my chest. And sitting in the frigid interior of the yacht to which life had banished me, hammering away at the keys of …

War on the Northern Border What price deterrence? He is a very old man now. Increasingly, on his daily walks up the hill, he feels his age. The tapping of his stick is loud on the metalled roads of the …

It is hot on the road by the beach. A tanker crawls slowly past the glistening white minarets of the Al Khaldi mosque. On its dusty white flanks, the Arabic word for water, in uneven letters, advertises its contents. Over …

(* the following is a fictional reconstruction of events) The Massacre at Deir Yassin – ‘Proud, generous and cruel’i They lie on their bellies in the starlit valley. They are angry young men, members of the Irgun group. They are …