Representative Press Blog

The Arab-Israeli conflict

"For us," said Mohamed El-Sayed Said, a columnist of Egypt's leading newspaper Al-Ahram, "the West always preferred control to democracy. Now, 90 per cent of the problem flows from the Arab-Israeli conflict, that continuous reminder of our colonised past." Never, in Arab eyes, has the US acted so blatantly, so subserviently, in favour of its Israeli protégé, and for domestic reasons -- the triple alliance of Jewish lobby, neo-conservative ideologues, and Christian fundamentalist right -- that take little or no stock of rights or wrongs on the ground. A new, post-9/11, Middle East article by David Hirst

David Hirst is author of the excellent book The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East It is worth buying for the new section "9/11-Never Ask Why" alone. Hirst's undated 2003 edition adds 130 pages to his myth-breaking history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the book, Hirst writes about the power of "The Lobby" which he explains is "a loose network of some fifty-odd organizations of which the two most influential are the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Both, along with such bodies as the World Zionist Organization and the Anti-Defamation League, are more hawkish than many of the others" p42 The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East