Middle East

From roughly the 1970s to the mid-2010s, Saudi Arabia was the stuff of nightmares, referred to now, with understatement, as ‘the dark period’. Governed by the austere, brutal credo of the cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th century Quran literalist who divided the world into true Muslims (Salafis/Wahhabis) and their mortal enemies, Saudi life was ruled by fear of the omnipresent religious police. Executions were commonplace, TV was banned, women were essentially locked up, and most foreigners and outward travel were blocked.  Wahhabiism has been softened a great deal since then. Since 2017, when the frenetic moderniser Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) became Crown Prince, a thousand laws have been dropped, and suddenly women, while still second-class

Twenty-one years ago, I was opportunistically kidnapped by supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). In light of the PKK declaring last month its intention to discontinue its armed struggle against Turkey, I’ve been reflecting back on my involuntary run-in with the struggle for Kurdish self-governance. As with my kidnapping, the Kurdish cause had always been riven by amateurism, not to mention the petty feuds of the rival Kurdish organisations in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Truces, mass casualty events, kidnappings, and negotiations followed each other haphazardly. The struggle was filled with freelancers, bandits, and entrepreneurs. It embodied contradictory approaches to Americans and Western power in the region. Steve had come to the Levant for a taste

For Iran, the re-election of Donald Trump in November 2024 was its worst nightmare. Waking up the morning after the US election, Tehran feared President Trump’s unpredictability – and remembered the hard line he’d taken on Iran in the past and his killing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds force commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020. With Iran already reeling from losing a chunk of its proxy network in 2024, and with its air defences and missiles degraded by Israel, it was in a uniquely vulnerable position. All of this forced a recalibration. Iran’s tactic changed from rebuffing to killing President Trump with kindness. Tehran decided to weaponise diplomacy

Imagine booing a survivor of a fascist attack. People actually did that this week. Pro-Palestine activists heckled and insulted a young woman who survived Hamas’s anti-Semitic butchery of 7 October 2023 by playing dead under a pile of bodies. Take a minute to consider the depravity of this, the sheer inhumanity of tormenting a woman who experienced such terror. It was a spectacle of cruelty masquerading as protest The woman is Yuval Raphael. She’s the 24-year-old singer who’s representing Israel at Eurovision. The last big music event she attended was the Nova festival in the desert of southern Israel on 7 October 2023. What she witnessed there almost defies belief.

This weekend in Muscat, US and Iranian diplomats held a fourth round of talks, continuing their efforts to find a way through an impasse that has bedevilled US-Iran relations since 1979. By all accounts, the negotiations so far have been a mixed bag. The overall picture remains slightly confused, particularly around the issue of uranium enrichment. Some hardliners in Tehran are getting cold feet, and old entrenched narratives on both sides of the divide are beginning to resurface as the going gets tough. Sources close to the talks have indicated that the US might agree to Iranian domestic uranium enrichment – either frozen state or limited – while, in return, Iran

War seldom has true victors – and for Bethlehem, where tourism once accounted for approximately 70 per cent of income, the Israel-Gaza conflict has left businesses shuttered and livelihoods in ruins. Since the October 7 attack, my home country of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs has classified Bethlehem and the rest of the West Bank under its highest Level 4: “Do Not Travel” risk advisory. Earlier this month – despite my better judgement – I ventured into Bethlehem to witness firsthand the impact of the Israel-Gaza war on the city’s economy and dwindling Christian population. ‘There are dozens of hotels in Bethlehem, and they’re almost all empty.’ Under the Oslo