Articles from the author

This is a pessimistic article that might not fall in line with what the angry Arab reader might want to read at such a stage of our history. But then again, I have become a pessimistic man and am viewing the current crisis in historical retrospect.

Last week, I wrote an article for this newspaper saying that Yasser Arafat was achieving a reputation for himself among the Palestinians "almost as similar as that of the late Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser."

The situation in the Middle East has raised a million questions and a million possible answers. What does Sharon want? How will the Arabs respond to the popular street demands they are facing? And more importantly - where are we all heading?

In September 2001, George Bush went into a temporary honeymoon with Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.

In 2000, the world stood by and remarked at how Bashar Al-Assad succeeded his father, the late Hafez Al-Assad and became president of Syria. Since then, that practice has surfaced worldwide.

They say that you can never really judge a person unless you have walked a mile in his shoes. True, and nobody in the Arab world today has walked a mile in the shoes of Yasser Arafat.

Rafiq Al Hariri is an ambitious man who does not like sharing power with anyone - and this has been evident in his past two years as Prime Minister of Lebanon.

In November 2000, Walid Jumblatt broke a 25-year alliance with Syria by joining the anti-Syrian movement in Lebanon. Today, having spent two years with the opposition, Jumblatt returns to the Syrian fold.

Elie Hobeika is dead. A chilling yet re-assuring fact to many and a nightmare to others. I received news of Hobeika's brutal assassination with mixed emotions.

For two weeks now, I have been trying to write something "different" about the Arab world. Whenever I start working on a new topic, however, something comes up in Palestine and overshadows everything else in the Middle East.

The upcoming Arab summit in Beirut, scheduled for March 2002, has caused a bundle of dormant inter-Arab disputes to erupt and doom the already shaky conference.

In December 2001, in my capacity as regional analyst for the Washington Report, I applied for a work interview with Khaled Meshal, chairman of the Hamas political bureau, who is residing in Syria.