Fifteen years ago, when their first major works appeared, the Israeli historians Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe might both have been described as Palestinian fellow-travellers. Morris's immensely detailed study of the 1948 Palestinian exodus, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, uncovered a widespread pattern of expulsions and occasional massacres - a process that the world would soon start calling ethnic cleansing. Still, Morris concluded that there had been no [...]

Ariel Sharon leads a country with fewer inhabitants than London or New York, but which is the object of intense fascination throughout the world. This goes far beyond even the disproportionate attention that all Israeli politics commands.

To many, he is a bloodstained monster; to a few, a hero and saviour; to pro-Israel lobbyists, a man they may privately detest but towards whom they won't tolerate any public criticism. For [...]

Ziauddin Sardar believes passionately that what can be called the Islamic world is in a miserable state - politically, economically, morally and, above all, intellectually. It is hard to disagree. There are many important "Muslim" thinkers, but few genuinely stringent and sceptical intellectuals. That is neither surprising nor unique to Islam. How many important intellectuals, anywhere, are unequivocally religious thinkers? What place do theologians have in the cultural life of [...]

The prospects for the Israeli left seem not only grim, but paradoxically so. Ariel Sharon's government has delivered neither peace nor security. Economic prospects are disastrous. The past two years of violence and repression have almost killed the Palestinians' fragile economy; but they've sorely hurt Israel's, too. Israel's international standing is at its lowest ebb at least since the war in Lebanon 20 years ago. Yet far from being poised [...]

From the moment the earth closed over the original communist plot, at Highgate in 1883, Karl Marx was resurrected, only to die again, times without number. The most definitive, most widely proclaimed, perhaps most final demise came just over a decade ago. With the assisted suicide of the Soviet system, the great symbolic moment of demolition in Berlin, and the virtual disappearance of communist parties in almost all democracies (except, [...]

All wars, in a sense, are history wars. Their protagonists are driven by rival visions of the past, and people are willing to kill or die for those visions, at least as much as they are for ideas about the future. The unending violence between Israelis and Palestinians is a particularly extreme case. There, historians themselves are combatants, whether they are working to sustain the national myths that fuel the [...]

In more than three decades of crusading journalism, John Pilger has made many enemies. Some of them are the kinds of foes any reporter - indeed any honest person - would be proud to have: all those among the powerful, the brutal, corrupt and secretive whose misdeeds he has exposed and who still resent him for it. Tyrannical rulers, racist politicians and profit-gouging bosses of multinational companies in a dozen [...]

The Atlantic slave trade is more widely evoked, depicted and debated in our culture than any other historical crime or tragedy except the Holocaust. There are good reasons for this. The New World slave systems fed by the Atlantic trade were different from all others, including those within Africa itself, because they alone formed a central, dynamic element in the growth of the modern world. Their sheer scale was unique: [...]

Tony Blair worries about people ignoring Africa. The people he has most in mind are those who sit in the White House, the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. US policy-makers, it is felt, have washed their hands of what the Economist calls "the hopeless continent". Their inclination - and that of many in Europe, too - is to leave Africa's numerous failing states to continue collapsing under the weight of [...]

Northern Ireland's Protestants receive bad press, and often deserve it. Much writing about Northern Ireland, and especially about loyalism, routinely oversimplifies and stereotypes its subjects. If they are unfairly maligned, they have themselves to blame, in part. Since the 1990s, however, a new kind of loyalist politician has emerged. Surfacing from the murky depths of paramilitarism, the leaders of the Progressive Unionist Party have shown themselves more constructive and willing [...]