Joshua Hammer

n early May 1994, one month into the Rwandan genocide, I was driving down a mountain road in northern Rwanda when my car was overtaken by a speeding convoy. Curious, I followed the vehicles into a nearby compound, where I found myself the only correspondent at a meeting between Paul Kagame, chief of the Rwandan […]

n January 2001, toward the end of my stint in Germany as Newsweek‘s Berlin bureau chief, a decades-old series of photographs surfaced in the German magazine Stern and instantly became the talk of the country. The pictures showed the country’s charismatic, popular foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, clad in a motorcycle helmet and leather jacketpunching and […]

f all the dramatic twists and turns that have characterized the Middle East conflict over the last five decades, no event blindsided more people than the landslide victory of the radical Hamas movement in the Palestinian elections of January 2006. For months, close observers of the campaign had forecast an easy win for Fatah, the […]

mong the many examples of failure in Africa, the descent of Zimbabwe from hope of the continent into beggar is one of the saddest. More than a quarter century after leading his guerrilla army to victory over the racist regime of Ian Smith in white- minority-ruled Rhodesia, President Robert Mugabe has morphed into a caricature […]

t the height of the second Palestinian intifada five years ago, Sari Nusseibeh was a welcomeand lonelyvoice of moderation. As the president of Al-Quds University and Yasser Arafats administrator in East Jerusalem, Nusseibeh used his influential position as a bully pulpit to denounce the wave of suicide bombings that Palestinian militants were carrying out with […]

In 1990, near the end of the first Palestinian intifada, Jeffrey Goldberg,a young American Jew living in Israel and contemplating immigrating there, was dispatched on army reserve duty to serve as a guard in Ketziot, a bleak prison camp in the Negev Desert. For Goldberg, who had grown up admiring the early Zionist pioneers and […]

Halutz’s callousness, it turns out, is no aberration. As Richard Ben Cramer relates in How Israel Lost: The Four Questions, his wry, resonant new book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Air Force commander didn’t lose his job over the comments. Instead, he was celebrated by many as a hero, while the killing of Shehadeh was […]