The warships reached the Syrian city of Tartous, northwest of the capital Damascus, after crossing the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea.

The crossing was the second in a year by Iranian warships, Iran’s navy chief said.

Last February, the Iranian frigate Alvand and the supply ship Kharg entered the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal, for the first time since 1979.

Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayari told the official news agency IRNA that the latest initiative was to show Iran’s naval power and “deliver the message of peace to the nations of the region and the world.”

… because nothing can “deliver the message of peace” quite like warships.

More and more, I feel like I’m watching the beginning of what will end up being a bad hockey game that’s going to feature more fighting than hockey. Iran and Israel are opposing wingers who are jawing at each other before the puck even drops, trying to goad one another into dropping the gloves. The puck drops, these two clowns go after each other, the refs can’t effectively break it up, and before you know it, even the goalies are swinging at one another at center ice.

I won’t stretch the analogy any more than I already have, except to say that I hope we can find some officials who can put a stop to the nonsense before it really gets started.

A new article in The Journal of Politics (gated) — ”Economic Conditions and the Quality of Suicide Terrorism” (draft 2009, ungated) by Benmelecha, Berrebia, and Klora — examines one of the connections between poverty and terrorism:

This article analyzes the link between economic conditions and the quality of suicide terrorism. While the existing empirical literature shows that poverty and economic conditions are not correlated with the quantity of terror, theory predicts that poverty and poor economic conditions may affect the quality of terror. Poor economic conditions may lead more able and better-educated individuals to participate in terror attacks, allowing terror organizations to send better-qualified terrorists to more complex, higher-impact terror missions. Using the universe of Palestinian suicide terrorists who acted against Israeli targets in 2000–06, we provide evidence of the correlation between economic conditions, the characteristics of suicide terrorists, and the targets they attack. High levels of unemployment enable terror organizations to recruit better educated, more mature, and more experienced suicide terrorists, who in turn attack more important Israeli targets.

There’s also this piece, posted yesterday by Brad Parks at the Monkey Cage, which looks at another one of the connections between poverty and terrorism:

Since 9/11, the USG has promoted foreign assistance as a useful tool for combating global terrorism. Indeed, the case for foreign aid is often made on the basis of its presumed efficacy inpreventing terrorism. But, until recently, the evidence supporting these claims was rather flimsy.

Formal models of the aid-terrorism relationship suggest that aid may prevent terrorism when it is targeted in ways that promote human capital through education (Azam and Thelen 2008; Buenode Mesquita 2005). However, many of these theoretical arguments have not been subjected to careful empirical scrutiny because of insufficiently granular data.

A recent article by Joseph Young and Michael Findley seeks to correct these weaknesses.  AidData’s detailed activity coding methodology allows the authors to disaggregate aid figures by project purpose. In their analysis, Young and Findley include separate measures of education aid to test the specific argument that aid targeted to education may prevent terrorism. They are also able to examine the potentially substitutable effects of general budget aid, health aid, and aid tied to counterterrorism.

Here is a brief summary of their findings:

Does foreign aid reduce terrorism? We examine whether foreign aid decreases terrorism by analyzing whether aid targeted toward certain sectors is more effective than others. We use the most comprehensive databases on foreign aid and transnational terrorism—AidData andITERATE—to provide a series of statistical tests. Our results show that foreign aid decreases terrorism especially when targeted toward sectors, such as education, health, civil society, and conflict prevention. These sector-level results indicate that foreign aid can be an effective instrument in fighting terrorism if allocated in appropriate ways.

HT: Michael Tofias.

This is all sorts of fascinating:

Members of a single American family have donated half of the NIS 330,000 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has raised for his Likud party primary campaign in the past few weeks. Four members of the Falic family from Florida are responsible for contributing some NIS 165,000.

There’s an interesting discussion already underway — in Israel and in the U.S. — about whether or not anyone can unseat Netanyahu for the premier position within the Likud part, who it might be, and what a change in leadership might mean for Israel in the region.

One thing we know right now: At least there’s one family out there that still likes Bibi.

The Jerusalem Post published as an op-ed today a piece by Erika Dreifus — whose work I must admit I’ve never read — that describes a serious problem she faces. She’s an American author who has to keep unsubscribing from email lists, unfollowing other authors on Twitter, and declining to join petition campaigns because they all become “a reliable source of condemnation for Operation Cast Lead,” “condemning Israel for enforcing the Gaza blockade,” or some other such thing.

She writes, “In defending Israel, you risk alienating friends, editors and critics. As open-minded as these ‘liberal or leftist’ circles claim to be, they are as quick as their analogues at the other end of the spectrum to judge and scorn. There is no place for centrists.”

I had a difficult time with this op-ed, for a whole host of reasons. The most obvious problem is that the author just doesn’t seem like a centrist to me. She says, toward the end of the piece, that she’d like to gain “the ability to acknowledge [Israel’s] flaws publicly,” but nowhere does she explain why she feels she can’t do this now. What she really seems to be saying is that it deeply offends her whenever anyone else — Jewish, non-Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, or American — brings up a single flaw with Israel.

What’s more, all of the examples she gives of things that have forced her to resign, unfollow, and unsubscribe seem like relatively reasonable complaints, ones that a centrist would understand and be able to discuss in a reasonable manner. Indeed, I consider myself a centrist and I often have public conversations about Israel, the Palestinians, and precisely the criticisms that Dreifus felt were so over-the-top that she needed to resign in protest and horror. Indeed, if you look back through the past two years of my blogging here, you’ll find plenty of places where I’m able both to defend and to criticize Israeli policy. The same is true of the way that I write about American policy.

Indeed, it’s possible to care about a country, to hope for the best for its citizens, and also to continually hold its leadership to standards of respect for human rights and international law. The opposite position to that one isn’t centrism; it’s the nationalist “My country right or wrong” sort of thinking that forces someone to cover her eyes and ears whenever there’s challenges to her view of that country as perfectly virtuous and good.

If Dreifus really cares about the way that Israel is perceived, it’s important for her to enagage in dialogue with people who have a different perception of the country. But it’s also desperately important for her to take a good look at the country she loves because it’s often the case that caring so much blinds us to problems that have arisen. Think, for example, of people who care deeply about — and therefore end up enabling — a drug addicted friend or loved one.

Indeed, if a person cannot recognize problems with Operation Cast Lead, if she cannot stand to hear — even from those who support Israel — that the Gaza blockade is bad policy, then it seems clear to me that she’s either not the centrist she believes herself to be or else she simply doesn’t know enough about the country she loves. Perhaps she knows more than she lets on in the op-ed, of course. But, as it’s written, it’s nothing more than a sad lament from someone who claims she wants to find “a place where I can be an American writer and a Zionist” but whose Zionism seems to preclude finding that place.

Dalia Dassa Kaye on some of the complexity regarding the Israeli position on the possible Iranian nuclear threat:

[I]mportant divisions are emerging within the Israeli strategic community over how to deal with the Iranian nuclear challenge. U.S. politicians may feel comfortable with framing Iran as an existential threat to Israel, but not all Israeli leaders do. An increasing number are concerned that overplaying the “existential threat” card may erode Israel’s own ability to deter a future Iranian bomb, suggesting that Israel could not protect itself from a nuclear Iran. Many have stopped using this term in public. Other leaders prefer to talk about Iran as a global problem rather than focus on Iran as Israel’s problem in order to enhance the international coalition that has emerged to pressure and isolate the Islamic Republic.

Perhaps the most interesting debate in Israel today is over the question of a military strike. Last year, former Mossad head Meir Dagan publicly argued that a military attack would be a “dumb idea,” that would trigger region-wide conflict. But well before Dagan’s statements, Israeli leaders and analysts had been quietly debating the merits and feasibility of a military strike. For some, a military strike would be worth the costs even if the nuclear program were only delayed (very few believe it could be destroyed); they think that the risks of Iranian retaliation against Israeli and U.S. targets may be exaggerated. Others believe that a delay in the program could be more effectively achieved through other measures, including sabotage and continued diplomatic and economic isolation, with far fewer costs and risks of wider regional military escalation.

It is difficult to know who has the upper hand in Israel at the moment. Reports suggest that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sympathetic to striking Iran if the alternative is an Iranian breakout capability under his watch. But it is not clear that the Israeli military and certainly Israeli intelligence analysts share this view; many may in fact hold positions closer to U.S. assessments that are less alarmist about the timeline of the Iranian program and more cautious about the utility of a military option. Much has been made over differences between the U.S. and Israeli threat perceptions of Iran, but in fact these internal Israeli divisions suggest that the gap may not be as great as some suggest.

More here.

Just in time for the beginning of my annual “Israel and the Middle East” course this week:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement said on Sunday it would have to re-evaluate its reconciliation pact with the Islamist Hamas group following the rejection of a Fatah visit to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip last week.

In a statement, Fatah’s Central Committee said Hamas’ behavior showed it was not interested in the implementation of the reconciliation agreement signed in Cairo last year, which included the formation of a unity government and the holding of a parliamentary election on May 4.

…

Hamas in turn accused Fatah of reneging on the Egyptian-brokered deal to end four years of bitter rivalry that has split the Palestinian national movement.

It said Abbas was putting peace talks with Israel, taking place in Jordan, ahead of Palestinian unity. Negotiators are searching for a way to revive direct negotiations that have been suspended for over a year.

The fragile reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah always seems to be on the verge of collapse … but that hasn’t seemed to matter very much since reconciliation hasn’t really yield a whole lot of practical outcomes for anyone. To be sure, it’s better than outright fighting between the two groups. But it’s not as though they’ve seemed to get any closer to collaborative governing or negotiating. Nor is it entirely clear what a collapse of the reconciliation agreement would mean … apart from a move to return to the table to discuss renewing or restarting the reconciliation process. At times, the intra-Palestinian negotiations really feels a whole lot like the Israeli/Palestinian negotiations.

For the first time in more than a year, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are set to meet, this time in Jordan. Neither side is particularly optimistic going into the meeting, especially since the Palestinians continue to insist on a freeze on Israeli settlement construction and the Netanyahu government has made no such concession.

So … who’s driving this bus? Well, the minority ruling family of Jordan certainly has an interest in seeing things get moving again:

King Abdullah is also eager to send a message to Hamas, the militant Islamist movement that rules Gaza, that despite the rise of Islamism in the region over the past year, the Palestinian Authority remains, in his view, the leader of the Palestinians. Mr. Abbas has started unity talks with Hamas although they are proceeding slowly.

The king also has a very specific interest in a moderate Palestinian state being established in the West Bank and Gaza — he has tensions with his own Islamists and he does not want to encourage any thoughts of a Palestinian state being established in Jordan instead, as some on the Israeli right advocate. More than half of the inhabitants of Jordan are Palestinian.

Jordan and Israel share a common interest in focusing Palestinian nationalism on the West Bank and Gaza to prevent its being focused on either of their states. Mr. Netanyahu and his aides say they also worry that that any Palestinian state in the West Bank would ultimately be overrun by Islamists, who could threaten the Israeli heartland.

Are we likely to see any progress? I wouldn’t hold my breath.