Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Daniel Byman Middle Eastern governments have long supported terrorist groups as part of their foreign polices. States funded Palestinian militants, sheltered violent opposition groups confronting rival governments, and otherwise bolstered substate groups that regularly used terrorism. Regimes supported terrorists to fight Israel, demonstrate their revolutionary credentials, and weaken one another in their deadly geopolitical […]

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From Raymond Ibrahim At the recent inaugural conference for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), presenter LTC Joseph Myers made an interesting point that deserves further elaboration: that, though military studies have traditionally valued and absorbed the texts of classical war doctrine—such as Clausewitz’s On War, Sun Tzu’s The […]

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From Alan Dowty “Go’al nefesh” (abomination). Thus a headline on the front page of today’s Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest-circulation (and centrist) newspaper, characterizing yesterday’s testimony by U.S. businessman Morris Talansky about his abundant generosity over the years to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Gifts totaled $150,000, much of it cash in envelopes handed over personally, some […]

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MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Philip Carl Salzman is professor of anthropology at McGill University and a member of MESH. His new book (with Donna Robinson Divine) is Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel […]

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From Jon Alterman It would be nice to think that Israeli-Syrian negotiations represent a key strategic advance. While I wouldn’t rule out such an advance in the future, this all has the whiff of tactical advantage to me.

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From Tamara Cofman Wittes A Lebanese friend of mine made a close study of the new deal announced today in Doha between Lebanese factions, and didn’t think it was so bad. He argued to me that the deal effectively forbids Hezbollah from using its cabinet representation as a veto on government decisions, and that the […]

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MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Matthew Levitt is senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a member of MESH. His forthcoming book is Negotiating Under Fire: Preserving Peace Talks […]

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