Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From MESH Admin At last week’s Herzliya Conference, Tel Aviv University geographer Gideon Biger presented a futuristic plan for land swaps and border alterations among Israel, the Palestinians, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Biger, author of The Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 1840-1947, proposes a map based on 1967—that is, each party would end up with the […]

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From Martin Kramer “This may be a blessing in disguise.” This is how an unnamed Israeli official greeted the destruction by Hamas of a chunk of the border barrier separating Gaza from Egypt, followed by an unregulated flood of hundreds of thousands of Gazan Palestinians across the border into Egypt. “Some people in the Defense […]

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From MESH Admin The 2006 National Geographic-Roper Survey of Geographic Literacy surveyed geographic knowledge of 18- to 24-year-olds across the United States. (The full report is here.) Respondents were shown a blank political map of the Middle East and asked to identify four countries: Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran. These were the results:

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From MESH Admin What is the most effective way to represent the strategic significance of the Persian Gulf? One alternative is to emphasize its dominance of world oil reserves and exports, via a graph or map. Here are three approaches—the first one, conventional; the other two, innovative and even dramatic.

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From MESH Admin Over the past year or so, drawing maps of a reconfigured Middle East has become a pastime of journalists and experts. Here is an early exercise that’s been overlooked, but that seems to have anticipated them all.

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From MESH Admin This map is from the December 2007 report “Rocket Threat from the Gaza Strip, 2000-2007,” by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center (IICC).

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