Apologies for the light blogging recently. I wish I had been able to be more active over the last three weeks, but an unfortunate injury to my left arm has kept me on the shelf.

Needless to say, there is a lot going on in the world, what with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the presidential elections, the worsening (can it really get any worse?) situation in Syria, the emergence of an Egyptian constitution, a renewed Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN, and the list goes on and on. Each of these topics deserves coverage, but I’d like to look back ten days to the presidential foreign policy debate. Read more »

My friend and colleague, Dov Friedman, was nice enough to guest post while I’m convalescing from a recent injury. Enjoy.

Over the last six months, the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) have renewed clashes and Kurdish groups have asserted control in northern Syria.  These developments reminded observers—if such a reminder was even necessary—that Turkey’s so-called “Kurdish Question” remains unresolved.  Yet, exactly how the ongoing conflict is called ties intimately into the search for a solution. Read more »

Helen Lackner on Open Democracy, discusses the possibility of southern separatists in Yemen disrupting the country’s unity.

Nada Moselhy describes the experience of many of the Syrian refugees now living in Egypt. Read more »

Ibrahim El-Houdaiby wonders if Egypt’s Islamists will make the same mistakes as previous regimes.

Qifa Nabki offers an interesting profile of Wissam al-Hassan, the head of Lebanon’s Information Branch of the Internal Security Forces, who was assassinated in today’s attack in Beirut. Read more »

Blogging will be light for the next few weeks. In the meantime, here are some interesting new releases on the Middle East that you may enjoy:

The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran
by Ali Ansari Read more »

Sarah Carr offers her reflections from Cairo during the march commemorating the one year anniversary of the Maspero massacre.

Stefan Fule, the EU commissioner responsible for enlargement policy, says that the project of Turkey’s accession to the EU has not been abandoned, despite widespread sentiment to the contrary. Read more »

In the fall of 1991, Robert A. Mortimer writing in the Middle East Journal declared, “Although the leaders of the post-independence generation feared that a pluralistic Algeria would be too unruly to govern, today’s political elite has moved beyond that position.” It was not to be, however. Just a few months after Mortimer’s article appeared, Algeria’s senior military commanders pushed President Chadli Bendjedid from office and nullified the results of the country’s first competitive national elections when it became clear that the Front Islamique du Salut would win an outright majority in the National Assembly. The civil conflict that followed the military’s intervention took the lives of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 Algerians, though some estimates go much higher. Read more »

Zeinobia posts a documentary on Lieutenant General Saad el Shazly, a hero of the October 1973 War. [In Arabic-but even if you don't speak Arabic, it's worth eight minutes of your time.] Read more »

If it is “unbreakable,” “unshakeable,” and “a common commitment,” the United States and Israel are sure to share it, at least that is what American politicians of all stripes have been telling the American people for as long as anyone can remember.  There are, of course, influential voices who question the premise of these ties, but for a variety of political, strategic, and moral reasons, Washington and Jerusalem have what is known as a “special relationship.”  This is essentially a fact of U.S.-Middle East policy, which is why the current conversation about relations between the countries is so curious. Suffice it to say that Israel’s supporters are deeply unhappy about the way things have gone since almost the moment President Obama took office.  It’s true, there were Obama missteps.  Sticking it to the Israelis over settlement growth was, in principle, a good thing, but doing it at the same time as offering to talk to the Iranian leadership about anything anywhere was not the best way to start off.  Still, this was more clumsy than an effort to undermine that unshakeable bond between Washington and Jerusalem. Read more »

Mustafa Akyol writes about his mixed feelings on the Sledgehammer case trials in Turkey.

Nour Bakr on Egypt Monocle, reflects on the recent questions concerning the U.S.-Egypt relationship. Read more »