Former head of Jordanian intelligence Muhammad Dhahabi was detained this week on charges of money laundering and corruption. He wasn't the first. In December, former Amman mayor Omar Maani was arrested on corruption charges. Last month, a young pro-democracy activist from Madaba, Ibrahim Braizat, was arrested and then convicted - in the State Security Court -- for setting fire to a banner picturing King Abdullah II. Last week, police arrested the always-controversial former Member of Parliament Ahmad Oweidi al-Abbadi, allegedly for suggesting that Jordan should become a republic.

Each of these arrests has generated considerable discussion, and sent signals about where exactly Jordan is on the barometer of the Arab Spring. While the Maani case was greeted by some in Jordan's reform movement as part of a crackdown on corruption -- a key opposition demand -- Braizat's two year sentence was met with serious concern, as the state seemed to have come down unusually harshly for what amounted to minor vandalism. As should be expected from those who follow Jordanian politics, the signals are mixed.

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Women are at a crossroads in the Middle East and North Africa. This is widely reflected in the current battles over the adoption of quotas aimed at improving women's chances of being elected into parliaments. Although women's quotas were introduced as early as 1979 in Egypt, there are new efforts underway in the Middle East to implement them. Last year, Tunisia adopted a law requiring that party lists alternate between men and women. In a more restrained manner, Libya recently drafted an election law that gives women only 10 percent of the seats. However, the struggle for quotas has also met with resistance as in Egypt, which abandoned a 2010 quota law altogether that would have ensured the presence of 64 women in the parliament.  

Quotas are not only being adopted in the legislative arena in the Middle East, they are being entertained in government as well. Recently, the Iraqi cabinet approved a quota system that requires women to make up half of all hires in the ministries of health and education and to account for 30 percent of hires at all other ministries.

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Talk to Iranian diplomats in Damascus and they will tell you that the late Syrian President Hafez Assad advised his son Bashar in his will that he could always rely on Iranians, but that he should never trust Arab leaders. True or not, Tehran's current strong support for current Syrian President Bashar Assad is proof of the unique nature of the Damascus-Tehran relationship. While the failure of the Arab League's roadmap to end the bloodshed in Syria and the army crackdown and gruesome sectarian violence in the city of Homs has exposed Syria to greater Arab and international pressures, Tehran is exploiting all of its regional cards to save its ally from outside intervention and the waves of the Arab Spring. Indeed, an alliance that has survived much tension in its bilateral relationship and relentless external pressure since the 1979 revolution in Iran is now again put to a difficult test in the wake of the Arab Spring. But this time, the Iranian-Syrian axis is facing a different kind of challenge; unlike the international and regional pressures of the past, this time the challenge is foremost coming from within Syria.

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Speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace earlier this month, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen stressed the need for the U.S. to maintain open channels of communication with the government of Iran.

"Even in the darkest days of the Cold War," Mullen said, "we had links to the Soviet Union. We are not talking to Iran, so we don't understand each other." Asked whether he was "specifically talking about military to military contact, or a broader set of engagement between the two countries," Mullen replied, "I'm talking about any channel that's open. We've not had a direct link of communication with Iran since 1979...Any channel would be terrific."

While President Obama made talking to Iran a central element of his foreign policy agenda upon taking office, no one expected that it would be easy. Over the last three years, Iran's leaders have done nothing to change that pessimism. Always skeptical of the prospect of negotiating with Iran, U.S. conservatives have criticized President Obama's engagement policy from the start. Most recently, in his first big foreign policy address last Tuesday, Texas Governor Rick Perry scolded President Obama for "wasting precious time on a naïve policy of outreach" to Iran.

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While the relentless pace of developments in the Middle East shows little sign of flagging, the region will briefly cast its gaze to New York next week -- with the backdrop for the next installment on Israel-Palestine being provided by Manhattan's East side digs of the United Nations. Any thoughts of the Arab awakening "proving" that Palestine was in fact a marginal concern in the region were unequivocally banished in recent weeks. To imagine that a popular Arab push for democracy, freedom, and dignity would ignore Israel's denial of those same aspirations for Palestinians was a flight of fancy. The opposite is unsurprisingly proving true -- Arab democracy will be less tolerant of Palestinian disenfranchisement than was Arab autocracy.

What is actually likely to happen to the Palestinian effort at the United Nations and what might it mean for all concerned?

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