The Palestinian leadership seems to have given up on negotiations with the Netanyahu government and is obviously moving towards seeking recognition for a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, possibly in September this year. Most pundits believe that they will muster a substantial majority in the UN General Assembly.

Israel's foreign ministry has now informed the members of the Security Council as well as a number of European countries that it will react to this Palestinian move with a series of unilateral steps. There are indications that these might include the annexation of some major settlement blocs in the West Bank.

What on earth is this move supposed to achieve? Is it intended to frighten the Palestinians, the UN, or the EU? Does the foreign minister expect the international community to meekly accept Israel's annexation and immediately to stop the process of recognizing the Palestinian state?

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While US and international attention is focused largely elsewhere in the region, especially Libya, the violent crackdown against protestors in the tiny island kingdom of Bahrain may well pose a bigger threat to the entire region's stability. The Bahrain situation is exposing long simmering tensions and rivalries between Saudi Arabia and Iran and carries the danger that it will trigger the next regional war. Such a scenario would likely draw in the United States at a time when its relationships with key allies in the region, especially Saudi Arabia, are under strain. Urgent action is therefore needed to de-escalate the situation in Bahrain and create the trust necessary for the government and opposition to start a much delayed national dialogue that charts the future of the country.

Worryingly, a senior unidentified Saudi official has described the mission of Saudi and other GCC troops to support the Bahraini security forces as "open-ended." A three month state of emergency has led to a campaign of house raids and arrests that have included the leaders of the main opposition parties, as well as human rights activists and other dissidents. There are also mounting concerns that these combined security forces are using disproportionate force and committing serious violations of international law and humanitarian law. The space for dialogue seems to be rapidly closing.

In the days ahead, we are likely to see a deepening of the culture of resistance in Bahrain. In particular, calls for dialogue to establish a constitutional monarchy may be swept away by more radical groups and the combative youth that increasingly supports them. Further radicalization of Bahrainis seems inevitable the longer the current impasse lasts, carrying with it the real danger that the country will be mired in a full blown civil war.

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Thursday's U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorizes international intervention into Libya to protect civilians, is the first time the world has pursued humanitarian intervention in the 21st century. The resolution calls for "all necessary measures to protect civilians under threat of attack in the country," and indeed, British and French diplomats said this morning that they are now fueling jets to enforce a no fly zone. Speaking in a televised address this afternoon, U.S. President Barack Obama also explained his position largely in humanitarian terms: If the world failed to intervene, he said, "The democratic values that we stand for would be overrun. Moreover, the words of the international community would be rendered hollow."

That's one reading of the events unfolding in Washington, London, and Paris. But there's also a more cynical view: that the intervention, centered on the enforcement of a no fly zone, is too little too late. And that's if you agree that the United States and its allies should be involved in the first place. Foreign involvement could play into Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi's hands, other analysts worry, giving him an excuse to strike harder against the now Western-backed rebels.

Read the FP debate.

Two-thousand Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) troops, most of them from Saudi Arabia, entered Bahrain on Monday -- ostensibly to provide security to government installations "threatened" by protestors. In fact, such a show of force, with more troops on the way, is an attempt by the Saudi-led GCC to stiffen the resolve of the ruling house in Bahrain to put down the democracy protests if need be with force. The violence unleashed by the Bahraini army and police against peaceful protestors on Tuesday was the direct outcome of the Saudi/GCC military intervention.

Various interpretations have been put forward as to the reasons behind the Saudi-led military intervention. These include pre-empting the emergence of a pro-Iranian, Shia-dominated government in Bahrain and tilting the balance in favor of the hard-line faction among the al-Khalifa and against the more moderate faction allegedly led by the crown prince.

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As any U.S. Marine can tell you, America's first overseas military intervention occurred in what is now Libya. The United States eventually carried the day, won release of its hostages, and the ruler of Tripoli ultimately gave up piracy and hostage-taking. But the operation could hardly be called a glorious success. Interventions can have costs. After the fledgling U.S. naval squadron blockaded Tripoli harbor in 1803, the frigate Philadelphia was captured. Eventually, Stephen Decatur famously scuttled the ship but one would have to observe that this was not an unvarnished victory. Nor was the fact that the U.S. had to ransom its hostages. Finally in 1805, William Eaton led his force of eight Marines and 500 mercenaries across the desert to "the shores of Tripoli" to carry out regime change, but they only got as far as Derna, east of Benghazi. Although a bit short of their destination, they still were able to persuade the Pasha to sue for peace.

If there is any lesson to be learned from this curious episode, it might be that foreign interventions can be messy. No wonder Thomas Jefferson and John Adams argued about the utility of military force in dealing with overseas problems. 181 years later in 1986, President Ronald Reagan -- provoked by Muammar al-Qadhafi's nefarious (indeed murderous) activities in Europe and elsewhere -- ordered an air attack on Tripoli and Benghazi. Two years later, Libyan agents (who may not have been acting alone) brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Today, once again, we are debating the merits of intervening in Libya.

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Israelis, like most Jews, worry for a living. The dark side of Jewish history and the security challenges of their national life compel them to. And these days there's plenty to worry about. Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and turbulent changes in the Arab world unleashed by the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia are shifting the power balance against Israel. Indeed, its position in the neighborhood -- in part as a consequence of its own policies -- is growing increasingly precarious.

But Israel, and particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is also worried about something else: How will their close ally in Washington, particularly President Barack Obama, react to this tumultuous Arab Spring. Will he race to coddle and court the new Arab democrats, doing so at Israel's expense? Is a big American peace initiative coming, one designed to pre-empt further radicalization in the region that will require big concessions from Israel?

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With the rumblings of fresh protests in Tehran after over a year of relative quiet from the opposition, some members of the US congress, along with several other former officials, appear to be again dreaming of the possibility of a post-theocratic Iran. One significant sign is their renewed push to have the People's Mojahedin of Iran (also known as the MEK) removed from the State Departments list of designated foreign terrorist organizations. Echoing this sentiment last month, former Democratic Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, in an event designed to raise support for the MEK's removal from terror list, asked the audience, "Is it even possible to oppose a terrorist state, and be a terrorist yourself?"

No matter how one looks at that question, the answer must be a resounding "yes." MEK is a non-state organization that, at regular intervals over the years, has taken pride in attacks that have left innocent civilians dead. In the lexicon of our times that qualifies as terrorism. With their designation as a terrorist organization currently under review, the larger issue is not just whether the MEK is engaged in terrorism at the moment, but that if the organization is further legitimated  by U.S. policy makers, it will prove to be yet another disastrous read by the U.S. government.

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Since February 11 when Mubarak stepped down, the Supreme Military Council, which has assumed leadership of Egypt's affairs until such time as free elections are held, has repeatedly and thus far unsuccessfully called on Egyptians to "return to work." It has even threatened to take action against striking workers in the name of national security. The civilian middle-class revolutionaries also seem to be insisting that the striking workers "return to work." Even Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, in his February 18 Tahrir khutba before hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, urged striking workers to go home, stating that it is impossible for all demands to be met immediately and counselling them to be patient.  

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Jeane Kirkpatrick was angry.

In August 1997, I visited the retired diplomat at her spacious corner office at the American Enterprise Institute. "I guess they thought it was worth publishing," she spluttered. What had got her so steamed was my allusion to a recent philippic Robert Kagan had published in Commentary called "Democracies and Double Standards."

In his article, Kagan repudiated Kirkpatrick's famous 1979 essay "Dictatorships & Double Standards" in the same journal, which denounced U.S. President Jimmy Carter and caught the eye of his successor Ronald Reagan, who appointed her ambassador to the United Nations. As Kirkpatrick saw it, Carter had hustled the Shah of Iran and the leader of Nicaragua, both of them pro-American autocrats, out of office. The results were disastrous. Friendly authoritarians were gone; true totalitarians were taking over in both places. While authoritarian regimes of the right could mellow over time into democracies, totalitarians ones of the left would not. Anyway, it required "decades, if not centuries," she observed, for "people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits" to create a viable democracy.

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Last Sunday, with violence mounting as the Libyan government unleashed elements of its security apparatus to put down the uprising against the 40-plus-year reign of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi -- the colonel's son and heir apparent -- took to Libyan television to deliver a rambling speech threatening civil war and the potential takeover of Libya by militant Islamists. As I heard the reports of the younger Qaddafi's speech, I was puzzled -- were these the same militant Islamists the government had released from the notorious Abu Salim prison under a program of rehabilitation sponsored by none other than Saif al-Islam himself?

Along with a number of international experts and researchers, I traveled to Libya in March 2010 for a three-day public relations tour on the dime of the Qaddafi Foundation, the quasi-governmental organization headed by Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi. The ostensible purpose of the trip was a conference on the terrorist deradicalization and rehabilitation program the foundation runs for imprisoned members of an al Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. But what I and the other academics and think tankers assembled in Tripoli were really there for was the hard sell of Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi and the "new Libya" he supposedly represented.

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Within days of the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority announced plans for municipal, legislative, and presidential elections, as well as a cabinet reshuffle. Although these appear on the surface to be democratic measures in the new spirit of the times, they sidestep -- so far -- the serious challenges Palestinians face, including: the Fatah-Hamas split, the exclusion of refugees and exiles from Palestinian governance, and continued Israeli colonization and control over Palestinian land and lives.

The PA does not seem ready to address the Hamas-Fatah split, otherwise it would have sought reconciliation before the announcement of elections -- the latter of which Hamas rejected. Perhaps the PA still fears an American veto of unity efforts until Hamas meets the Quartet's three conditions. Yet elections in the absence of reconciliation would reinforce the West Bank's separation from Gaza. Even assuming a best-case scenario in which all parties are allowed to contest elections freely and fairly and the results are respected, it is not clear how elections will help bring an end to Israel's occupation.

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When Zhou Enlai was asked in the 1970s about the historical significance of the French Revolution, he famously responded that it was "too soon to tell." Given that wise caution, it is undoubtedly foolhardy for me to try to pick the winners and losers of the upheaval whose ultimate implications remain uncertain. But at the risk of looking silly in a few days (or weeks or months or years), I'm going to ignore the obvious pitfalls and forge ahead. Here's my current list of winners and losers, plus a third category: those for whom I have no idea.

THE WINNERS:
1. The Demonstrators
The obvious winners are the thousands of ordinary Egyptians who poured into the streets to demand Hosni Mubarak's ouster and insist on the credible prospect of genuine reform. For this reason, Mubarak's designated deputy, Omar Suleiman, had to go too. Some of the demonstrators' activities were planned and coordinated (and we'll probably know a lot more about it over time), but a lot of it was the spontaneous expression of long-simmering frustration. By relying on nonviolent methods, maintaining morale and discipline, and insisting that Mubarak had to go, the anti-government uprising succeeded where prior protest campaigns had failed. "People power" with an Arab face. And, oh yes: Google got a great product placement too. 

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I long to be back in Cairo. I have fond memories of the two years I spent there from 1965 to 1967. I remember sipping sweet black tea in the Old City's Khan al-Khalili souk, hanging out on weekends at Groppi's Tea Room, and riding the train to the southern suburb of Maadi, where I attended an international high school. I have vivid memories of Tahrir Square's chaotic sidewalks. There were crowds of people everywhere, a moving mosaic of gentle, jostling chaos. It was a noisy city, home to both considerable wealth and desperate poverty, and over the three decades of President Hosni Mubarak's rule the inequality gap has grown even wider.

I wish I could be there today, in solidarity with the thousands of young and old Egyptians, to celebrate the demise of his dreadful regime. But what we are witnessing is more than the end of a government -- it is nothing less than the birth of a new liberal order in Egypt. And that's not only good news for the beleaguered citizens of Egypt, but also the United States and Israel.

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The Quartet on Middle East peace will meet on the sidelines of the Munich security conference tomorrow to discuss the current impasse facing the Palestinian-Israeli search for peace. Breaking this impasse will depend largely on whether the Quartet is prepared to take a qualitative shift in the way it does business.

The Middle East "peace process" is in serious trouble. After years of fruitless negotiations, Israel's occupation is still firmly entrenched, eroding what hope remains for establishing a sovereign Palestinian state and concluding a just and lasting peace based on the two-state solution. Recent efforts by the United States to revive stalled peace talks have been nothing short of disastrous.

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