Events of interest in the past week:

Today, US Forces caught the highest ranking Baath Party member, the Ace of Diamonds, Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Tikriti. Read about it in the New York Times.

Chaos has continued throughout Iraq as the US tries to get a handle on it. Services are slowly being restored, but former Iraqi Army soldiers are demonstrating about the lack of work. Today, the US fired on one such demonstration in Baghdad, killing two. The US had sponsored a planned election of local officials in Najaf. Paul Bremer III, the head of the American military occupation in Iraq, decreed that conditions in Najaf were not appropriate for an election. What this likely means is that the winner would likely be someone that Mr. Bremer did not approve of. New York Times again.

Students have been demonstrating against the government in Tehran, Iran for the past week. It is unclear what effect it is having on the government or whether the protests are beginning to die down or increase. The government sent police to break up demonstrations, but pro-government militias have been attacking the demonstrators, often beating them. Protests have spread to the provincial cities of Hamedan, Mashhad, Karaj, Isfahan, Kerman, Kermanshahr and Tabriz as well. The official news in Iran describes them as small. BBC has more.

In addition to the pressure on the Mullahs by students and other demonstrators, there has been international pressure on Iran for its pursuit of nuclear technology. BBC and New York Times. This week, the EU and Russia have both stated concerns that the program is leading to the development of nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency has demanded more rigorous inspections to ensure compliance with the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. The treaty is designed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapon technology throughout the world. A consequence of this is that only a few countries have nuclear weapons and they have a stranglehold on the power that comes with it. Included on the list are the US, Britain, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel. For this reason, many smaller countries either have rejected the treaty, like North Korea, or are secretly violating it, like Iran is now and Pakistan did in the 1990's. The nuclear countries do not want to see any other countries gain nuclear weapons because it represents a quantum increase in their political power. Nuclear armed countries cannot be bullied or threatened into toeing the line if they have a nuclear deterrent. This is the reason that the North Koreans have given for developing them.

The Israel-Palestinian conflict is in chaos after attacks and counterattacks by Hamas and the Israeli government. It seems that, in the deadlocked political situation, a radical organization can use violence to define the terms of the debate. It seems that neither Hamas nor right-wing Israelis want peace. The goal on each side is total victory. On the Israeli right, the radicals want nothing more than a Jewish state over all of Palestine, including the territories of Judea and Samaria, as they call the West Bank. They can gain this only if there is a war against the Arabs in the occupied territories. If there is peace, then Israel must give up its claims to the land, which the ultra-right adamantly opposes. In the current political climate, they can keep the war going by forcing the government to continue assassinating high level Hamas or Islamic Jihad leaders.

On the other side, Hamas has a goal of total victory as well. Many of their leaders have publicly stated that they will drive the Zionists into the sea. Given the imbalance of power, it seems unlikely that this will happen. However, violence is their only tool to keep the debate on their terms. All Palestinian politicians at least give lip service to the demand that all of Palestine should be controlled by the Palestinians, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. To say otherwise would be political suicide. Of course, such an arrangement would not mean that all Jews must leave, but it would require the end of the State of Israel, which is defined as a Jewish state.

It appears that much is happening behind the scenes. There are conflicting reports every day as to whether Hamas will agree to a truce, whether Israel will give up its policy of assassination. We hear about high level Egyptian and American envoys meeting with factions on both sides. There has even been talk of freeing Marwan Barghouti, a very popular Palestinian Fatah politician who has been suggested as a successor to Yassir Arafat. Arial Sharon seems to be making minor concessions under American pressure. Nothing is clear, especially whether progress is being made. I expect that, if anything happens, it may happen as a sudden flood. More at the BBC.

From the Palestinian perspective, the biggest sticking point in getting to peace is the Right of Return. That is the right of Palestinian refugees, or their descendants, to return to their homes in what is now Israel from which they were expelled in 1948 at the foundation of the State of Israel. Hamas opposes the Road Map to Peace because it requires the Palestinians to give up their most powerful tool, violence, without any decision on the Right of Return. Israel opposes the Return because it would require that millions of Arabs be settled on land in Israel. But this land is occupied by Jews, many of whom were expelled from Arab countries in 1948 or arrived since then. In addition, if the Palestinians were allowed to return or even if the West Bank were reunited with Israel, the Arabs would overwhelm the Jews with their larger number, endangering the Jewish nature of the State of Israel.

The other sticking point is the Jewish nature of the State of Israel. Americans generally have no problem with this, in spite of our tradition of religious tolerance. The thinking goes that, all the other major religions (in the American mind, those are Christianity, Islam and Judaism) have their own countries, then the Jews should as well. Europeans, however, are less comfortable with this notion because it sounds so much like nationalism which has caused so much trouble in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. In fact, the wars in the Balkans in the 1990's and the Troubles in northern Ireland are nationalist movements. Europeans are now going through a process of suppressing nationalist tendencies in Europe through the strenghtening of the European Union. But can Israel give up its Jewish nature and unite with Arabs in one state? The notion seems unthinkable except for the most idealistic political scientist.