Slow Week

This week has been a slow week for me.  Working hard on some research/survey projects and working harder on my summer fun (an afternoon of shotgun practice makes the world seem a little better to me).  Even in a slow week there are events in our world that raise questions and thoughts.  This week's big story is the growing exchange of hostility in Israel.  

I have spent some time considering a range of questions related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  This conflict as a study tool is a no brainer for conflict studies and particularly for intra-state conflict study.  I have even co-authored work looking at the ethnic and religious dimension of the conflict following a visit to Israel that began on the same day as the Mavi Marmara incident (May 31, 2010), contributing to this volume.

Interestingly a thoughtful piece about the "Iron Dome" defense system was published recently.  The group that I attended seminars with in 2010 were briefed about the development of this system and reading about the actual deployment and use of the system makes a believer out of me about the ability to create missile defense systems that actually can and will work.  For my two cents, the use of Iron Dome is the biggest story to emerge.  The root causes of the conflict betwen Israelis and Palestinians have not changed.  The issues of territory, governance and religion remain the same and as such the conflict itself is not really big news.  The amount of attention received is directly related to the continued importance to the developed world of having peace in a region of the world important for energy resources and other trade related issues both in the Middle East and the rest of the world.  Which means, nothing really new. but Iron Dome is showing us something new.  I am left to wonder if U.S. developments that began with the deployment of Patriot Missile batteries in the early 1990s have come as far as the Israeli system.