This is very cool.

Very Short List:

Zamaaan is a crowd-sourced digital collection of vintage family photos from the Middle East.

On Tuesday’s Fresh Air, we talk to journalist Peter Beinart about his book The Crisis of Zionism, which argues that Israel cannot be a true democratic state as long as there are settlements in the West Bank, where Jews are citizens of the Israeli state and Palestinians are not. In his book and in a recent New York Times op-ed, Beinart has proposed a boycott of goods made in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

We also talk to journalist Gary Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt, the editor and publish of The Jewish Weekof New York, details the reaction to Beinart’s article and explains why he disagrees with the boycott proposal.

Any attack on Iran would probably have the effect of unifying a very divided country. It would bring up a nationalistic surge. It could force opposition politicians to side with the Mullahs. It could make a battle with Israel or the United States an issue in the streets of Tehran rather than seeing those protestors out, as they were in 2009, protesting against their own government.

— New York Times correspondent David Sanger, on what could happen if Israel or the U.S. attacked facilities in Iran.

4 Times Journalists Held Captive in Libya Faced Days of Brutality

In March, veteran foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid and three other journalists were held and beaten by security forces in Libya. On today’s Fresh Air, Shadid talks about his experiences in Libya and why he decided to continue reporting from conflict zones. In the past year, he’s covered the Arab uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Tunisia. Before that, he covered the Iraq War for nearly a decade. 

If you’re sitting out on the network, it’s very difficult to determine what is being said during a Skype conversation. So one way around that is to put some intrusion technology on the target’s computer. So basically you’re seeing all the keystrokes and hearing all the conversation before it becomes encrypted. There are some technologies that boast about their abilities to do this.

— On today’s Fresh Air, Bloomberg News’ reporter Ben Elgin talks about how Western companies are providing software/technology that allows repressive regimes like Syria and Iran to spy on their citizens. 

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Surveillance /Brooklyn, New York (September, 2011)

Tomorrow: As protesters in the Middle East use social media to organize and communicate, the regimes they’re battling are using sophisticated technology to intercept their emails, text messages, and cell phones calls. We’ll talk to journalist Ben Elgin about Western companies that sell surveillance technology to repressive regimes, and what government regulators and human rights are doing about it. 

We have [the troops] leaving at a time when just about everybody involved in the discussion — from the American military leaders to the Iraqi military leaders — did not think it was a good idea that all the troops leave — that Iraq is not ready for that.

— On today’s Fresh Air, we talk to New York Times Baghdad Bureau Chief Tim Arango about what happens to the country after U.S. troops leave at the end of next month. 

I hope I’m wrong, I’ve made enough wrong predictions over the Arab Spring that maybe I’m wrong on this too — but my conviction is that President Abbas and Prime Minister Netanyahu cannot reach a deal for so many reasons, not just personal outlooks but politics on both sides.

— The West Bank has yet to see a democracy movement on the of level of those sparking dramatic changes in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. It could have a huge effect on the region, were it to happen, says conflict resolution expert Robert Malley.

Atlantic’s Focus: Crisis in Yemen June 3, 2011

Tomorrow’s Fresh Air: Democracy movements are sweeping across the Middle East. But the dramatic changes in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria have not yet come to the West Bank. If and when that does occur, it could be a game-changer for Israel and the United States according to Robert Malley. He’s the program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group.

Tomorrow’s guest Dexter Filkins in the current issue of The New Yorker on the current state of Yemen

A Western diplomat in Yemen said, “O.K., fine, Saleh goes. Then what do you do? There is no institutional capacity—in the bureaucracy, in the military, or in any other institutions in this society—to really step in and pick up the pieces and manage a transition.” A failed state in Yemen, coupled with an already anarchic situation in Somalia, could provide Islamist militants with hundreds of miles of unguarded coastline, disrupting the shipping lanes that run from the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean.

On today’s Fresh Air, political scientist Marc Lynch explains why the future of Libya has become a key part in the rapidly changing transformation of the Arab world: “If Gadhafi survives, it sends a message to every dictator in the region that force pays — that the way to stay on the throne is to shoot your people if they protest and the international community really won’t do anything about it. And that sends a powerful message both to the dictators and to the people.”

Journalist Thanassis Cambanis, on Hezbollah’s perpetual war against Israel: “They’ll engineer it at the moment that is most propitious to them. In their ideal world, they manage to engineer a situation in which Israel attacks and they can blame the beginning of the war on Israel. … They seem to feel like they’ve changed the balance of power between Hezbollah and Israel — not that they could defeat Israel — but they think they can inflict so much damage on Israel in another war with missiles on Tel Aviv, or much more destructive missiles on Haifa that [Hezbollah] will hold the cards.”

The Big Picture: Protest Spreads in the Middle East