Israeli business site, Globes, ran an article today that summarized a recent Citibank research note. What caught my eye is that instead of publishing analysis on a severely undervalued (IMHO) Israel tech firm, Comverse Technology (OTC: CMVT.PK) or an unheard of diamond-in-the-rough (IMH0), Elbit Medical (Nasdaq: EMITF), this piece was on the take-aways of what's going on in Middle Eastern history in Annapolis, Maryland today.

If you haven't heard the harbingers of peace chirping away, you haven't see the fanfare going on in Annapolis. Everyone who is everyone is there (well, almost). Check out my piece over the weekend about two interesting stock picks as a play on the conference.

Beyond the tongue and cheek surrounding the love fest, Citibank wrote the following about the Israeli economy:
"In the past couple of years, strong domestic economic performance has allowed Israeli markets to shrug off several regional geo-political developments, including the victory of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian Authority (PA) elections and last year's war in the north versus Hezbollah."

As Middle East leaders prepare to convene together, again, I was looking for some ways to play this event in my portfolio via Israeli Ingenuity, something we discuss a lot at IsraelNewsletter.com. This time around, the location is Annapolis, Maryland, site of the U.S. Naval Academy. Tuesday's conference aims to relaunch Israeli-Palestinian peace talks for the first time in seven years. Looks like almost everyone is going to attend. Even Lebanon looks ready to join the U.S., Israel, the Palestinians, and Syria in making history.

I'd be a buyer here of Elbit Systems (NASDAQ: ESLT), an Israeli defense contractor working on some large deals and really cool technology. BloggingStocks' Aaron Katsman wrote this past week about the anti-hijacking technology Elbit is marketing and this will certainly come in handy in Annapolis while each attending party will be working diligently to secure its best interest at the expense of all the others'. We've been here before and most of us do not so readily imbibe the peace kool-aid as in years past.

The second company I'd be buying here is Answers.com (NASDAQ: ANSW). Answers.com is an Israeli internet firm that runs an answer-based information portal providing users with answers covering millions of topics. I hope the participants in Annapolis are using Answers.com to find a path to peace because from where I'm sitting, it doesn't look particularly promising.

Answers.com, which gets a lot of its traffic from search monolith, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), is in the process of acquiring the parent company of Dictionary.com, in a bid to secure more organic search traffic to its site. Dictionary.com may come in handy for Annapolis participants to find the definition of "disappointment" when this is all over.

Zack Miller is the lead equity analyst for America Israel Investment Associates, LLC., the managing editor of IsraelNewsletter.com and a former equity analyst for a leading multinational hedge fund. Author's fund holds a position in ESLT but not in ANSW.

Oil prices have picked up right where they left off yesterday, fueled by new concerns over tensions in the Middle East. Prices have moved up $1.42 on the day to $88.52 and hit an intraday high of $88.99 earlier in the session.

Yesterday, traders pushed prices higher after the U.S. Energy Department's weekly inventory report showed an unexpected decline of 5.3 million barrels, but today's extra price gains are being attributed to new violence between Israel and Lebanon. Any Middle Eastern conflicts will result in price gains, and that is exactly what we are seeing today on news that Lebanese troops fired on Israeli warplanes.

While it is true that a conflict between Israel and Lebanon would not impact supplies from the region, there is always the fear that an escalation of violence between the two would draw in the big oil players in the region. This is the first encounter since last summer's conflict between Israel and Hezbollah rebels, which pushed oil prices to last summer's highs.

According to a report in Bloomberg, oil is selling in record territory on worries that Turkey may invade Northern Iraq. Uncertainty is never a good thing when it comes to business, and when it's related to oil prices it rocks the world, and potentially the world's economy.

• Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told reporters his country would pursue the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, regardless of diplomatic costs, according to an Agence France-Presse report. Northern Iraq holds some of its largest oil fields, including Kirkuk, the source of much of Iraq's exports.
• "If they start shelling across the border, the price is going to go up,'' said Addison Armstrong, director of market research at TFS Energy LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. "When there is tension in the world, oil gets bid up.''

This unpredictability in the region has kept oil prices up even though demand is not as strong as speculators anticipated during its rise over the last few years. For me, this is an unfortunate irony as I read this news after returning from a breakfast meeting where I told an associate, "Oil will be $60 a barrel before it is $100, unless war breaks out somewhere." This is very sad to me, because just the possibilty of war creates a rise in oil prices that I envision causes more pain for those at the bottom of the economic strata barely getting by now.

Former President Jimmy Carter just doesn't know when to shut up. Here is the man who may go down as the worst president in American history and he still is trying to build his legacy. A legacy of what? A legacy of saying stupid things at the worst time? Saying the recent elections in Venezuela, which he oversaw as an "observer" were fair and equitable? The man who let the shah of Iran fall in 1978, only to see the Ayatollah Khomeini take over and begin a reign of terror, including the 1979 hostage crisis at the American Embassy? Carter should call it a day and go back to Habitat for Humanity -- where he has done good work.

Carter has seen many members of his staff leave their posts recently, as his latest book was viewed as a joke. He is pro-Palestinian and virtually anti-Jewish. He says he isn't, but his statements supporting the wrong group show otherwise. Carter speaks to anyone who will listen as if he believes he was a great and wise president. Right.

Carter's presidency was marked by record high interest rates, international failures culminating in the failed rescue attempt of the hostages in Iran, and the idiotic "fireside chats" where he accused Americans of being in a "malaise." America was so "malaised" that Carter was crushed by Ronald Reagan 48 states to 2. The day Reagan was inaugurated, the hostages were released -- some 444 days after their capture. The State Department had warned Carter that the embassy was at risk, but Carter chose to ignore the warnings. Gee, what a surprise.

So why do we even give this guy a forum to spout off like a scorned lover? He never got over the Reagan landslide, and has taken every opportunity to publicly criticize President Bush. There was an unwritten rule that retired presidents do not openly criticize the current occupant of the Oval Office. So much for protocol.

Jimmy, it's time to go back to Plains, Ga., and retire -- for good.

Georges Yared is the CIO of Yared Investment Research and the author of "Baby Boomer Investing...Where do we go from here?"

Since the Democrats took control of Congress, a battle is going on within the Bush administration on the direction of its Mideast policy. You can see this with the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld and the subsequent appointment of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. We also got additional evidence with the resignation of John Bolton as American Ambassador to the United Nations. This is literally a battle of the Bushes.

On one side we have the "neoconservatives" or Bush 2 people who were the architects of American foreign and defense policy during President Bush's first term. They are internationalist in scope and want to remake the Mideast and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the world in a new Western, democratic mold, beginning with Iraq. They want to accomplish this with or without help from the rest of the world.

On the other side are the "realists" or Bush 1 people who served during President George H.W. Bush's term of office. These individuals value stability and American control of the situation with much less regard for ideology and are very wary of trying to change the existing world order. Some have said that they don't mind a dictator as long as he is our dictator.

Why should we care?