GEORGE MITCHELL is in the Middle East, pressing for peace. His planned itinerary brackets Israel and Palestine with a start in Abu Dhabi and Syria and a conclusion in Bahrain and Egypt. The Obama administration’s determination to revivify the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is further indicated by the arrivals in the region next week of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, National Security Adviser James Jones, and special Middle East adviser Dennis Ross. President Obama has replaced the Bush policy of hands-off with a gloves-off readiness to push all parties hard.
The destitution of Gaza remains the largest, and most unaddressed, problem between Palestinians and Israelis. Progress toward reconciliation there remains remote, but it presumes prior accommodation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. That prospect, though, has become ever more nettlesome in recent days because of tensions over Jerusalem. This week, the sacred city comes into the center of Jewish awareness as Jews everywhere observe the holy day of Tisha B’Av, the commemoration of the destructions of the Temple. Those calamities, as this Christian understands them, define not only the place of grief in the Jewish soul, but also the Jewish capacity for reinvention and survival. To the extent that the on-again, off-again peace process has offered prospects of reinvention and survival to both Israelis and Palestinians, a new conflict over Jerusalem now threatens to join the enforced misery of Gaza as a looming deal-breaker.
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