When thousands of Israelis this weekend attend the annual ceremony to mark the assassination in 1995 of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who died attempting to make peace with the Palestinians, they will be shown a pre-recorded message from Barack Obama, urging them to re-engage with the peace process. At the same time, they will be reminded of just how far relations between Israelis and Palestinians have deteriorated since those heady days in 1993 when Mr Rabin signed the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, in front of a beaming Bill Clinton.
The collapse of the Oslo initiative, which was precipitated by Mr Rabin's untimely murder by a Jewish extremist, has led to a dramatic polarisation, with Israel now run by arguably the most Right-wing government in its 61-year history and the Palestinians turning in increasing numbers to the Islamist militancy espoused by Hamas. The deterioration in relations culminated in the military offensive Israel launched last January in Gaza, in retaliation for Hamas firing rockets at Israeli towns close to the Gazan border. A recent UN report into this nasty little war, which found that both sides were guilty of war crimes, has only served to exacerbate tensions further, as Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, will discover when she flies to Tel Aviv tomorrow in a desperate attempt to rescue the peace process.
White House officials have hinted that Mr Obama had been seriously contemplating a visit of his own, such is his concern at the way the situation has unravelled. After all, persuading the Israelis and Palestinians to agree a permanent peace deal is supposed to be one of the pillars of the Obama presidency: the policy featured prominently in his much-vaunted speech in Cairo in June, when he sought to end the "cycle of suspicion and discord" between America and the Muslim world. Yet the prospects were deemed to be so unpromising that the White House decided to send Mrs Clinton instead, who, together with Senator George Mitchell, Washington's Middle East envoy, has the daunting task of trying to coax the two sides back to the negotiating table.
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