Middle East Peace

George J. Mitchell, the new U.S. envoy to the Middle East, arrived in Israel on Wednesday to begin testing his axiom that there's no such thing as a conflict that cannot be ended. Yet even as Israeli and Palestinian leaders offered ideas on how the Obama administration can help bring about peace, the prevailing mood on both sides was that their decades-old fight had become almost hopelessly deadlocked.

President Obama dispatched his special Middle East envoy on his inaugural peacemaking trip Monday, declaring that former Sen. George J. Mitchell would speak for the White House in a search for "progress, not just photo ops." Obama's public appearance with Mitchell and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was his second in five days and placed a strong emphasis on the peacemaking efforts, which come when many analysts rate the chances for Arab-Israeli peace as the worst in decades.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in an unusual public criticism of Israel, said Wednesday that its plan to destroy dozens of Palestinian homes in Arab East Jerusalem was "unhelpful" and contrary to Israel's obligations under a U.S.-backed peace plan. Clinton, closing her first foray into Middle East peacemaking, said the implications of the decision to raze the homes for an archaeological project "go far beyond" the 88 homes affected by Israel's plans.

When President Obama takes the podium in Cairo this week for his much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world, he'll stand before them as an American leader born of an African Muslim father and raised partly in Indonesia, as well as a politician who cut his political teeth in an Illinois political culture that has a sizable Muslim population. And he will talk, aides say, about those roots he shares with the Muslim world.

Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Thursday fired a Katyusha rocket 10 1/2 miles into Israel, their deepest artillery strike yet, provoking some of the heaviest Israeli assaults in months. Nine Palestinians were killed in the day's fighting. The rocket landed harmlessly on the northern outskirts of the coastal city of Ashkelon.

Israel has failed to keep its pledge to stop enlarging Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acknowledged in an interview published Friday, addressing a criticism he expects to hear next week from President Bush. "Every year all the settlements in all the territories [of the West Bank] continue to grow," Olmert told the Jerusalem Post. "There is a certain contradiction in this between what we're actually seeing and what we ourselves promised. . . .

For seven years, President Bush has been a distant defender of Israel, working from Washington to tilt America's policies in the Middle East more firmly behind its longtime ally. When he arrives here Wednesday on his first presidential visit, however, Bush will find an ambivalent Israeli public. It is appreciative of his efforts, yet critical of U.S. setbacks that have made the region feel more threatening. No recent president has been less involved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations than Bush.

As President Bush headed to the Middle East to check on their peace talks, Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed Tuesday to launch them in earnest, six weeks late. It was that long ago that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas stood beside Bush at an international conference in Annapolis, Md., and announced the start of full-scale negotiations with the aim of creating a Palestinian state by the end of 2008.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators began addressing the most difficult issues of their decades-old conflict Monday, keeping a promise to President Bush but putting Israel's coalition government under strain. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Korei emerged from a two-hour session at a Jerusalem hotel with little to say about what they had discussed. Israeli officials said the two lead negotiators planned to meet at least once a week.

A right-wing party quit Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's governing coalition Wednesday in protest of the revived peace talks with the Palestinians, but the move poses no immediate threat to his rule. Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the hawkish Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) faction, said he opposed an approach that sought peace through territorial concessions. "Negotiations on the basis of land for peace are a crucial mistake," he told reporters.