Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this week will make her first foray into Middle East diplomacy, attending a high-level conference on humanitarian assistance to Gaza and making the rounds of Israeli and Palestinian officials, at a time when a growing chorus of voices on both the right and left say the peace process needs a dramatically new approach.
President Barack Obama won praise by appointing a Middle East envoy on the second day of his presidency, indicating a commitment to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The envoy, former Sen. George Mitchell, is making his second tour of the region in a month and will meet up with Clinton at the aid conference, which will be held Monday in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik.
But neither Mitchell nor Clinton appear to have come up with new ideas for rekindling peace efforts. Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, devoted the final months of his administration to unsuccessfully trying to achieve a peace agreement, even sketching out a series of groundbreaking proposals for bridging the gaps still known as the "Clinton parameters." But much has changed since 2001, and the Bush administration's last-minute stab at peacemaking, known as the Annapolis process, also collapsed in failure.
Any peace effort is complicated by other factors, including the prospect of a new right-wing Israeli government hostile to the idea of a Palestinian state and the splintering of the Palestinian leadership into a moderate faction that runs the West Bank and radical group that controls Gaza.
Hillary Clinton will visit Jerusalem and Ramallah on Tuesday and Wednesday.
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