Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki al-Faisal, was 3 years old and eating dinner when he learned about the war. Outside, there were sirens: Bombers were flying over Cairo. Inside, his mother ordered the family to get under a table. It was July 1948. Israel had declared independence three months earlier, prompting an immediate invasion of Jewish-held territory by its Arab neighbors.

"From then on, the Arab-Israeli dispute was a constant," Turki said....

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger have all suggested in recent weeks that a reinvigorated peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians is a key part of addressing the many crises in the Middle East. Nobody says that achieving peace is a panacea, or even close to one. It's just that everything else, everywhere, looks so bad that peace between Israelis and Palestinians suddenly appears to offer the best shot at curbing the momentum of extremists and of their backer, Iran, in at least one venue.

"For America, Israel, and the moderate states, the choices now are binary," said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator who is the director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation. "Either engage in peacemaking, or you are vacating the region to the extremists, and it's going to take a long time, and a lot of bloodshed, before you can pull it back again..."

Iran, in turn, has steadfastly refused U.N. and U.S. demands to abandon its uranium-enrichment program before sitting down to negotiations. So the United States is encouraging greater security cooperation among the neighboring Persian Gulf states as a way of making Iran "come to see that its behavior is making it less secure," Assistant Secretary of State John Hillen said at a November conference of the Middle East Institute in Washington. "We intend to solve this diplomatically, from a position of strength." But so far, the indirect diplomacy isn't producing results...

Yossi Beilin, an architect of the Oslo accords and the chairman of the dovish Israeli Meretz-Yachad Party, has a new theory on peace: Strong leaders haven't delivered it in the past; maybe it requires weak leaders. After all, he pointed out on a recent visit to Washington, speaking at the New America Foundation, they have less to lose. "What are you worried about, you're going to lose your constituency? You already lost it!" ...

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