Life rarely gives you second chances. But if handled deftly, the Arab Peace Initiative (API), discussed yesterday at a Blair House meeting between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and an assembled group of Arab foreign ministers, could help form the basis of a serious reconstituted peace process. The delegation came to Washington under the guise of the Arab Peace Initiative Follow-up Committee -- a group charged with securing acceptance of the API by Israel and others.   

The API was proposed over a decade ago by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah at a 2002 Arab League Summit in Beirut that convened amidst raging Israeli-Palestinian violence. Endorsed by the Arab League, the proposal offered Israel the prospect of peace, security, and normal relations -- a goal Israel has sought since its independence in 1948. In return, the Arabs called on Israel to agree to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. 

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The brouhaha over Israel's recent settlement announcements faded as suddenly as it emerged. After the United Nations General Assembly vote on November 29, 2012 that granted Palestine non-member observer status, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized an aggressive push in and around East Jerusalem. Construction plans, some of which already were on the fast track, were further accelerated and thousands of new housing units were approved, both to deter the Palestinian leadership from taking further steps in the international arena and as an unsuccessful election gambit to shore up his right flank. Within weeks, the bureaucracy reverted to a plodding pace, partly because the brouhaha had served its purpose, partly because of the quick and relatively forceful international response.

International condemnations of Israeli settlement activity are often pro forma. Not this time. The United States and European Union have been sensitive to these particular plans for nearly a decade already because they are seen to pose potentially insurmountable obstacles to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. The most provocative project in question -- a development in the area known as E-1, an approximately 4.5 square mile zone east of Jerusalem that stretches to the settlement of Maale Adumim -- would all but separate the putative Palestinian capital from its Arab hinterland and foreclose the possibility of suturing the West Bank's urban continuum.

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Even though the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has experienced long periods of stalemate over the past 20 years, a majority of Palestinians and Israelis never ceased to support its final goals. They disagreed about the contours of negotiations, preconditions, and timing, but they consistently agreed about the most important things: the viability of a two-state solution and the acceptance of mutual recognition of each other's right to self-determination. Israeli and Palestinian opinion polls since the signing of the Oslo Agreement have shown this again and again. However, recent polls indicate that 2013 could be the year when this all changes.

The latest joint Israeli-Palestinian poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) from December 2012 shows that a majority among Israelis (65 percent) and Palestinians (62 percent) now believe the chances for a final agreement are low to non-existent. In Israel, unlike the 2009 election in which the center-left and the right blocs were approximately tied, the election planned for January 2013 is likely to generate an easy victory for the hawkish Netanyahu and Lieberman coalition. The two main players in this coalition -- the Likud and Yisrael Beitenu parties (which have merged into one list) -- are dominated by politicians who adamantly reject the two-state paradigm, some of whom even advocate for an Israeli annexation of the West Bank.

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With his decision to oppose the U.N. General Assembly's granting Palestine non-member state observer status, U.S. President Barack Obama leaves no doubt he is not modifying his pre-election position that "There is no daylight between Israel and the United States," and that no matter how deeply Israeli behavior violates international norms and existing agreements, U.S. support for Israel remains "rock solid." This continuity of U.S. Middle East peace policy was promptly reinforced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she assured Israel that despite her condemnation of its decision to proceed with new construction in the E1 corridor of the West Bank that will doom the two-state solution, this administration will continue to "have Israel's back."

The decision confirms America's irrelevance not only to a possible resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict but to the emerging political architecture of the entire region, the shape and direction of which will increasingly be determined by popular Arab opinion, not autocratic regimes dependent on the United States for their survival.

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Yasir Arafat had a canny knack for ensuring that Palestine never strayed too far from the world's headlines. His ghost may turn out to be no less resourceful. Today, a multinational team of medical and forensic experts exhumed the late Palestinian president's remains, as part of an investigation to determine whether he was poisoned. And, Thursday, the United Nations General Assembly, Arafat's favorite international forum, appears poised to confer the status of "non-member observer state" upon Palestine. The timing of these two developments appears coincidental, but what happens next may determine the fate of another apparent victim of foul play: the Middle East peace process.

The decision to exhume Arafat's remains, almost eight years after his demise, is itself illuminating. Why, many have asked, wasn't it done earlier, when potential evidence of wrongdoing remained fresh? Although it is tempting to suspect a conspiracy, the reality likely hews closer to Hamlet than Julius Caesar. Just after Arafat's death in 2004, a negotiated settlement of the conflict remained a tantalizing prospect: Israel withdrew its troops from the Gaza Strip in 2005, a new Palestinian-Israeli agreement on movement and access was concluded later the same year, and Palestinians returned to the polls in 2006 for the first time in a decade. While many Palestinians suspected from the start that Arafat died from unnatural causes, their leadership, like the court of Denmark in Hamlet, preferred not to be confronted with potentially unpleasant facts about the late patriarch's death. Why inflame the situation just as tempers were cooling? Why risk souring relations with Israel and the United States when progress was close at hand? Wasn't it possible, after all, that Arafat had been the obstacle to peace all along?

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Recent developments in Jerusalem pose a threat to the stability of the city and to the region. The world saw a preview over the recent Jewish holidays, when activists challenged the Israeli-imposed ban on Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif. Sensitivities at the site tend to peak during any holiday season; however, these latest challenges cannot be dismissed as routine or benign. The radicalization in the political discourse in Israel and the growing power of an emboldened group of Israeli activists focused on the Temple Mount are today coalescing into concrete initiatives that aspire to alter the status quo at the site for the first time since 1967. With Israeli elections approaching, the temptation of right-wing politicians to pander to Temple Mount activists will grow. In parallel, as the radicalization trend within Israel continues a settler-inspired "price tag" incident at the site becomes increasingly likely.

The site at the center of this brewing crisis is revered in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. For Jews, it is the Temple Mount, site of the ancient first and second Jewish Temples. For Muslims, since 705 AD the same spot has been home to the third holiest site in Islam, al Aqsa Mosque. For some dispensationalist Christians, restoration of Jewish contol over the site is an essential component in bringing about the "end of days."

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Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had high hopes for the visit to Tehran by new Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. His trip on Thursday for the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit might have been brief -- his spokesman emphasized ahead of time that he would spend only four hours on Iranian soil, including getting stuck in traffic -- but Iran's leaders relished the opportunity to demonstrate progress in overcoming its isolation in the Arab world and to gain some democratic and revolutionary legitimacy by proxy.

Worried that Morsi's visit would indeed bestow such a diplomatic blessing on Tehran, the New York Times for example, sternly advised him to get briefed on the events of 2009, when the Iranian regime crushed the Green Movement by killing and imprisoning demonstrators demanding reform -- the same kind of uprising that brought Morsi to power in Cairo. But Morsi's performance in Tehran disappointed his Iranian hosts as cruelly as it mocked those who warned that his visit would deliver Egypt into Iran's camp and reveal a radical new Egyptian foreign policy.

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Foreign aid to Palestine is desperately in need of rethinking. Wittingly or not, external aid facilitates Israel's occupation, enables an inept Palestinian leadership to survive, and subverts much of Palestinian civil society. The extent of the dependency on aid means the Palestinian Authority (PA) must spend considerable energy begging for handouts from Arab governments, the European Union, and the United States. Facing a severe cash shortage -- which is not unusual -- the PA was recently unable to pay the salaries on which an estimated one million bureaucrats and their families rely.

One of the major problems with external aid was illustrated by the beatings a month ago of young, peaceful Palestinian protesters by PA security forces. The protesters were initially demonstrating against a planned visit to Ramallah by former Israeli Vice-Premier Shaul Mofaz, who has faced travel bans to other countries due to accusations of war crimes during Israel's attacks on Palestinian cities in 2002. But after the PA security forces assaulted them, protestors organized demonstrations against police brutality.

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Last week Yitzhak Shamir, Israel's seventh Prime Minister, passed away. Israel's current premier, Benjamin Netanyahu, will shortly overtake Shamir as the second longest serving PM in the state's history. At first glance Shamir and Netanyahu strike two very contrasting profiles: Shamir was modest and private; Netanyahu is the in-your-face, cigar-smoking friend to billionaires -- "King Bibi."

Yet in terms of ideology and its political application, they are probably the two most kindred spirits to have ever held Israel's highest elected office. A week of remembering, commentary, and eulogies of Shamir are a timely portal into understanding both the current PM's policies and the journey Israeli politics has taken in reaching an era of almost unchallenged dominance for the politics of intolerant, ethnocentric nationalism.

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During its latest meeting on the Middle East peace process, the Council of the European Union repeated its warning that the emergence of a viable Palestinian state living peacefully beside Israel was in jeopardy. Perhaps angered by reports that more than 60 development projects funded by the European Commission and several EU states had been deliberately demolished by Israel, the Council blamed the Israeli government for threatening to make a two-state solution "impossible" through increased settlement construction, house demolitions, forced population transfers, and revoking Palestinian residency rights in Jerusalem. The EU urged the donor community -- especially donors from the Middle East -- to do more to assist the Palestinians by providing financial assistance for donor-funded projects in areas under Palestinian Authority (PA) control. 

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In 1975, a combination of malevolent and misguided governments managed to enshrine in a United Nations General Assembly resolution the defamatory accusation that Zionism is racism. That libel was rescinded by the General Assembly in 1991, the only time that one of its resolutions was revoked.

In 2012, having neutralized American opposition to its efforts to establish -- through the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank -- irreversible "facts on the ground" that will prevent the emergence of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, while at the same time denying Israeli citizenship to the millions of Palestinian residents of the occupied territories, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has succeeded in reviving the calumny that Zionism is racism, something anti-Semites and Israel's enemies had been unable to do.

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Even before the looming confrontation with Iran, Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu have been engaged in their own related tussle -- more civilized and subdued no doubt, but arguably no less consequential. Their dueling speeches this week were striking in the degree to which they simultaneously mirrored and defied each other. It was no coincidence.

The U.S. president lavished praise on the one Israeli in the audience who most accurately reflects his own pragmatic views (Israeli President Shimon Peres) while bringing up Netanyahu only fleetingly. The Israeli prime minister enthusiastically applauded the many Americans in the room who share his more belligerent stance (members of Congress) while politely referring to Obama. Each paid lip service to his counterpart's central claim -- Obama, by acknowledging that Israel was entitled to its own sovereign security decisions; Netanyahu by conceding that the nuclear standoff would be best resolved by diplomacy. Both then proceeded to ruthlessly tear it apart: the president, by underscoring the imprudence of precipitous military action and the need to give negotiations time; the prime minister by stating flatly that Israel had waited long enough. Finally, the two leaders took aim at statements they argued were either dead wrong, or deadly dangerous -- Obama decried careless talk of war; Netanyahu mocked the endless recitation of war's perils. Neither bothered mentioning to whom they were referring, but there was no need. Not a day goes by without Israeli officials raising the specter of military action; meanwhile, a succession of U.S. officials have warned about the catastrophe such action might provoke.

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Earlier this month, the Israeli government's ministerial Committee on Legislation approved a bill to try and uphold prison sentences for solicitors of prostitution. The bill, which also grants an educational program for first time-offenders, was initiated already half a decade ago by the left-wing Meretz MK Zehava Gal-On. When Meretz's political fortunes diminished in 2009 elections and Gal-on lost her sit, Kadima MK Orit Zuaretz took upon herself to promote it. Gal-On -- now an MK again -- said in an interview that it took years of huge efforts by her and the other supporters of the bill, mainly NGOs and academia, "including arranging conferences and presenting experts' advocacy" to change perceptions among decision makers and opinion leaders. The bill still needs to gain the Knesset's vote, but should it be approved, it will be a tremendous addition to progressive trends in Israel and to the standing of women in Israeli society.

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Yet another deadline passed late last month in the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process," this time over the initial exchange of proposals on border and security issues. Palestinian negotiators were (and remain) under pressure on a number of fronts. The Quartet still holds to a resumption of talks under the current guise and a recent visit from Ban Ki-Moon called for "a gesture of goodwill by both sides" in order to create a positive atmosphere for continuing negotiations.

Instead, many Palestinians are urging the PLO to end negotiations altogether until Israel halts all settlement expansion in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Palestinian frustration with the international community and the hollow negotiation process was embodied by the slippers and sticks that showered the Secretary-General's convoy upon entry to the Gaza Strip two weeks ago. 

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