East Jerusalem

THE POSSIBILITY of peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians was set back by the death of Faisal Husseini in Kuwait, Thursday, from a heart attack at age 60. The absence of leadership committed to peace-seeking is notable in Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Palestinian Authority's Yasser Arafat, whose violence-fomenting rejection of reasonable terms provoked Mr. Sharon's election. Mr. Husseini was a more natural leader than Mr. Arafat, who saw in him a potential rival.

ON A BLISTERING day in the summer of 1999 I went to Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem to help Salim Shawamreh rebuild his twice- demolished home. Palestinians, Israeli Jews and Americans worked together to rebuild the "House of Peace." During a break, we chatted amiably as we ate a watermelon. This shared moment is what peace could look like. But it won't happen anytime soon at the Shawamrehs'. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had their home demolished earlier this month. There is no stronger message he could send of his antagonism to the very concept of peace than to destroy this particular home.

JERUSALEM - Hana Abu Khdeir was born in East Jerusalem. She became a U.S. citizen in 1995 while living on Fleet Street in Baltimore. Then she returned to East Jerusalem. By her account, her American citizenship may have spared her some of the harshest treatment dealt out to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, but not all of it. She is one of five Americans of Palestinian origin detained by Israel since the outbreak of violence in September. Three have complained of severe abuse, raising the question of whether the United States does enough to protect citizens arrested overseas - especially those arrested by governments friendly to Washington.

JERUSALEM - Three months of bloodshed and the loss of more than 300 lives have brought Palestinians closer to their goal of controlling East Jerusalem and its Muslim shrines, and acquiring a state in almost all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat can now pocket these gains in the remaining weeks before President Clinton leaves the White House on Jan. 20 and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak faces elections Feb. 6. Or he can wait, in hopes that time and continued conflict will eventually win the final Palestinian claim - a right of return for several million Palestinian refugees or their descendants to their original homes in Israel.

A DISTURBING byproduct of recent Middle Eastern violence is the decline in critical thinking among Jews. Even political liberals are being swept up in a tribal "us-against-them" mentality, viewing Palestinians as aggressors and Jews as victims. But in doing so, they ignore an uncomfortable reality: It is Israel that threatens the Palestinian state to be, not the other way around. The Palestinian predicament is often obscured by Israel's popular media, which focus largely on the experiences of Jewish soldiers and settlers, rather than on Palestinians under Jewish control.

JERUSALEM - Set against a backdrop of unabated bloodshed, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak won assurance yesterday that his tottering government would survive for another month, allowing him to take a new crack at negotiating with the Palestinians after next week's U.S. elections. The commitment from the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party not to vote to bring down the government means that Barak won't have to join forces right away with right-wing, Likud opposition leader Ariel Sharon, whose presence in the government would be widely seen as killing chances for peace.

THE RIOTS THAT erupted in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip probably signaled the death of the Oslo phase of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This summer, the Camp David summit provided a glimmer of hope, but the talks stalled because the sides could not agree on a mutually acceptable definition of peace. The latest round of rioting was sparked by Likud party leader Ariel Sharon's visit to Jerusalem. Sharon, the former defense minister who led Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, is widely despised by Arabs.

JERUSALEM - Their fate overshadowed by an epic struggle between Muslims and Jews, this city's Christians are watching uneasily from the sidelines as Israeli and Palestinian leaders negotiate Jerusalem's future. Divided and anxious, the Christian population is torn between support for Palestinian rights and a need to protect its shrinking numbers as well as the churches, convents and monasteries that symbolize the biblical account of Jesus' teaching, death and resurrection. Atallah Hanna, a Greek Orthodox priest, favors full Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem and the Old City.

PREPARATIONS are afoot for a second Israeli-Palestinian summit, which the Clinton administration hopes will finally produce a permanent agreement before Yasser Arafat's planned declaration of an independent Palestinian state on Sept. 13. The president has dispatched Edward Walker, the assistant secretary of state for Near East Asian affairs, to the region to try to drum up support within the Arab world. The administration was publicly miffed that its strongest allies in the region - Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan - did not pressure Arafat to compromise during the final stages of the failed Camp David summit meetings, specifically in favor of U.S. and Israeli proposals on the status of Jerusalem.

THURMONT - The Camp David peace talks shifted back into high gear late yesterday as President Clinton returned from a trip to Japan, and Israel reportedly showed signs of making new concessions on Palestinian demands for a piece of East Jerusalem. Clinton arrived back from the G-8 summit of industrial nations more than six hours earlier than originally scheduled and was expected to meet into the night with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. "He's back.