After an exhausting two weeks of peace talks in the Maryland mountains, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak returned home Wednesday to hurriedly form a new coalition government before Wednesday’s Knesset recess and to begin addressing domestic issues that have been subsumed by peace efforts.

Although in the past Barak has shifted his peace efforts to the Syrians when Palestinian peace efforts waned — as they did Tuesday in the collapse of the Camp David summit — Colette Avital of Barak’s One Israel Party said this would not happen now.

After no more than 20 minutes in a Nazi concentration camp, Polish diplomat Jan Karski had to leave. “I couldn’t take it,” he recalled later. Karski, who in 1942 would provide the West with the first eyewitness accounts of Holocaust atrocities after secretly entering the camp and the Warsaw Ghetto, died last week in Washington. He was 86.
“I cried when I read he had died, not just because I had lost a friend but imagine what could have happened if people had listened to him,” said Michael Berenbaum, a prominent Holocaust scholar.