MIDEAST PEACE AS ELUSIVE AS 5,000 YEARS AGO

After 14 days of negotiations at Camp David, Israelis and Palestinians walked away with no peace agreement. The unsuccessful deadlock was a blow to President Clinton's effort to pressure the two sides into signing an accord -- any accord -- in the interest of calming tensions in a part of the world where conflict is second nature.

For Israelis, the peace process is splitting the nation over territorial issues. On the one hand are those who want peace at almost any price and are willing to give up more and more land, inches at a time. On the other hand are the hard-liners who remember the bloodshed it took for Israel to carve out even a toehold in an area considered sacred to Jews, Moslems and Christians.

The peace process is one of the issues that produced a government crisis yesterday in Israel. Former prime minister and Nobel laureate Shimon Peres was edged out in a bid for the presidency by Iranian-born Moshe Katsav. There is no such thing as a shoo-in when it comes to Israeli politics.

And later the same day, Prime Minister Ehud Barak, a strong advocate of land concessions to appease Yassir Arafat's Palestinians, narrowly escaped a no-confidence vote in the Knesset. Now Barak can pursue his negotiations without parliamentary interference, since the Knesset conveniently doesn't meet again until October.

In the last half of the 20th century, the world saw amazing things happen in the Mideast, many of them orchestrated by U.S. diplomats and presidents. At all times, peace was the key objective, even as partisans killed each other in terrorist raids that too often left civilians dead and maimed.

So what's new?

Modern advocates of share-and-share-alike in the Mideast seem to have forgotten everything they've read about the ability of warring sides to get along in that arid part of the world. From the feuding tribes of biblical history on down to modern governments, the lines have always been drawn with the blood of religious zealots.

It is not at all likely that true peace will ever be made in the Mideast, nor will there ever be borders that satisfy every claim to every rocky, dusty square yard of land. But this isn't just any land. This is the land of Abraham and Mohammed. Finding peace in this land has eluded sages, seers and saints for 5,000 years. Barak and Arafat have absolutely no chance of succeeding where so many have failed.