James A. Baker III, the first President Bush’s secretary of state, is back in the news, writing a memoir and leading a bipartisan group that will help his old boss’s son figure a way out of Iraq. We can’t say we missed Baker (actually, he never really went away; he is called in as a GOP fixer for stints like the Florida recount in 2004). But time has been good to Baker, especially in his relations with the Jewish community. The Texan angered pro-Israel activists when he told a recalcitrant Yitzhak Shamir to dial his number when he was ready to talk peace. And his harsh but largely accurate assessment of Jewish voters remains unprintable in a family newspaper even today.

But it can also be argued that it was Baker’s persistence, even bullying, that led to the Madrid peace conference in 1991 and broke taboos that allowed Israel and the Palestinians to envision a new future. Yasser Arafat destroyed that hope, but not before both sides got a glimpse at a vision of coexistence.

Baker’s counterpart in the current White House, Condoleezza Rice, is trying to walk a similar path — but one that is considerably rockier than Baker’s. She was back in the Middle East, trying to prop up Palestinian moderates and sideline Hamas. She came home with little to show for her travels, but we should nevertheless applaud the effort.

Baker’s fact-finding committee will not make its recommendations until after Election Day. When it does, among them is likely to be a suggestion that the president focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — not as the cause of Middle East instability, but as a situation that must be addressed for its own sake and for whatever impact it does have on the bigger picture.

As Baker once showed, the Middle East peace process is a pot that needs constant attention, new ingredients, and occasional stirring. The administration cannot relegate it to a back burner.