For more than two years, from the autumn of 1993, when the Oslo process began in earnest, to the winter of 1995, when Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead at a Tel Aviv peace rally, Benjamin Netanyahu, then the leader of the Israeli opposition Likud party, relentlessly assaulted the Israeli-Palestinian partnership. He ridiculed the notion that Yasser Arafat had any possible role to play in ensuring security for Israel.

After Hamas suicide bombings, and there were many in that period, he habitually demanded that all contacts with Mr Arafat be halted, that the peace process be stopped. Mr Rabin, he insisted, was leading Israel to disaster.

When Mr Rabin was shot, Mr Netanyahu castigated his Labour prime ministerial successor, Shimon Peres, for maintaining the relationship with Mr Arafat, for ceding more West Bank land to Palestinian control.

Running for election as prime minister in May 1996, Mr Netanyahu repeatedly used footage of Mr Peres and Mr Arafat walking hand-in-hand, with a narrated voiceover saying: "This partnership is dangerous to Israel."

Last weekend, Mr Netanyahu, now in the third year of his prime ministership, returned from nine days of summit talks in Maryland with the latest Israeli-Palestinian peace deal - a phased arrangement to hand over another 13 per cent of the occupied West Bank to Mr Arafat's control in exchange for a more determined effort by Mr Arafat to crack down on the Hamas bombers. He flew off to those summit talks despite the murders, by Hamas, of two Israelis in the preceding 10 days.

He stayed on at the scenic Wye River resort even though, back home, a Hamas attacker threw two hand-grenades into the morning rush-hour crowds at Beersheba bus station, injuring 64 Israelis. And, far from breaking off contacts with Mr Arafat when, in the past few days, Hamas gunmen have shot a West Bank settler and a Hamas suicide bomber has narrowly failed to blow up a school bus, he will be presenting the Wye deal to his cabinet for approval on Monday.

Mr Netanyahu has employed two main tactics to cover up his colossal volte-face: he has presented the Wye deal as an extraordinary victory, born of his tough negotiating stance, and he has declared that the Labour Party, under Mr Rabin or any of his successors, would have made far greater concessions to Mr Arafat.

Neither tactic is particularly credible. While Mr Netanyahu asserts that the deal will ensure a more binding cancellation of the explicitly anti-Israeli PLO covenant than has hitherto been achieved, the text of the "Wye River Memorandum" provides only for the reaffirmation of previous PLO decisions. While he insists that the Palestinian police force will now be reduced to its mandated size, that illegal weapons will be confiscated in Gaza and the West Bank, that 30 Palestinians suspected of involvement in anti-Israeli violence will now be jailed by Mr Arafat, the text of the published agreement contains no such provisions.

As for his claims that Labour would, in the interim phases of the Oslo process, have relinquished 90 per cent of the West Bank to Mr Arafat, while he has given up only 13 per cent, the denials from former Labour participants in the peace negotiations have been firm and furious.

Examining the new Wye deal, and comparing it with the terms under which Mr Rabin was negotiating peace with Mr Arafat, it is hard to justify Mr Netanyahu's central claim that his arrangement with the Palestinians is somehow acceptable, safe for Israel, while Mr Rabin's was not. His angry criticisms of Mr Rabin between 1993 and 1995 look increasingly like the naked opposition of a frustrated political leader bent on securing power rather than the principled objections of a distraught ideologue.

Three-quarters of Israelis have expressed backing for the Wye deal - all of Mr Rabin's former supporters, for all their residual bitterness, and most of Mr Netanyahu's. But it is not surprising that Israeli hardliners, the settlers and their supporters who helped Mr Netanyahu to his narrow election success in 1996, are now crying foul, accusing him of, to put it mildly, misleading them.

Three years after the assassination, it is refreshing that most of the leading voices on the far-right, for all their despair at Mr Netanyahu's lurch to the political centre, are reminding their supporters to keep their protests within democratic limits, to demonstrate but not to incite violence.

The worry now is that from the same sector of right-wing Orthodox extremism which produced Mr Rabin's killer, Yigal Amir, another gunman is poised to emerge, in a new effort to frustrate majority will. For all the calls for restraint, the same shouts as three years ago about the prime minister being a traitor are being heard at the demonstrations, the same posters brandished of the prime minister in traitor's Arab headdress.