Benjamin Netanyahu, after his visit to the United States, is paralysed and finds himself assailed on all sides. David Horovitz reports from Jerusalem

By DAVID HOROVITZ

WHEN the dour Likud prime minister Yitzhak Shamir was cajoled by the United States into attending the Madrid peace conference 51/2 years ago (the conference mapped out subsequent Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations) he plucked a largely unknown figure to accompany him.

Deputy foreign minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as he was then, went along to "put Israel's case", to explain why Mr Shamir's government was so reluctant to trade land for peace with the Palestinians and other neighbouring Arab states. Mr Netanyahu did a brilliant job.

He convened a media conference especially for Arab journalists, and he charmed them with a charismatic, witty performance that may not have convinced them of the rightness of his cause, but certainly left them with much to ponder.

On Monday in Washington, after his difficult session of talks with President Clinton, Mr Netanyahu placed himself before the microphones again. Only this time he wasn't addressing an Arab press audience, but a global one.

Israel's state TV showed none of his media conference live, and the second, commercial, channel broadcast only a few minutes. CNN and the BBC World networks, however, cleared their schedules to give viewers every word that Mr Netanyahu had to say, keeping him on screen for nearly an hour.

But Mr Netanyahu has changed since Madrid. Indeed, he seems to have changed markedly even since last May, when he so energetically and confidently outperformed the Labour Party leader, Shimon Peres, in the TV debate just before the elections that brought him to power.

He has aged dramatically. He has put on weight. And, last night at least, there was no sign of that former wit and charisma. A few attempts at humour died. And whereas he had gradually won over a sceptical press corps in Madrid, on Monday in Washington he seemed to grow angrier and less focused. To quote the correspondent from the Hebrew Daily Ma'ariv, he "chided, preached and scolded."

Though many of his points were valid - particularly his determination riot to be seen to be rewarding Palestinian terrorism - others were outrageous. He assailed the reporters for continually describing East Jerusalem as "Arab"; yet it was indisputably captured by Israel from Jordan in 1967.

He claimed that Har Homa, the south-east Jerusalem site where Jewish building has prompted the worst crisis since the peace process began, had been Jewish property since before the second World War; yet the Israeli entrepreneur, David Myr, from whom much of the land is being expropriated, bought it from private Arab owners in the 1970s.

Mr Netanyahu's new inability to score points even in his former field of expertise, public relations, contrasted markedly with the calm, reasoned approach of the Palestinian minister, Hanan Ashrawi, who was interviewed immediately after him on CNN.

And his repeated attempts to show that he had "clean hands", that he was in no way to blame for the collapse of the peace process, underline the growing sense of defensiveness surrounding his administration.

To be blunt, Mr Netanyahu appears to be paralysed and harried on all sides. For all the fiery rhetoric about continuing to build in Jerusalem and the West Bank, he dare not risk a real diplomatic breakdown with the US by ordering more major construction projects.

Equally, though, he seems terrified to trigger the collapse of his right-wing coalition by formally agreeing to freeze all further settlement and show a new generosity to the Palestinians, the price the Americans are demanding for energetically reinvolving themselves in the peace effort.

MR ARAFAT, too, is in frozen mode, refusing, so long as work goes on at Har Homa, to grant Mr Netanyahu's request that he publicly reaffirm his renunciation of terrorism and renew security co-operation with the Israeli forces.

The indefatigable European Union envoy Miguel Moratinos, trying to break the deadlock with a proposed new "code of behaviour" (providing for an Israeli settlement halt and an end to Palestinian violence), was firmly rebuffed by the Israeli Foreign Minister, David Levy, on Sunday.

The Clinton administration has more than enough leverage to extract a condemnation of terrorism from Mr Arafat and a settlement moratorium from Mr Netanyahu.

But President Clinton is evidently reluctant to apply the pressure needed to get the two sides talking again until he can be confident that those talks will lead toward a full and final peace arrangement. And given the almost complete breakdown of co-operation and trust, there is no reason for him to feel any such confidence.

For the first time since the Oslo framework was formulated in 1993, the situation looks almost hopeless. The only way out of the daily spiral of escalating violence lies through Mr Netanyahu and Mr Arafat recognising anew the basic premise on which Oslo was built: that a decline into another Middle East war would serve nobody's interests.

Just now, though, these two men appear so deeply at odds with one another, so mistrustful, that even this abiding truth may no longer be apparent to them.