The first visit to the Middle East by Ms Madeleine Albright may well mark the last chance to save the Israeli-Palestinian peace process her President helped to initiate four years ago. Saturday marks the fourth anniversary of the late Yitzhak Rabin's hesitant White House handshake with an enthusiastic Mr Yasser Arafat, an Israeli prime minister's uncertain embrace of the hitherto reviled leader of the Palestinian liberation movement.
By Saturday, it may be clear whether the US Secretary of State has managed to remind the Israelis and Palestinians "that they have a common destiny in peacemaking", as a top State Department official put it yesterday, or whether the Oslo peace deal is beyond salvation.
Ms Albright flew in overnight, and her officials have done so effective a job of moderating expectations that no one will be surprised if nothing remotely dramatic arises from her trip.
The prospects are unremittingly grim. Despite the latest suicide bombings, Mr Arafat has made only a few dozen arrests, has issued no ringing, Arabic-language public denunciation of terrorism, and is refusing to order the sort of drastic clampdown on Hamas activities that he carried out after the four bombings in the spring of 1996.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, is unwilling to freeze Jewish settlement or lift the West Bank and Gaza closure that keeps tens of thousands of Palestinians from their jobs in Israel.
Each side is bitterly cataloguing the other's perceived betrayals: Israel wants to talk to Ms Albright about the exaggerated size of the Palestinian police force, and the alleged personal involvement in anti-Israel violence of Mr Arafat's Gaza police chief. The Palestinians are anxious that she hold Mr Netanyahu to Oslo's schedule of West Bank troop withdrawals, Gaza port openings, and so on.
But if Ms Albright is to live up to her robust reputation, and make her mark in a region that desperately needs her intervention, she will steer away from the details and instead hammer home to Mr Arafat and Mr Netanyahu that, for all their mutual personal distaste and mistrust, only they can steer the Middle East away from its current decline into massive bloodshed.
The truth is that, despite all the rhetoric and the violence of the extremists on both sides, most Israelis and Palestinians are still committed to co-existence. Most Israelis and Palestinians, if the opinion polls are to be believed, are ready to accept a final peace deal that takes Israel back to something like its pre-1967 borders, with minor territorial adjustments to encompass a proportion of the settlers, and some kind of creative solution to meet Palestinian claims to sovereignty in East Jerusalem.
The second-term Clinton administration has so far proved reluctant to press Israel or the Palestinians. Mr Clinton is clearly anxious to avoid costing his VicePresident, Mr Al Gore, the support of American Jewry in his planned presidential campaign. But American Jews won't greatly thank him for failing to prevent the Middle East's slide toward open conflict.
And that is the stark alternative to a resuscitated peace process. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak hinted as much in a letter to Mr Netanyahu published here yesterday, warning: "All that was built by the last Israeli government is going down the drain."
With no co-operation whatsoever at present, it will not take much to plunge the sides into fullscale confrontation.
Indeed, had last Thursday's three suicide bombers self-detonated inside rather than outside the cafes on Jerusalem's BenYehuda Street, and killed 50 rather than five Israelis, it is hard to believe that Mr Netanyahu would have resisted the pressure to send his troops Hamas-hunting in Arafat territory, and still harder to envisage the Palestinian police force swallowing such an incursion without a forceful response.
Ms Albright's officials might insist that a dramatic breakthrough is only a remote possibility on this visit. But without such a breakthrough, it will be the extremists who set the tone for the Middle East in the coming years.
David Horovitz is managing editor of the Jerusalem Report