President Clinton yesterday flew home from the Middle East after a failed summit with Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, leaving the two men exactly where he had found them three days ago, deeply at odds with each other.
But there was one critical difference: whereas, before this trip, the US had hesitated to blame the Israeli government for 30 months of virtual deadlock in peace negotiations, Mr Clinton ended it having placed the Netanyahu government firmly on the defensive, and having effectively signalled his backing for the Palestinian march towards statehood.
It was, therefore, no surprise that a snap survey conducted by Israeli TV last night showed 66 per cent of Israelis believing that Mr Arafat had been the prime beneficiary of Mr Clinton's Middle East visit, against 15 per cent who spoke up for Mr Netanyahu.
At their summit talks yesterday morning on the Gaza-Israel border, Mr Clinton tried hard to persuade Mr Netanyahu to recommit Israel to the timetable agreed in October's Wye River Memorandum, under which Israel is on Friday to relinquish a further slice of occupied West Bank land to Mr Arafat's Palestinian Authority.
But to the disgust of Mr Arafat, who drove off early, Mr Netanyahu would not be budged.
Although he welcomed Monday's public renunciation by Palestinian leaders of the anti-Israel clauses in the PLO Covenant, Mr Netanyahu insisted that Mr Arafat still had to put a halt to anti-Israeli incitement, to his talk of declaring unilateral Palestinian statehood next May, and to his demands for the release of Palestinians jailed for violence against Israelis before the next Israeli withdrawal could take place.
Mr Clinton, holding an informal news conference with a handful of reporters after the summit had broken down, insisted that he had "achieved what I came here to achieve". He was, presumably, referring to Monday's landmark visit to Gaza city, when he addressed the hundreds of Palestinian officials who had convened to annul the covenant.
While Mr Netanyahu was yesterday still bitterly listing his series of alleged Palestinian violations of the Wye peace deal, Israeli commentators and some politicians were recognising the Gaza trip for what it was: the conferring of superpower legitimacy on the Palestinian aspiration to full independence.
"The Palestinian state has been founded," noted the opposition Labour Party Knesset member Mr Shlomo Ben-Ami.
It was also, to the slowly-dawning fury of Mr Netanyahu's circle yesterday, the moment when Mr Clinton championed the Palestinians as being more devoted peacemakers than this Israeli government.
In his speech, after all, he hailed the Palestinian leadership for issuing "a challenge to the government and the leaders of Israel to walk down that path [to a better future] with you". Mr Netanyahu was adamant yesterday that he was not "engaged in a confrontation with the United States and President Clinton". Indeed not. Mr Clinton, on this visit, eschewed confrontation with Mr Netanyahu by speaking directly to the Israeli public - both by addressing students in Jerusalem on Sunday, and from Gaza, where he praised the Palestinians for "reaching deep into the heart of the people of Israel". It may be that Mr Clinton is expecting the Netanyahu government to fall soon. And, indeed, the coalition is looking weaker, with the Defence Minister, Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, and other relative moderates publicly discomfited by Mr Netanyahu's continuing freeze on peace moves.
Mr Clinton asserted before his departure that, while the Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, would shortly return to the region to iron out the latest crop of differences, the peace process was essentially "back on track". The American-Palestinian peace process, certainly. Not so, the Israeli-Palestinian one or, come to think of it, the Israeli-American one.