Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, looks likely to survive a no-confidence motion in the Knesset today, because his Foreign Minister is not yet sufficiently disgruntled to bring him down. That will give him a breather of at least three months to try to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Mr David Levy, the Foreign Minister who has been publicly castigating Mr Barak for offering concessions to the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, at last week's Camp David peace summit, met privately with the Prime Minister yesterday and emerged to say he would not vote with the opposition in today's no-confidence motion.
Mr Levy's defection would have been likely to start a domino effect among other wavering Knesset members that could have seen Mr Barak voted out of office.
Mr Levy, a figure with something of a reputation for fickle political positioning over the years, warned nevertheless he would resign on Wednesday, and would vote then in favour of a bill to dissolve the Knesset unless Mr Barak sought to expand his coalition into a "national unity government" to include the hardline opposition Likud.
But the threat is empty: the bill to dissolve the Knesset will receive only a preliminary reading on Wednesday and will not be debated again until parliament returns in October from its lengthy summer recess.
It is still mathematically possible that Mr Barak will fall in today's no-confidence motion, but that is unlikely to happen. The Prime Minister, therefore, can relax a little, and spend the next three months trying to convert the progress made at Camp David into a full and permanent peace treaty.
Mr Barak, with the influential support of President Clinton, has laid the blame with Mr Arafat for the lack of success at the Camp David summit. At a cabinet meeting yesterday, Mr Barak reportedly told his colleagues Mr Arafat was "utterly inflexible" on the subject of Jerusalem - the holy city at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute - after Israel's negotiating team at Camp David, unprecedentedly, offered to share partial control of the city with the Palestinians.
Hitting back, Mr Arafat is now engaged in an international diplomatic initiative designed to pin blame on Mr Barak, who, in the Palestinian view, failed to budge sufficiently from pre-summit positions.
But while Mr Arafat's mission took him to France yesterday and a meeting with President Jacques Chirac, events at home seem more significant: less than a week after the Camp David summit broke up in deadlock, two sets of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were already renewing their dialogue and the relative calm on the streets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is testament to a desire on both sides to reach a deal.
Mr Arafat has been adamant he will declare independent Palestinian statehood on September 13th - but he would clearly much rather do so in partnership with the Israelis, and the Americans, than in defiance of them. "We are determined to exert maximum effort to achieve a full agreement," said the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, after talks with his Israeli counterpart, Oded Eran, in Jericho.
Meanwhile, Israel will today elect the country's eighth president, with Shimon Peres, the former prime minister and Nobel peace laureate, favourite to succeed Ezer Weizman, who stood down early because of financial misdealings.