Despite two bombings in which two Israelis were killed and a dozen injured, despite the cancellation of a planned summit meeting, and despite the near rejection by the Palestinians of his peace proposal, President Clinton remained optimistic yesterday that he could seal his presidency with a Middle East peace treaty.
The two sides were now "by the far the closest" they had ever been to a deal, Mr Clinton asserted. And his officials said that, via both the Saudis and the Egyptians, they were pressing the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, to accept Mr Clinton's "parameters" for a deal, and that they hoped the Palestinian leader would come to Washington early next week to resume peace talks.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, after marathon cabinet meetings that extended into the early hours of this morning, has told the Americans that the Clinton formula constitutes an acceptable basis for further negotiation, even though he and his ministers are opposed to relinquishing sovereignty over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians, as the formula envisages.
Mr Arafat, by contrast, preferred yesterday to refer to the Clinton formula vaguely as mere "American ideas", and his officials have issued a list of fundamental objections to them. They rule out, for instance, the notion of only a minority of Palestinian refugees being allowed to return to their former homes inside Israel, and reject the idea of sharing sovereignty with Israel of the area below the Temple Mount's alAqsa mosque compound. In the absence of Palestinian agreement, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt cancelled a planned summit in Cairo with Mr Arafat and Mr Barak, and met alone instead with Mr Arafat.
The purported Arafat-loyalists leading the three-month Intifada, in which close to 350 people have been killed, continue to side with the Islamic extremist groups in ruling out a return to negotiation. And matching words to deeds, Palestinian militants yesterday carried out two attacks on Israeli targets, detonating explosives aboard a bus in central Tel Aviv, and ambushing four Israelis in the south of the Gaza Strip, killing two of them.
Mr Barak vowed to press on with peace efforts despite the "reprehensible" violence, and one of his ministers, Mr Yossi Sarid, warned Mr Arafat not to make the "terrible mistake" of rejecting the Clinton formula. But opposition to the American terms is growing in Israel too.
It was no surprise to hear a leading Jewish settlement rabbi, Dr Zalman Melamed, branding the prime minister "an idiot" for purportedly contemplating giving up control of the Temple Mount. But it was considerably more dramatic to learn that the army's chief of staff, Gen Shaul Mofaz, in the course of cabinet debate, had bitterly criticised the formula as "failing to meet Israel's basic security needs . . . leaving population centres threatened".
If Israel gave up control of the Jordan Valley, as the formula suggests, Gen Mofaz reportedly argued that Israel would not be able to defend itself against the threat of countries like Iraq to the east. As for the proposals for sharing Jerusalem, he said, these would mean that Jewish neighbourhoods could not be properly protected.