LIKE a head teacher dealing with two stubborn classroom bullies, President Bill Clinton has had to step in to separate Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, writes David Horovitz from Jerusalem.
Strong willed, arrogant and each over estimating their own influence, the two Middle Eastern leaders allowed tempers to spiral way out of control last week, and in the process cost the lives of 56 Palestinians and 14 Israelis. Both men, absurdly, appear to feel that they have gained something from the explosion of conflict. Both are mistaken.
Mr Arafat will fly to Washington for tomorrow's summit convinced that he has reunited his people behind him and that he has demonstrated to the world the intolerable intransigence of the hardline Israeli government. In fact, his new popularity with even his former opponents from the Islamic extremist fringe of Palestinian society is a function only of their delight at the collapse of peace efforts.
And whatever the world may think of Mr Netanyahu, and his refusal to honour the peace accords signed by the previous Labour led coalition, there is no mass backlash against his government where it really counts - within the Israeli public, where despair at the dashed hopes of peace has been outweighed by horror at the readiness of Palestinian policemen to turn their guns on Israeli soldiers.
Mr Netanyahu, meanwhile, has resullied Israel's image abroad, and proved himself sadly lacking in prime ministerial vision. He believes that the outbreak of fighting - over so absurd an issue as the opening of a second entrance to a 2,000 year old tunnel vindicates his long held thesis that Mr Arafat never made a strategic commitment to peace, and underlines his reluctance to sanction an Israeli pullout from yet another West Bank city, Hebron.
But even if he has proved a point, what has he gained by it? Since he dare not risk the casualties involved in sending in the Israeli army to reoccupy Palestinian cities, all he has done is to complicate immensely Israeli Palestinian relations, and set in motion yet another cycle of low level violence.
The United States will be pressuring him this week to proceed with the Hebron pullout. But if he moves ahead now, he will be more heavily castigated than ever by his own right wingers, and he will be relying on unprecedented Palestinian co operation in the field at a time when the degree of mutual trust between troops on the ground has never been lower.
At best, the clashes in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank have set reconciliation efforts back by years. Relationships painstakingly nurtured over tea and cigarettes on the outskirts of Jericho, Ramallah and Bethlehem will somehow have to be restored; how long it will take before Israeli soldiers and Palestinian policemen can feel anything akin to confident as they go out on armed patrol together is anyone's guess.
At worst, the damage will prove irreparable - the leaders too intransigent to compromise, the field commanders too disillusioned to start again. If so, the Middle East is headed back into the dark ages.
Unaccountably, indisputably, Mr Arafat and Mr Netanyahu remain their respective people's most popular figureheads. Now, Mr Clinton might suggest, would be a good time for them to justify their people's trust.
(David Horovitz is managing editor of The Jerusalem Report)