It is turning into a race against time. Which will go first - the Netanyahu government, or the patience of the Palestinians? Demonstrating its increasingly hard-line stance, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet met yesterday to agree on the details of "security zones" in the West Bank which would have to remain under Israeli control even under the terms of a permanent peace treaty with the Palestinians.
Coming a day after the cabinet issued a 12-page document, listing 50 "violations" by President Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority of the Oslo peace accords - violations which would have to be corrected before any further West Bank land would be turned over to Mr Arafat's control - the new deliberations underlined how far the government has shifted to the right in the week-and-a-half since the moderate Mr David Levy resigned as foreign minister.
In essence, the Israeli commentator Menachem Shalev noted in yesterday's Ma'ariv newspaper, the government, its narrow majority resting on hard-line support, has issued its "final divorce papers from the Oslo peace process".
Ridiculing some parts of the Israeli "violations" document (especially clauses relating to alleged Palestinian environmental infractions), and flatly rejecting others (including the assertion that the PLO charter has yet to be annulled), the Palestinian leadership is accusing the Netanyahu government of manufacturing pretexts to avoid implementing the next, overdue, West Bank withdrawal.
But the Israelis are adamant about many of their demands, including those for an end to anti-Israeli incitement, the disarming of Islamic militants, and the reduction to the officially agreed numbers of the bloated Palestinian police force.
Mr Arafat, returning yesterday from talks with King Hussein in Jordan, warned that, unless an unlikely breakthrough was achieved in the separate meetings he and Mr Netanyahu are to have with President Clinton next week, "anything can happen" - including a resumption of the Intifada. As though to illustrate his point, Palestinians in Hebron clashed yesterday with Israeli troops in protests on the third anniversary of the massacre by an Israeli settler of 29 Palestinians at prayer in the mosque/synagogue at the city's Tomb of the Patriarchs.
In Tel Aviv last night, about 25,000 settlers and other Israeli right-wingers gathered to remind Mr Netanyahu that they had elected him to "hold on to Greater Israel" - the biblical area that includes the West Bank - and to suggest that he had "no mandate" to give up West Bank land.
Simultaneously, Mr Arye Deri, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, was meeting King Hussein, and assuring the Jordanian monarch that the next West Bank land hand-over would go ahead soon. But for Mr Deri's assurance to be proved correct, there would have to be a radical reshuffling of the Israeli political forces.
David Horovitz is managing editor of the Jerusalem Post