The Likud hardline leader, Mr Ariel Sharon, is tomorrow set to take office as Israel's 11th prime minister, heading the largest coalition in Israeli history.
Topping his agenda will be the struggle to contain the escalating conflict with the Palestinians, which is prompting calls within Israel to formally brand Mr Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority as a "terrorist organisation" and confront it directly.
In patient negotiations since beating the Labour incumbent, Mr Ehud Barak, by an unprecedented 25 per cent margin in elections on February 6th, Mr Sharon (73) has forged alliances with parties comprising almost three-quarters of the 120-member Knesset, including Labour and the ultra-Orthodox Shas.
On the one hand, this range of alliances enables Mr Sharon to claim that his coalition fully represents the Jewish people of Israel - with parliamentary opposition limited to Israeli Arab Knesset members, the left-wing Meretz and the anti-Orthodox Shinui. On the other hand, his partners have conflicting agendas.
Right-wingers will press, for example, to expand settlements, which Labour will oppose. It seems inevitable that, sooner rather than later, coalition partners will therefore begin to fall away.
To bolster the coalition's mainstream credentials, and to blunt anticipated international opposition to his premiership - the controversial ex-general was stripped of the Defence Minister's job during the Lebanon War in 1983 - Mr Sharon astutely invited Labour to take the key posts of Foreign and Defence Ministers, to be filled respectively by the Nobel Peace Laureate, Mr Shimon Peres, and another former general, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer.
Mr Ben-Eliezer, in turn, has invited Ms Dalia Rabin-Pelossof, daughter of the late prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, to serve as his deputy. Settler leaders yesterday lamented the possible appointment, declaring that Ms Rabin-Pelossof was a "personal enemy" of the settlers, whom she blames in part for fostering the atmosphere that led to her father's assassination in 1995.
Mr Sharon has yet to spell out his plans for confronting the Intifada. But in comments after Sunday's suicide bombing by a Palestinian in Netanyah, in which three Israelis died, Mr Sharon said that "the most loyal forces of Arafat" were involved in the violence.
An editorial in the Yediot Ahronot daily yesterday asserted: "Instead of the peace of the brave, Arafat has chosen the terrorism of cowards".
Mr Arafat vowed yesterday that the five-month uprising would continue "until we raise the Palestinian flag on the wall of Jerusalem". He attended prayers to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, and laid a wreath at Gaza's Martyrs' Cemetery, where many Intifada victims are buried.
The death toll now tops 420, the vast majority of them Palestinians. One of his cabinet ministers, Mr Imad Falouji, said earlier this week that the Intifada had been deliberately planned by the Palestinians after Mr Arafat rejected an Israeli peace offer at last summer's Camp David talks.
But Mr Arafat yesterday blamed Israel for the "dangerous military escalation". A Palestinian gunman was killed by Israeli troops in a clash overnight on Sunday, near the West Bank city of Jenin.
AFP adds: The Palestinian mufti, Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, said yesterday that Palestinians would press on with the "blessed Intifada" despite the sacrifices they were forced to make, the official MENA agency reported.
"The Palestinian people are determined to continue the blessed Intifada despite the huge sacrifices," the mufti said in a telephone interview with Egyptian radio.