President Clinton has expressed cautious hopes that the Middle East summit due to start today at Camp David outside Washington can be successful in spite of the political problems of the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak.
Mr Barak is due to arrive in Washington early today at Andrews Air Force base and then helicopter to the secluded Camp David where President Clinton and the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, will be waiting.
Mr Clinton said yesterday before leaving the White House to fly to a governors' conference in Pennsylvania that he believed Mr Barak would be able to reach a settlement with Mr Arafat in spite of his political problems at home.
A solid majority of Israelis "want him to come and want him to pursue peace", the President said.
Mr Clinton also talked yesterday with President Vladimir Putin of Russia about the Middle East summit.
He acknowledged that the Middle East poses "perhaps the most difficult of all peace problems in the world". But he added: "Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have the vision, the knowledge, the experience and the ability and sheer guts to do what it takes . . . to reach an agreement and then to take it back to their people and see if they can sell it."
Mr Clinton, who will fly to Japan next week for a Group of Eight (G8) economic summit, said that he did not want "to set an artificial deadline for these talks, but I think that they need to listen to each other and I need to listen to them and we need to get right after it, because it's not as if we don't know what's out there to be done. And this has been simmering on the stove for some years now". In an article in Newsweek yesterday, Mr Clinton said that the alternative to a peace accord was rising tension in the region. "If the parties do not seize this moment to make more progress, there will be more hostility and more bitterness, perhaps even more violence."
He wrote that "while there clearly is no guarantee of success, not to try would guarantee failure".
The US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, who will also be taking part in the Camp David talks, said yesterday she was confident that Mr Barak has the support he needs to reach an agreement with the Palestinians. His election last year was "a mandate to make peace", she said.
She demurred at the suggestion by some commentators that this week's summit will have limited results and that a second one will then be required. "That is not our plan," she said.
Ms Albright said that President Clinton will be at the summit "the majority of the time" and she would be there "all of the time". Mr Barak and Mr Arafat would have "the hard decisions" but "we will try to make it easy".
The international media covering the summit will be kept several miles away at a briefing centre.
US officials have said that restrictions would also be imposed on the participants to limit their communications outside the presidential retreat where Israel and Egypt reached a peace agreement under president Jimmy Carter in 1978.