NO sooner had Mr Benjamin Netanyahu taken office in, Israel following the May 29th elections than the Syrian media began comparing him to Hitler, asserting that he would be introducing racist anti Arab policies.
The leaders of Jordan and Egypt, Arab states with which Israel has already made peace, by contrast, scheduled meetings with Mr Netanyahu and emerged convinced, they said, that he intended to advance the peace process.
Mr Yasser Arafat, the elected head of the Palestinian Authority that runs most of Gaza and the major Palestinian population centres in the West Bank, did not have the luxury of meeting Mr Netanyahu. The new Israeli premier refused any such contact. And so, in the absence of any first hand evidence of Mr Netanyahu's inclinations, Mr Arafat, champion of a people part way along the road to co existence with Israel, opted to sit on the fence to give the prime minister a kind of honeymoon before reaching any conclusions.
As of this week, the honeymoon is over. Aghast at reports that the Israeli government has approved the construction of hundreds of Jewish homes at various West Bank settlements, Mr Arafat on Wednesday, echoed the Syrian line on Mr Netanyahu, accusing the government during a speech to his councillors of, "declaring war" on the Palestinians.
Yesterday, he took the unusual measure - unused in more than two years - of declaring a Palestinian, general strike to protest at the settlement plans. And today he will call for mass protest prayers on Temple Mount for those Palestinians the Israelis permit to get there. The rest will pray on other land believed, scheduled for Israeli settlement building.
The next stage, if the deterioration in relations continues, can only be a resumption of violence. And, indeed, as though to underline how easy and swift such a descent into outright confrontation can be, a group Palestinian rejectionists fired at an Israeli bus in the West Bank late on Wednesday night, injuring two passengers.
Mr Arafat's strike action did have an immediate and positive impact. After weeks of prevarication, the Israeli government yesterday suddenly sent a new delegate, the former army chief of staff, Mr Dan Shomron, to meet with Mr Saeb Erakat, his veteran Palestinian counterpart, for talks on how to resume substantive peace negotiations.
The two men agreed to get down to, serious business next week and both took pains to speak optimistically about the future. "Our job is to solve the problems," said Mr Shomron, "and I believe we have the ability."
Mr Erakat said: "We do not know of any other way to, give a better life for the Palestinians and the Israelis."
But such bland niceties apart, the fact is that the three months since the Israeli elections have produced no movement whatsoever on the peace front. Mr Netanyahu has not ordered Israeli troops out of Hebron, as he is obliged to do under the terms of the peace deals signed by his predecessors, Mr Yitzhak Rabin and Mr Shimon Peres. He has still not consented to meet with Mr Arafat. And he appears to be seeking out even the most marginal Palestinian breaches of the peace accords to serve as pretexts for continued stalemate.
Mr Netanyahu notes accurately that he has a mandate from the Israeli public to move the peace process along at a different rate, according to different considerations. A majority of Israelis, albeit a slender majority, were clearly unhappy with the way Mr Rabin and Mr Peres had been doing things; hence Mr Netanyahu's, victory at the polls.
But only a tiny minority of Israelis want the process stopped altogether. And there is currently a very real danger that Mr Netanyahu's desire to show himself getting tough on Mr Arafat, combined with his rejuvenation of the settlement drive, will destroy the fragile, three year Israeli Palestinian partnership.
Mr Faisal Hussein, one of the better Palestinian judges of his people's mood, warned yesterday that "the people who want peace don't see anything coming". Yesterday's strike, he, said, was "only the official response. Among the people, there is grave worry.
"I don't know if it will be like the Inifada. I don't know if it will be less than the Intifada. I don't know if it will be more than the Intifada. It will be something new. If there isn't a change there will be an explosion".
