WHETHER or not the American mediator Dennis Ross manages to get Israeli and Palestinian leaders talking again, and whether or not there are more suicide bombings and an intensification of clashes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the next few days, the crisis in the Middle East these past few weeks has already produced one clear result: the overwhelming majority of Israelis do not believe Yasser Arafat is seriously fighting terrorism - or, indeed, is serious about wanting peace.
If Palestinian misgivings about the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu's, commitment to peace efforts have deepened gradually since he won election here last May, Israeli attitudes to Mr Arafat appear to have changed in a single, dramatic jolt - a consequence of last Friday's Tel Aviv suicide bombing and the flood of Israeli intelligence assessments since then suggesting that Mr Arafat had at least tacitly approved the blast.
Israeli support for the peace process in general has moved up and down from 65 to 45 per cent in the four years since Yitzhak Rabin and Mr Arafat first began working together. But a new poll published in the top selling Yediot Ahronot daily yesterday indicated that trust in Mr Arafat personally is far, far lower.
Asked to evaluate Mr Arafat's efforts to prevent "terrorism against Israel", just 9 per cent of respondents said they thought he was doing "all he can", while a massive 78 per cent felt he was doing little or nothing to thwart the extremists. Asked the even more straightforward question of whether they believed Mr Arafat "wants real peace with Israel", 69 per cent gave an equally straightforward response: no.
Those findings would appear to underline the unparalleled credibility in Israeli eyes of their armys intelligence chiefs.
It is one thing for a politician, like Mr Netanyahu, to claim as he did after the Tel Aviv bombing that Mr Arafat had given "the green light" to Hamas. But when the army's chief of staff and top intelligence officers give public support to that assessment Israelis sit up and listen.
Their scepticism about Mr Arafat's intentions is being reinforced daily in articles by leading left wing commentators, previously arch critics of Mr Netanyahu, detailing the alleged sequence of meetings in Gaza between Mr Arafat and the various Islamic leaders that led up to last Friday's bombing. Ron Ben Yishai, a prominent military analyst, wrote yesterday that Mr Arafat has actually been using the arrest and release of Hamas terror chiefs, throughout the years of the peace process, "as a carrot and stick" to appease or threaten Israel.
That kind of claim has been levelled for years by Israeli far right politicians but publicly derided by previous Labour governments. Now it is the Palestinian leaders' assertions that Mr Arafat has been seeking to moderate, not encourage, Hamas that are being derided.
Mr Ross is this weekend flying back to Washington, to report to President Clinton and see if there is any life left in the peace efforts. Given the leverage the United States has over both sides, all may not yet be lost. But the guiding principle of the Oslo peace accords - that Israel and the Palestinians would gradually learn to trust each other as the phased process unfolded, making the most complex issues easier to resolve as the years went by has been shattered by this latest crisis.
If there is yet to be a negotiated solution, rather than a new bout of full scale conflict, it can be achieved only through concerted American pressure, not the spirit of mutual compromise the Israeli and Palestinian architects of the Oslo framework envisaged when they were holding their secret talks in the course of 1993.