Mr Ehud Barak last night announced that he had secured the backing of most of Israel's parliamentarians, and would be able to swear in his cabinet and take over as prime minister next week. The coalition he intends to present will be firmly supportive of land-for-peace deals with both the Palestinians and the Syrians, giving Israel its largest-ever Knesset majority in favour of peacemaking.
Mr Barak, who defeated Mr Benjamin Netanyahu by a stunning 56-44 per cent in elections on May 17th for the prime ministership, has spent the six weeks since then in gruelling negotiations with potential coalition partners for his One Israel party. Yesterday, he signed the key alliance, with the ultra-Orthodox Shas party.
With Shas safely on board, Mr Barak sent a formal letter to the acting Speaker of the Knesset, his party colleague and former prime minister, Mr Shimon Peres, serving notice that he and his ministers would be ready to take their oaths of office next week, safely inside the July 8th deadline mandated by law.
With two more parties - the Centre Party and the Am Ehud workers' party - likely to sign coalition deals in the next day or so, Mr Barak expects to have no fewer than 77 of the 120 Knesset members in his coalition. He will also be able to count on the votes of 10 Israeli Arab Knesset members on decisions relating to expected peace deals with the Palestinians and the Syrians.
The distribution of forces in the new Knesset, indeed, underlines how strongly peace-oriented the parliament, and especially the coalition, are likely to prove.
Fully supporting Mr Barak's planned handover of further occupied West Bank land to Mr Yasser Arafat, and of land in the Golan Heights to Syria's President Assad, are his own 26-strong One Israel, the 10-member Meretz, the six-strong Centre Party and the two-man Am Ehud - as well as the 10 Arab MKs.
Also bound to support most peace moves, now that they are full coalition members, are the 17-man Shas, the Yisrael Ba'aliya immigrant party (six members), and two other Orthodox parties, the National Religious Party (six) and United Torah Judaism (five). That adds up to 87 votes. What's more, the virulently anti-ultra-Orthodox Shinui party, whom Mr Barak consigned to opposition in favour of Shas, will also likely vote with him on peace issues.
The right-wing opposition to Mr Barak's government, therefore - parties that will oppose territorial compromise with the Palestinians and/or Syria - is likely to be limited to just 27 politicians. They are the 19-strong defeated Likud party of Mr Netanyahu, four members of the far-right National Union party, and four members of a right-wing immigrant party, Israel Our Home.
The contrast with Mr Netanyahu's outgoing government, which made no progress at all on the Syrian front, and stalled agreements with the Palestinians, could hardly be more stark. But there is a dramatic contrast, too, with the last moderate Israeli government - led by Mr Yitzhak Rabin after the 1992 elections. Mr Rabin pioneered the path to negotiation with Mr Arafat, and signed the key framework Oslo accords with him at the White House in 1993. But he did so with the support of barely half the electorate, and with a Knesset majority, on occasion, of just a single vote.
It was the sense among opponents of the peace process at the time that Mr Rabin was moving ahead in defiance of half of the country, that created the climate of hostility that ultimately saw Mr Rabin assassinated.
It was because he was anxious to avoid a repeat performance that Mr Barak eschewed his easy post-election option: forming a centre-left-Arab coalition, excluding the Orthodox parties.
Instead, he set out clear government guidelines, making plain his desire to revive the peace process, and invited the Orthodox parties to join him in a broad coalition. Mr Barak had brought in "parties from all sides of the political spectrum", a spokesman for the prime minister-elect observed last night, fulfilling his pledge to create a wide coalition to heal the rifts in Israeli society."
The price he has paid is that legislation to counter Orthodox power will have to wait. He has compromised on proposals to conscript ultra-Orthodox men who don't serve in the army, and on issues relating to Sabbath observance - evidently believing that Middle East peace is his urgent priority, and that these internal disputes can be better tackled a few years down the road.
Mr Arafat was publicly worrying yesterday that Mr Barak was shackling himself by taking the Orthodox partners, and that the National Religious Party in particular, a supporter of West Bank settlement, would try to halt land-for-peace agreements. But Mr Barak's aides are insistent that the NRP, and all the other coalition partners, have been told exactly how Mr Barak plans to move ahead with the Palestinians.