THE MIDDLE EAST: When the Oslo peace process was flourishing, Mr Shimon Peres, the Israeli Foreign Minister, used to speak optimistically of "a new Middle East" - in which Israelis and Palestinians would live peacefully side-by-side, with EU-style open borders between them.
In the bitter aftermath of Sunday's bombing in Jerusalem, the third such attack in less than a week, Israeli police yesterday deployed in record numbers and manned what amounted to a human border between Arab East Jerusalem and the near-deserted streets of the Jewish west of the city.
And the Israeli government is today to begin serious debate about erecting a "security envelope" around the city and a fence along much of the Israel-West Bank border. Hitherto, the notion of fencing off the West Bank has been advocated primarily by members of the Labour Party.
They have argued that this kind of "unilateral separation" from the Palestinians will make it harder for would-be bombers to cross into Israel - and is Israel's only option given the failure of the Camp David effort at a land-for-peace accord with Mr Yasser Arafat.
But this notion has traditionally been resisted by the hawkish members of the Likud Party of the Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, since they fear the fence would come to constitute a full-scale border, with the 200,000 Jewish settlers, in their 150 West Bank settlements, abandoned on the other side, in territory that would eventually come under full Palestinian control. Now, though, even some Likud leaders are pushing the idea of a fence, while insisting, somewhat implausibly, that it be erected purely for "security" purposes, and be afforded no political significance.
The shift in position is easy to fathom. As things stand, although some stretches of the West Bank border are fenced off, most of the border is open, and roadblocks and army patrols are, almost daily, proving patently incapable of thwarting the entry of Palestinian attackers.
Sunday's Jerusalem bomber - a 20-year-old Palestinian woman who police say might have deliberately killed herself in the blast, but who might also have intended to plant her explosives and make her escape - managed to find her way into the capital from the West Bank city of Nablus. So too have numerous suicide-bomber predecessors. Yesterday, Israeli police shot dead a Palestinian who they said had run over a soldier when bursting through a West Bank roadblock, and had then abandoned his car, forcing an Israeli couple out of their vehicle, and running over a policeman outside Tel Aviv. A young boy was also slightly hurt by two Palestinians who stabbed him in his home at the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh.
Meanwhile, Mr Arafat's West Bank security chief, Mr Jibril Rajoub, announced the arrest of a senior Palestinian Authority finance official, Mr Fuad Shubaki, alleged by Israel to have overseen payments for the arms shipment seized by Israel in the Red Sea on January 3rd. Mr Rajoub said arrest warrants had also been issued for two other Palestinian officials allegedly involved in the affair.