While all sides are playing down expectations of success at next week's Middle East summit in Camp David, moves are already under way to maximise the negotiators' chances of progress.
In barely publicised contacts yesterday, Mr Yossi Beilin, the Israeli Justice Minister and chief architect of the Oslo peace process, held a meeting in Gaza with two key Palestinian ministers, Mr Nabil Sha'ath and Mr Freih Abu Medein, to continue pre-summit talks that have also involved another key Israeli minister, Mr Shlomo Ben-Ami, in recent weeks.
On Sunday, teams of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are to meet in the US, for two days of talks before the summit's formal opening next Tuesday.
The intensive preparations underline the almost desperate desire by both the Israeli and the Palestinian leaderships to somehow forge a breakthrough from what remain apparently deep divisions over central issues. So does the word from the Israeli and the Palestinian camps that the summit may last as long as 10 days and be immediately followed, in August, by another such top-level meeting.
For all the effort, however, the sides may well find themselves hopelessly stymied by the fact that they enter this summit with entirely different objectives. The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, who yesterday estimated the tripartite summit's prospects of success as no more than fifty-fifty - "like the toss of a coin" - wants to emerge from the seclusion of Camp David with nothing less than an agreement formalising the "end of the conflict" between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Such an agreement would, of necessity, have to resolve the stickiest peace-process disputes, over the disputed claims to Jerusalem and rights of return for Palestinian refugees.
The Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, whose close aide and senior negotiator Mr Abu Ala said flatly yesterday that the summit was destined to fail, has more modest ambitions.
What he seeks is Israeli recognition of Palestinian statehood, in the form of support for the declaration of independence he has pledged to issue in September. The last thing he wants is an "end of the conflict" treaty, since this would involve him in major compromises over Jerusalem and refugee rights - compromises that could threaten his leadership of the Palestinians, if not his life. "I'll never earn myself the fate of being murdered by an Arab," the Palestinian leader is said to have been telling colleagues recently.
Mr Barak spent much of yesterday pleading with his coalition malcontents not to abandon the government before the outcome of the summit is clear, but to no avail. The leaders of both the Yisrael Ba'aliya faction and the National Religious Party are promising to resign on Sunday - because, they say, Mr Barak has failed to agree with them on the "red lines" for an agreement with the Palestinians.
Their departure, if it indeed comes to pass, would leave Mr Barak with a minority government, but this is no great cause for concern.
As the Prime Minister reiterated yesterday, were a deal to emerge from the Camp David summit, he would "go to the people" - in new elections or a referendum. And he would ask them, he said, whether they wanted "a historic peace", or a deterioration into confrontation, bloodshed on both sides, "and another 30 years of conflict".