A year after the Jerusalem tunnel project, which he helped finance, sparked Israeli-Palestinian gun battles in which 80 people died, a Florida-based Jewish millionaire again has set Israelis and Palestinians on a potentially violent collision course.
Last September, Mr Irving Moskowitz was guest of honour as a new entrance was opened at a 2,000-year-old water tunnel alongside the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. The opening ceremony was held without warning in the middle of the night, fuelling rumours among Palestinians that Israel was digging beneath the mosques atop the Temple Mount. It led to riots in which Israeli soldiers and Palestinian policemen shot and killed each other.
Now Mr Moskowitz has bought several buildings in the East Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of Ras al-Amud, outside the Old City on the Mount of Olives. Again acting in the dead of night, some 15 Israelis moved into these buildings on Sunday, and were yesterday celebrating their new foothold, protected from furious local Palestinians and from Israeli leftwingers by dozens of soldiers and policemen.
Mr Moskowitz, who made his millions running bingo halls, is visiting Jerusalem to keep track of his latest intervention into the highly-charged Israeli-Palestinian relationship. He issued a statement describing his limited holdings at Ras al-Amud as "a vital safeguard for the unity of Jerusalem". He is also planning to build several dozen new houses for Jews on nearby land purchased in recent years.
Israeli demonstrators outside the newly-occupied buildings yesterday compared the first Jewish residents of Ras al-Amud to the Islamic extremists of Hamas, shouting that they were deliberately provoking a confrontation that would cost lives on both sides. In a protest tent nearby, the senior Palestinian official in Jerusalem, Mr Faisal al-Husseini, called on Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, to evict the new arrivals or risk "an explosion", and lamented what he called a "new blow to the credibility" of those leaders, like himself, who had assured ordinary Palestinians of the viability of peacemaking with Israel.
Mr Netanyahu, who strongly backed the tunnel project last year, and who has endorsed Mr Moskowitz's building plans at Ras al-Amud in principle, said yesterday, however, that the arrival of Jews in the district just now was "not good for Jerusalem and not good for the state of Israel." His aides said he was examining the legal means for evicting the new arrivals - but such a move would meet heavy resistance inside his coalition.
This latest flashpoint has punctured the faint hopes of an upturn in Israeli-Palestinian ties in the wake of the recent visit by the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright.
Yesterday, Mr Netanyahu transferred some $35 million in tax revenues to Mr Arafat's Palestinian Authority - revenues that had been withheld to protest against Mr Arafat's perceived failure to counter Hamas violence - and lifted the blockade of Arafat-controlled West Bank towns, although the West Bank and Gaza remain sealed off from sovereign Israel.
David Horovitz is managing editor of the Jerusalem Report