The spectre of political assassination is haunting Israel again, less than five years after an Orthodox Jew murdered the prime minister, Mr Yitzhak Rabin, in a vain effort to halt the peace process with the Palestinians.
The threat has been revived amid reports that the current Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, who regards the late Mr Rabin as his mentor, is getting ready to sign a peace deal under which tens of thousands of Jewish settlers will either have to leave their homes in the occupied West Bank or submit to Palestinian rule there.
In a leaflet distributed at the weekend, the rabbi of one West Bank settlement declared that the handing over to the Palestinians of parts of the sacred Biblical Land of Israel, which included the West Bank, would be an act of "betrayal".
And last week, another settler leader said that Mr Barak would "end his days prematurely" were he to order the evacuation of settlements.
In contrast to the months of vicious anti-government demonstrations that proceeded the assassination of Mr Rabin in November 1995, the mood in Israel today is milder, and most rightwing rabbis and settler leaders are stressing that their opposition to the government's land-for-peace policies must remain "within democratic limits".
But police and other security officials are warning that the danger of another killing is potent. And the Foreign Minister, Mr David Levy, after talks with settler leaders yesterday, observed bitterly that Israel "couldn't survive" another such assassination.
Mr Barak's right-wing critics accuse him of cooking up a deal with the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, under which almost all of the West Bank will come under Palestinian control, with 50,000 of the 200,000 settlers either left behind or required to relocate to Israel.
The US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, is due here today to try and accelerate the negotiations.
Initially, Mr Barak dismissed the right-wing claims as mere "rumours". But in a speech to Labour Party colleagues on Friday, he all but confirmed them. In a peace treaty with the Palestinians, he said, "if 80 per cent or more of the settlers in Judea and Samaria [the Biblical names for the West Bank] come under Israeli sovereignty, then that would be an extraordinary historical achievement and the settlement enterprise will have achieved its objective". Mr Barak, not surprisingly, was viewing the glass half full. As things stand, all 200,000 settlers live on what the international community deems to be occupied territory, land that not even Israel formally claims as its own.
From Mr Barak's standpoint, if he can wrap up a deal with Mr Arafat under which Israel expands its sovereignty into a small percentage of the West Bank - areas where the settlers are particularly populous - he will have safeguarded most of the settler population, extended Israel's borders and boosted its security.
From the settlers' point of view, though, expanding sovereignty to encompass 80 per cent just isn't good enough. They are determined to oppose the evacuation of so much as a single settlement, and equally opposed to the notion of staying on under Palestinian rule.
Last week, the settler leaders began drawing up plans to try and block the peace deal scheduled to be signed by September between Israel and the Palestinians - a deal that President Clinton said in Lisbon last Thursday was now "within view". For now, Mr Barak is saying nothing about another of the reported clauses in this tentative deal - the one that cedes at least partial control to the Palestinians of Arab areas in Jerusalem. Mr Barak is adamant that Israel will retain sovereignty forever throughout the city. But his dovish Justice Minister, Mr Yossi Beilin, has previously held substantive talks with the Palestinians on "creative solutions" for joint control of Jerusalem. And many on the Israeli right say they fear a compromise is in the works here too. "Dark clouds are gathering over Jerusalem's skies and are threatening to cast a giant shadow of division and separation," the city's hardline Likud Mayor, Mr Ehud Olmert, warned last week.
West Bank settlers aren't the only ones gearing up to block Mr Barak's peace moves. Activists on the Golan Heights are to renew a campaign against relinquishing the area in a peace deal with Syria. Mr Barak's declaration in Lisbon that he has "respect" for Syrian sovereignty is being seen as a new hint of willingness to cede the Golan, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 war.