The next few weeks will decide the future of the Middle East peace process, following the Israeli prime minister Mr Netanyahu's meeting with President Clinton in Washington. They had a very frank exchange of views, hinging on the construction of the large-scale Jewish housing development in east Jerusalem which has become the crucial bone of contention between Israel and the Palestinians. Unless this issue is resolved, almost certainly with external help from the United States and possibly the European Union, it looks as if the process is doomed. Yesterday's violence in Hebron following the murder of a Palestinian by an Israeli settler would then be a foretaste of much more serious conflict to come.
Although President Clinton eschewed any grand gestures after the meeting and seems to have embarked on a step-by-step effort to rescue the peace process, there should be no mistaking his determination to see it put back on the road. He has made clear his opposition to the Har Homa development and has now to meet the Palestinian leader Mr Arafat, to hear his side of the story. Mr Clinton is better informed about Mr Netanyahu's great political difficulties in putting a stop to the development. It has become an issue of principle and an ideological badger for his right-wing coalition with the Israeli electorate just as has the question of Palestinian terrorism and their conviction that Mr Arafat cannot be relied upon to implement the agreements he has reached to eliminate it. Mr Clinton has also heard out Mr Netanyahu's latest proposal for an intensive negotiation over six months on the model of the 1977 Camp David agreement brokered by President Jimmy Carter. But he must equally be aware of the Palestinian suspicion that it is designed to foreshorten and jeopardise the agreements reached in Oslo which underlie the existing process.
A stark and fateful choice faces all involved. Precisely because the issue of Jerusalem is so central to a negotiated settlement the Har Homa development was bound to become highly controversial once the decision was taken to proceed with it. It should not have surprised Mr Netanyahu's government that this is so, nor that the US and EU states should have reached the same conclusion, amounting even to a widespread suspicion that it is expressly designed to sabotage the peace process. Efforts to rescue it have therefore revolved around proposals that Har Homa be abandoned or at least frozen. If this is not possible for Mr Netanyahu's coalition to agree to pressure will mount on him to abandon it and go into a national government with the Israeli Labour Party, which would probably be more willing to do so.
But could Mr Netanyahu stand such a humiliating climbdown? Many observers note how the strain is telling on him. It is set to increase as he decides in coming weeks on whether to make a final attempt to rescue the Oslo process and the political trust on which it was based or to abandon it for the grave uncertainty of an increasingly isolated fortress Israel. The trouble with that option is that it has previously been predicated on continuing US support. It is not at all clear that even the remarkably pro-Israeli Clinton administration would be prepared so to underwrite Mr Netayahu. It has too much at stake in wider regional stability to sacrifice the peace process it has brokered to his stubborn refusal to compromise.