The moment has already become legendary, writes David Horovitz. It is September 13th, 1993. We are at the White House. Yasser Arafat is stretching out his hand. And Yitzhak Rabin, the new peace partner with whom Mr Arafat wants to press the flesh, hesitates.
Only reluctantly does he stretch out his right arm, and give the photographers their symbolic snapshot of reconciliation.
Flash forward two years. We are the White House again, this time for a ceremony sealing an accord on the Israeli army's departure from the major Palestinian cities in the occupied West Bank. Mr Rabin tells a joke. He's been listening to Chairman Arafat's oratory, and reflecting that it's the Jews who are supposed to be experts at speech-making. Perhaps, he muses aloud, to the delight of Mr Arafat, perhaps the chairman has some Jewish blood in him.
The shift from reluctant handshake to Jewish humour demonstrated how, between 1993 and 1995, Mr Rabin came, if not to love or even like his Palestinian peer, then certainly to trust and respect him. Many Israelis, though, never made that shift. The 60 per cent who favoured the Oslo accords in 1993 had declined to 50 per cent two years later. And prominent among those who derided the notion of Mr Arafat as a peace partner was Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mr Netanyahu's own beloved elder brother, Yoni, was killed leading the 1976 Entebbe Airport Israeli hostage rescue - shot dead by one of the Palestinian hijackers. To him, Mr Arafat was and remains the Palestinian arch-terrorist. So vehement was his opposition to the Rabin-Arafat process, so viciously did he ridicule the idea that the gun-toting PLO leader would now embark on a battle against terrorism, that when Mr Rabin was shot dead in November 1995, Mr Netanyahu's own Likud party contemplated dumping him as its leader, concerned that the public felt he bore partial responsibility for the murderous climate, that he was unelectable.
Mr Netanyahu, of course, survived that crisis, as he has survived many more since. And, as prime minister since June 1996, he has had to swallow his revulsion and pose for his own handshakes with Mr Arafat. But he has never sought to conceal his fundamental mistrust of the man.
The Oslo accords have been harmed by Mr Netanyahu's ideological commitment to expanding Jewish settlement everywhere in the West Bank. They have been hurt by the composition of Mr Netanyahu's multi-party coalition, from which a dozen or more members regularly vow to bolt should he give up any more West Bank land. But they have been destined to fail because of Mr Netanyahu's basic unwillingness to work closely with Mr Arafat, a man he believes was duping Mr Rabin, a man he believes has never abandoned hope of driving Israel into the sea.