The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, who flies to Washington next week to begin negotiations intended to achieve peace within months between his country and Syria, last night delivered what sounded decidedly like a eulogy for the Israeli presence on the Golan Heights.
After months of behind-the-scenes contacts, President Clinton announced on Wednesday that Mr Barak and the Syrian Foreign Minister, Mr Farouq a-Sharaa, would launch the intensive talks between two of the region's most implacable foes.
The sense in Israel is that the price of peace has already been agreed: Israel will relinquish the Golan ridge, captured from Syria in 1967 when President Hafez Assad was his country's minister of defence, and demanded relentlessly by Mr Assad ever since he took over the presidency in 1971.
"The Golan will be evacuated just as the Sinai was evacuated [when Israel made peace with Egypt in the late 1970s]," wrote Mr Nahum Barnea, Israel's leading analyst, yesterday. "And not one centimetre less."
In a speech to his Labour Party colleagues last night, Mr Barak appeared to confirm as much, heaping compliments on the Golan "settlement enterprise", praising the Golan's 17,000 Jewish residents for "standing firm . . . and building a life there over three generations", and promising that Israel would "never forget you".
What he did not offer, however, was even the faintest suggestion that any of them would be able to live there much longer.
While Mr Barak was hailing the "historic opportunity" to normalise relations with both Syria and, by extension, with Lebanon, his political opponents were accusing him of selling out.
Mr Ariel Sharon, leader of the opposition Likud, accused Mr Barak of giving in completely to Syria's terms.
The Syrian media agreed, with state-run dailies emphasising that the talks are resuming, as Mr Assad has always demanded, from the point at which they broke off - the point at which, Syria claims, Israel had agreed in principle to return the entire Golan.
Some Golan residents were holding a crisis meeting last night, with Mr Sami Bar-Lev, council head of the main Golan town, Katzrin, vowing: "We will not be uprooted from here." The Golan Settlers' Council is determined to galvanise public opinion against a peace deal, which Mr Barak has promised to present to the public in a referendum.
Recent polls suggest that the electorate is deeply divided over the issue, but Mr Barak says he is confident he will prevail "with a sweeping majority".
In prospect after next week's Washington opening formalities are several months of arduous talks, possibly hosted by Jordan, over the precise scope of the Israeli pull-back, security arrangements, water allocations and so on. Lebanon is also seeking a formal place at the negotiations.
Suddenly, Mr Barak's pledge to bring Israel's troops out of Lebanon by next July is looking more realistic, and talk of Mr Assad being too unwell to make peace utterly misguided.
Michael Jansen adds:
Next week's resumption of negotiations between Syria and Israel is seen in Damascus as a victory for the Syrian position as talks are being resumed where they were broken off in March 1996.
Damascus insists this means that Mr Barak has reaffirmed the pledge made by his slain predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, to withdraw from the Golan to the line of June 4th, 1967, the day before the area was first occupied by the Israeli army.
A source close to the mediation effort said: "The Syrians would never have engaged in talks in the first place [in 1994-1995] if they did not have a commitment for full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan, so this commitment must have been renewed for Damascus to resume."