In the presence of President Clinton, hundreds of Palestinian leaders will gather in Gaza today to publicly renounce the clauses in the PLO's guiding charter which call for the destruction of Israel. If, as seemed likely last night, that annulment is confirmed by a show of hands and Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, deems this satisfactory, then he, the visiting US President, and the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, will meet this evening for talks designed to reinvigorate their latest, stalled Wye River peace deal. Next March or April, that same trio will reconvene at the Wye resort in Maryland for more talks on a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.
With this optimistic schedule in place, Mr Clinton had every right last night to look back on an arduous, but successful, first day of his Middle East trip. But the timetable he has managed to get pencilled in for the next few months of peacemaking involves several assumptions that may prove misplaced. The first is that, provided today's Palestine National Council meeting does unfold to Mr Netanyahu's satisfaction, with a clear, formal vote to annul the Covenant and "no tricks" as the prime minister put it, the sides will then move smoothly forward to implement the Wye peace deal.
In fact, whatever happens in Gaza today, Mr Netanyahu indicated yesterday, he does not intend to honour his commitment to hand over another slice of occupied West Bank land to Mr Arafat on Friday. Quite the contrary: given what he claimed were the "constant, systematic and deliberate" violations of the accord by Mr Arafat's Palestinian Authority, Israel could not be expected, he said, "to hand over another inch of territory". Palestinian leaders, he complained, were whipping up their people to demand the release of murderers from Israeli prisons - hence the past week's violence in the West Bank, in which four Palestinians have been killed, and which yesterday saw a teenage Israeli girl stabbed by a Palestinian girl.
The second assumption is that Messrs Clinton, Arafat and Netanyahu will still be leading their respective peoples come next spring. The US President is clearly preoccupied by his impeachment battle back home, and was questioned almost exclusively on that subject here yesterday by the travelling US press corps. Mr Netanyahu, whose coalition is falling apart over opposition to the territorial concessions in the Wye deal, faces a critical no-confidence motion next Monday, which he is by no means certain to survive.
Ironically, it is the ailing Mr Arafat, who remarked last week that he wasn't sure he'd live more than another year or two, whose political health seems the most robust.
Mr Clinton received an ecstatic welcome from the thousands of students he addressed at a Jerusalem convention centre, visited the grave of the assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and attended a candle-lighting service for the Hanukah festival at the state president's residence. Throughout the day, he pledged that the US would forever stand by Israel (he also pledged $1.2 billion in aid to finance the Wye deal security measures), and urged the Israeli people to recommit themselves to partnership with the Palestinians.
Though they smiled and shook hands at every stop, Mr Netanyahu was actually peddling a very different message - telling his guest, and trying to reassure his rightwing coalition malcontents, that Israel could do no more for peace, until there was "a real change of conduct by the Palestinian leadership." For Mr Netanyahu, more than five years after the peace process began, Mr Arafat and his colleagues have yet "to demonstrate that they have abandoned the path of violence."