Hopes for peace are soaring in the Middle East, following yesterday's immediate and positive Syrian response to peacemaking overtures from the new Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak.
Mr Barak, who bade a formal farewell to his predecessor, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, at the Prime Minister's office yesterday morning, had called on Damascus from the Knesset podium in his inaugural address to accept his "outstretched hand" of peace.
No sooner had the invitation been issued, than Syria, Israel's most bitter enemy these past three decades, was accepting it.
"Syria shares with Israel's Prime Minister Barak the same wish to put an end for wars and establish comprehensive peace in the region," said a senior Syrian Foreign Ministry official.
Formal Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations were suspended in the spring of 1996, with Syria demanding a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights and Israel insisting on retaining early-warning stations on the territory to be relinquished.
Mr Barak, who as chief of staff of the Israeli army participated in some of those negotiations, has made clear his readiness to conclude a full peace accord with Syria - presumably including the return of most or all of the Golan. Such a deal would also lead to an Israeli-Lebanon peace agreement, since Syria is the main power-broker in Lebanon.
President Hafez al-Assad of Syria has made unprecedentedly warm remarks about Mr Barak in recent weeks, describing him as strong, decent and capable of delivering peace. Mr Barak has made clear that peacemaking is his government's top priority. In that light, on his first day in office yesterday, he scheduled a meeting with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt for tomorrow, and talks with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat next Sunday, and began planning a visit to the US to meet President Clinton next Wednesday.
In the Knesset on Tuesday night, and again at the Prime Minister's Office yesterday morning, Mr Barak used warm and gracious language in completing the handover of power from Mr Netanyahu.
The two men go back a long way. Mr Barak was Mr Netanyahu's commander in the army's elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit. When Mr Netanyahu's older brother, Yoni, was killed during the legendary 1976 Entebbe hostage rescue operation, it is said, it was Mr Barak who delivered the grim tidings to the Netanyahu household.
"We had our differences in policy, on the way forward, and in our style," said Mr Barak in his Knesset speech on Tuesday - but on a personal level, he stressed, their relationship was never affected.
But what critical "differences in policy" they are, with what potentially dramatic consequences for the Middle East. Within a day of taking office, Mr Barak has already begun to try and repair the damage three years of the Netanyahu government did to the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. President Mubarak, who in 1996 urged more cynical Arab leaders to give Mr Netanyahu a chance, and has nursed a sense of betrayal ever since, warned in an interview yesterday that "trust can't be won at the push of a button". But though once bitten, even Mr Mubarak stressed that "I think there's going to be progress . . . I think he [Barak] is promising".
Several Arab leaders have already, correctly, pointed out that Mr Barak is no great political dove - no younger Shimon Peres. He is a prime minister in the Yitzhak Rabin mould - guided by his perception of Israel's security needs. He will be prepared to dismantle West Bank settlements as part of a final peace treaty with the Palestinians - but not all West Bank settlements.
He will talk tough against relinquishing Israeli sovereignty in East Jerusalem, but will probably seek the kind of "creative" solutions Mr Rabin was moving toward.