THE Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, returned home yesterday from a highly successful visit to the US, and walked straight into a coalition crisis.
The two are directly related. Having pleased the Clinton administration by implementing the partial pullout from Hebron last month, Mr Netanyahu, according to Israeli press reports, further delighted the President by assuring him that a controversial new Jerusalem housing development was being postponed so as to avoid antagonising the Palestinians.
The development at Har Homa on the edge of the West Bank, involves plans to build 6,500 homes near the Arab village of Sur Bahir.
Israeli peace policies that gratify President Clinton invariably infuriate the Israeli right wing. And so it proved yesterday, with almost a third of the members of Mr Netanyahu's own coalition threatening to withhold support from the government unless Har Homa gets the green light.
The Mayor of Jerusalem, Mr Ehud Olmert, a member of the Prime Minister's Likud party, called the project "a watershed with respect to my support for the government". Some of the private Jewish owners of land at Har Homa were talking about starting construction unilaterally.
Mr Olmert said he would send bulldozers to Har Homa within days to pave the way for construction if Israeli media reports proved true that Mr Netanyahu had stopped the project.
The Peace Now movement - an opponent of Jewish settlement on land captured from the Arabs in the 1967 Middle East war - said building on Har Homa, would ignite Arab violence. "Har Homa would be another Jerusalem tunnel," Mr Mossi Raz of Peace Now said.
Mr Netanyahu's spokesmen have denied that he gave any assurances on the issue during his talks at the White House.
The Prime Minister, characteristically, insisted yesterday that the newspaper headlines were baseless, and spoke in general terms of the Israeli consensus in favour of new Jewish housing on land in East Jerusalem captured during the 1967 war.
But although Mr Netanyahu has scheduled ministerial meetings for today and for next week on the subject of construction in the city he has yet to give a public pledge to begin work at Har Homa any time in the near future.
The Har Homa controversy dominated news reports in Israel yesterday and overshadowed Israeli PLO talks on implementing interim agreements signed since a landmark peace deal in 1993.
Mr Netanyahu's right wing critics charge that the Prime Minister's political direction is increasingly coming to resemble that of his Labour predecessors, Mr Yitzhak Rabin and Mr Shimon Peres.
They say he has yet to publicly rule out a land for peace deal with Syria on the Golan Heights.
They claim that in an apparent shift while in the US, he reportedly told audiences he was no longer bothered about the need for the PLO to introduce a new, non anti Israel, guiding covenant.
The problem for those critics is the knowledge that Mr Netanyahu is their Prime Minister, the man they helped elect, and that if they bring him down and force new elections, it is the Labour Party, under its leader in waiting, Mr Ehud Barak, that is likely to benefit.