Almost seven years into the Oslo peace process, and less than five months before the Palestinians are adamant that they will declare independent statehood, Israeli officials are belatedly realising what has been obvious all along to their interlocutors - that the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, is intent on gaining control of all the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem territory that Israel captured in the 1967 war.
The self-serving Israeli assumption, from the start of the Oslo process in September 1993, was that a final peace agreement would see Israel expanding its sovereignty into at least 10 per cent, and perhaps as much as 20 per cent, of the occupied West Bank, thereby enabling tens of thousands of Jewish settlers in those areas to stay put.
Israel's current Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, told President Clinton in talks earlier this month that he envisaged the Palestinians ultimately establishing their state in some 70-80 per cent of the West Bank.
But as talks on the final peace agreement intensify - the next round is due to begin on Sunday, and the negotiating leaders held a preparatory session yesterday in Jericho - Palestinian leaders are issuing a stream of statements insisting on a full Israeli withdrawal from occupied land, and the Israelis are starting to wake up to the significance of this unbending stand.
In his first visit to the West Bank since succeeding his father to the throne, Jordan's King Abdullah yesterday met Mr Arafat in Ramallah and, according to the Jordanian Foreign Minister, Mr Abdul-Illah Khatib, assured the Palestinians of Jordan's support for "the formation of an independent Palestinian state on land occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem". That stance precisely reflects the Palestinian position. At their meeting with Mr Clinton last week, Palestinian leaders were adamant: "We won't give up a single centimetre of lands which were conquered in 1967," said Mahmoud Abbas, Mr Arafat's deputy.
"We've made our compromises. We conceded almost all of historical Palestine . . . We won't agree to settlement presence on our lands."
After Sunday's weekly Palestinian cabinet meeting, Mr Abu Ala, Speaker of the Palestinian parliament, said much the same: "Any solution that does not include a full Israeli withdrawal . . . is not a solution."
Privately, some Palestinian officials hold out the prospect of "minor border alterations" - by which they mean that they might countenance an expansion of Israeli sovereignty into small areas of the West Bank, but only on condition that an equal area of what is now Israel be turned over to the Palestinians.
Critically, Mr Barak wants to be able to assure the public that most of the Jewish settlers - perhaps 120,000 of the up to 200,000 who live in the West Bank - will stay put under a permanent peace treaty. He also wants to maintain Israeli sovereignty throughout Jerusalem, albeit while giving Mr Arafat control of areas on the eastern edge of the city.
The trouble is, of course, that the Palestinians reject these positions. And that, as the veteran Israeli commentator, Danny Rubinstein, noted in the Ha'aretz daily earlier this week, renders the attempt at reaching a framework deal by next month, and a final deal by September, "a matter of miracle making". The likeliest scenario is that Mr Arafat, as repeatedly promised, will declare statehood in September, Israel will not seek to block the move, and peace talks will go on - but with both sides refusing to budge from positions that make a final treaty impossible, and every prospect of Palestinian frustration boiling over into violence.
And so, seven years down the road to peace, the two peoples will still be divided on most of the issues that were the most problematic from the start: the status of Jerusalem, the rights of refugees to return, the future of the settlements, and the demarcation of the border between Israel and Palestine.
Mr Arafat should work to unite all Palestinians in order to thwart Israeli artifices, a radical Palestinian leader said yesterday. "We stretch out our hand to Arafat, to [Arafat's] Fatah [movement] and to the Palestinian Authority, and call on him to launch a comprehensive Palestinian dialogue to draw up a common Palestinian political platform," Mr Nayef Hawatmeh, head of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), said.