On Tuesday, at the festive opening of the fifth session of the Palestinian legislative council in Ramallah, a beaming Mr Yasser Arafat waved his hand in the air, index finger pointing upwards to emphasise his words, and declared, to tumultuous applause, that, "We will declare independence this year. A promise is a promise. A vow is a vow . . . and anyone who doesn't like it can go drink the [undrinkably saline] waters of the Dead Sea."
This wasn't the first time Mr Arafat had issued such a pledge. In other comments in recent days he has been even more specific: unless he reaches a peace treaty with Israel by September 13th, a deadline he and Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, agreed upon late last year, statehood will be declared there and then.
Publicly, Israeli officials had been professing themselves unperturbed by the threat of unilateral action.
Israel, they made clear, certainly wouldn't recognise the new state of Palestine and might henceforth feel no obligation to transfer further areas of occupied West Bank land to Mr Arafat's control.
But privately, Mr Barak and his ministers - who, after all, won office last year partly on the promise to accelerate peacemaking with the Palestinians - realised they had to act.
Mr Arafat was evidently under pressure from the Palestinian public, increasingly frustrated at the absence of progress. Hamas, the Islamic extremist movement that opposes reconciliation with Israel, has deemed the moment ripe to attempt a new series of suicide bombings (several of which have been thwarted in recent weeks). The stalemate had to be broken.
So Mr Barak, later on Tuesday, invited Mr Arafat to a rare meeting inside Israel. Even more unusually, he travelled yesterday to Mr Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah for further talks. He came with concrete offers of progress, proposing to release a group of Palestinian security prisoners; to discuss the opening of a second "safe passage" for Palestinians to move across Israel between Gaza and the West Bank; and, most importantly, agreeing to reconsider which parts of the West Bank are to be handed over to Mr Arafat's control in the delayed Israeli withdrawal from 6.1 per cent of occupied land.
The resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is positive news, of course, but euphoria would be premature. The two sides have committed themselves to new timetables for peacemaking, but they are extremely ambitious timetables.
And when the negotiating teams present themselves in Washington next week, facing them, as ever, will be such vexed issues as the future of Jerusalem - where the Palestinians want at least partial sovereignty for their capital but Israel is resisting significant compromise - the fate of West Bank Jewish settlements, the question of how many Palestinians refugees will be allowed to return, and so on.
For now, Mr Arafat has forced the Palestinians back to the top of Mr Barak's agenda.
The fact remains, however, that if Syria signals a readiness to resume its talks with Israel, Mr Barak will refocus his attention on Damascus - because peace with Syria would bring merciful tranquillity to Israel's border with Lebanon as well, because a treaty with President Hafez Assad would be far less complex to finalise and because medical reports - of everything from Parkinson's disease to senile dementia - suggest Mr Assad may not be around much longer.
Reuters adds: Israel's highest court said in a landmark ruling yesterday that Arab citizens of the Jewish state could no longer be prevented from living wherever they chose in the country.
The High Court of Justice also ruled that it was illegal to designate any community in Israel as exclusively Jewish.