On Monday the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, declared publicly that he was determined to reach agreement with the Palestinians soon on the next Israeli withdrawal from West Bank land.
On Tuesday he gave Israeli TV viewers a different take, saying there were "eight or nine" other issues he wanted to resolve with the Palestinian leadership, before he could even contemplate sanctioning a further land handover. And yet yesterday he telephoned the peace envoy, Mr Dennis Ross, imploring the US State Department official to hurry to the Middle East, to help wrap up the deal.
Mr Netanyahu has been sending contradictory signals to his own coalition partners as well. As a newspaper columnist reported yesterday, he assures the moderates that the next withdrawal is only days away, then tells the hardliners, who vehemently oppose any further West Bank pullout, that "actually there'll be no agreement".
The Prime Minister is playing an apparently impossible game, but so far it's working. For a year and a half, since the partial pullout from Hebron marked the last substantive progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace effort, he has deflected ultimatum after ultimatum from the opposing flanks of his multi-party coalition, managed to persuade the Americans not to blame him publicly for the stalemate, and kept channels to the Palestinian leadership just about open.
And although three days of Israeli-Palestinian talks this week have produced no breakthrough, they did buy Mr Netanyahu some more crucial time.
Next Wednesday the Knesset goes into a three-month summer recess, during which the government cannot be voted out of office. If he can hold on for another week, Mr Netanyahu knows that he will still be Prime Minister this autumn.
The consequences of this endless procrastination have been deeply damaging, both for the Prime Minister personally and for Israel's international standing. There is hardly a friendly face at his cabinet table, he is mistrusted by his own intelligence and security chiefs, and the state's president has all-but branded him a liar.
Arab neighbours have cooled the relations with Israel that warmed in the 1992-95 heyday of Yitzhak Rabin's government, and relations with Europe and the United States have rarely been more strained.
Mr Netanyahu has even been able to relax a little in the last few days, as leading rabbis played into his hands by urging him not to hold negotiations with the Palestinians during a nine-day period, beginning tomorrow, that is said to have proved particularly unfortunate for Jews down the ages.
And yesterday, he was afforded still further relief by the opposition Labour Party, whose members turned on each other over whether they should help keep him in power.