Israel's President, the outspoken Mr Ezer Weizman, is yesterday understood to have urged the visiting US Secretary of State, Mrs Madeleine Albright, to "bang Arafat's and Netanyahu's heads together".
Mrs Albright may not be about to do anything quite that drastic in her bid to rescue the four-year-old peace process. But she quickly clashed with the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Netanyahu, over basic aspects of that process, and further extremely tough talking is in prospect today with the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat.
Starting her first visit to the region since succeeding Warren Christopher seven months ago, Mrs Albright began by positioning herself firmly by Israel's side in its demand that Mr Arafat crack down on the Islamic militants of Hamas, responsible for last week's triple Jerusalem suicide bombing.
"We are with you in the battle against terror," she told her Israeli hosts. "We are with you in your insistence that the Palestinian Authority fulfils the responsibilities and obligations that it has under taken."
But if that attitude immediately prompted Dr Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian Minister, to denounce the Secretary's "total sympathy and identification for Israel", Mrs Albright was soon issuing demands on Mr Netanyahu as well.
For a start, she wants him to resume negotiations in parallel with an intensified battle against the extremists by Mr Arafat. Mr Netanyahu, by contrast, insists on waiting and assessing Mr Arafat's anti-Hamas efforts before coming back to the peace table.
Importantly, too, Mrs Albright made it publicly clear that the United States was not about to let Mr Netanyahu side-step Israel's commitments under the Oslo accords, especially its signed pledge to carry out further West Bank troop withdrawals.
An aide of Mr Netanyahu was quoted as saying that he now wanted "to dispense with the whole interim agreement" - the Oslo process - and instead to try and reach a final settlement with the Palestinians.
That shift, Mrs Albright indicated, was not acceptable to the US, which has served with Russia as the guarantor of the Oslo accords.
"I do believe it is very important to follow through on the obligations of Oslo," she told journalists at a press conference, with Mr Netanyahu standing alongside her.
Mrs Albright's task is to somehow conquer the atmosphere of failure and disillusionment that prevails on both sides of the broken Israeli-Palestinian partnership, and to help foster the conditions that will get the two sides talking again.
And while it was clear that she held Mr Netanyahu at least partly to blame for destroying mutual trust - through his insistence on West Bank settlement expansion - she evidently does not accept the Palestinian assertion that such policies, rather than Islamic extremist violence, are the prime reason for the breakdown.
"There is no moral equivalent between killing people and building houses," she noted acerbically. The US Secretary also met bombing victims yesterday, and visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.
In advance of her talks today with Mr Arafat, the Palestinian leader has been making mass arrests of alleged Hamas activists. Some 200 are said to have been questioned since last Thursday's Jerusalem bombing.
In a rather different welcome, 200 Hamas-linked protesters in Nablus burned a US flag and a caricature of Mrs Albright.
David Horovitz is managing editor of the Jerusalem Report