The Israeli Justice Minister, Mr Tsachi Hanegbi, took a bite out of a snack at a coalition meeting yesterday, chewed for a moment, then declared: "Ladies and gentlemen, the Last Supper."
Mr Hanegbi was exaggerating. A little. The Israeli government, in its slimmed-down, post-Levy configuration, managed to get its budget law approved by the Knesset yesterday, guaranteeing itself a few more weeks in power.
But the resignation of the Foreign Minister, Mr David Levy, which takes formal effect today, is generally being seen as marking the beginning of the end of the Netanyahu coalition. Its parliamentary majority reduced to two by the departure of Mr Levy's five-strong Gesher party, the government is now at the mercy of any and all of its various competing factions.
The budget battle was only the first obstacle; a far more arduous test, over the next West Bank land handover to the Palestinians, is now looming uncomfortably large.
The US peace envoy, Mr Dennis Ross, is due in Jerusalem today to begin talks with Mr Netanyahu and with the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat. Mr Ross wants an Israeli decision on how much West Bank territory it intends to transfer soon to Palestinian control, under the terms of an accord Mr Netanyahu himself hammered out with Mr Arafat a year ago. On January 20th at the White House, Mr Clinton will want to examine the relevant maps and hear the Israeli timetable.
But Mr Netanyahu, who is now serving as his own foreign minister in the Levy-free cabinet, is virtually paralysed: on the one hand, at least 17 members of his coalition say they will vote to bring him down if he carries out any further withdrawals; on the other, the four-member Third Way coalition faction is adamant it will desert him if it becomes clear that no withdrawal is in prospect.
Caught between these two opposite forces, yet dependent on both of them for his majority, Mr Netanyahu is just about the only Israeli politician now asserting that his coalition can survive much longer in its present form.
Palestinian officials have been expressing concern that the departure of Mr Levy will further radicalise the coalition, and that the domestic crisis will be used as a pretext to delay peace moves. In fact, while Mr Netanyahu has used domestic difficulties as a questionable excuse for peace delays in the past, this time he really does have no room whatsoever for manoeuvre. The only comfort that the Palestinians might take from the deadlock lies in the prospect that, fairly soon now, the moderate Labour Party may get its shot at wresting power away from him.
For all his public confidence on seeing out a full term in office until the year 2000, Mr Netanyahu is probably privately setting a rather shorter goal - of holding on for at least a few months. The background to Mr Levy's departure was his anger at the discrimination against poorer Israelis in the national budget. Mr Netanyahu wants that subject, on which he is vulnerable, forgotten. He would much rather fight an election in the summer or autumn, over peace terms with the Palestinians, an issue on which his tough-sounding policies still enjoy wide public support.
Best of all would be an election in November, when two serious potential rivals, the Mayor of Jerusalem, Mr Ehud Omert, and the Mayor of Tel Aviv, Mr Ronnie Millo, will be preoccupied with their own election campaigns.
The Prime Minister's problem, in seeking to hold his coalition together and in preparing a second prime ministerial campaign, is his credibility - or the lack of it. Three ministers - Mr Levy, the former finance minister, Mr Dan Meridor and the former science minister, Mr Benny Begin - have now quit the cabinet, citing their lack of faith in the Prime Minister. There is hardly a genuinely supportive face in the cabinet.
Numerous back-bench Likud Knesset members claim he has breached promises solemnly made to them, and know that if they do not bring him down, he will make sure they are never re-elected. Even Mr Netanyahu, an artful survivor, will be hard-pressed to turn that overwhelming mistrust and dislike into the enthusiastic, solid backing he needs to stay in power.