For more than a year, Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, has postponed handing over further occupied West Bank territory by claiming that every small parcel of land relinquished would undermine his country's security needs.
This week - largely overlooked here because headlines have been dominated by the vicious row between Mr Netanyahu and the President, Mr Ezer Weizman - the Israeli army has unveiled its "security interests" map of the West Bank, and it appears to contradict Mr Netanyahu's claims.
The United States has been urging the prime minister to withdraw immediately Israeli troops from another 13 per cent of the West Bank. Mr Netanyahu has publicly indicated that he can sanction a pullout from, at most, 9 per cent. Any additional land, he has stressed repeatedly, could harm Israel's defence stature.
The map unveiled by the army, and presented this week to the Knesset's defence committee, however, indicates that Israel could safely withdraw from considerably more land, handing great swathes of the West Bank to Mr Yasser Arafat's control, with no security damage.
Indeed, an analysis of the map suggests that the army could comfortably envisage Mr Arafat controlling about half of the West Bank in the interim period of the peace process, including land currently occupied by some 60 Jewish settlements.
Presenting the map to the committee on Tuesday, the army's planning chief, Gen Shlomo Yanai, stressed that it had been drawn up with no political intervention. It provides for Israel retaining, among other areas, a wide strip of land along the Jordan Valley, a thinner strip along the old "Green Line" separating Israel from the West Bank and a further swathe around Jerusalem, but relinquishing most of the central areas of the West Bank to the north and south of Jerusalem.
Members of Mr Netanyahu's coalition have flatly rejected the map as any kind of blueprint for peace moves, and recoiled from the notion that 60, of the approximately 160, West Bank settlements are deemed by the army to offer no security benefit. One of the key arguments for the establishment and maintenance of the settlements has been that they enhance Israel's defence capabilities.
The chairman of the defence committee, Mr Uzi Landau, a member of Mr Netanyahu's Likud party, said the map bore the footprints of the previous Labour government, and called on the army to produce a new version. "We have to turn the wheel back," he said.
A pro-settler Knesset member, Mr Nissan Smoliansky, called the map "a distortion". However, a Labour legislator, Mr Haim Ramon, said the map proved that Mr Netanyahu had been lying in invoking security considerations to delay handing over more land.
Mr Netanyahu would normally have been expected to react personally to such a charge. However, he has been preoccupied with a continuing confrontation with the president. After Mr Weizman on Monday all but called him a liar, and accused him of ruining the peace process and destroying Israel's international standing, Mr Netanyahu hit back on Tuesday by asserting that the president had "placed himself at the head of the leftist camp, and is trying to bring down an elected government". Mr Weizman, he added, was harming Israel's negotiating position, and had "strengthened and hardened the Arab position".
Yesterday morning, Mr Weiz man scheduled a press conference, at which it was anticipated he would further criticise Mr Netanyahu. Instead, however, the prime minister arrived for a private consultation - their first meeting in several weeks - and the press conference was cancelled. They then issued a joint statement pledging to resolve their differences behind closed doors. Neither faced reporters, however, and there was no sense of reconciliation.