While Israel yesterday released 151 Arab prisoners from its jails, and preparations were being finalised for tomorrow's opening of the "safe passage" route for Palestinians to travel between Gaza and the West Bank, extreme rightwing opposition is mounting in Israel to the revived peace process with the Palestinians.
And as in the months before the assassination of the late prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in November 1995, it centres on further planned territorial compromise, and involves young hot-headed activists apparently prepared to take the law into their own hands.
Rabbi Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of the hardline West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, was reported by Israel Radio yesterday to have issued a rabbinical ruling barring the evacuation of about a dozen new West Bank settlement outposts, which are to be dismantled in the next few days, under an agreement reached this week by settlement leaders with the Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak. That reported ruling comes as some of the residents of the outposts are already issuing threats to resist evacuation.
The residents have formed themselves into a new movement, called the Next Generation, which is openly critical of the more established settler leaders who cut the deal with Mr Barak.
The Prime Minister had been contemplating evacuating all 42 of the new outposts, set up in the last months of the previous Netanyahu government, and the settler leadership has been claiming victory in limiting the number to just 12.
But members of the Next Generation say they will use "passive opposition" to resist any evacuation, since they regard a voluntary departure from any part of "Biblical Israel" as a dangerous precedent, and some have warned that such passive resistance could turn active.
In an example of such activism, and an ominous echo of the violence of the Rabin era, a member of the Knesset, Mr Zevulun Orlev, from the pro-settler National Religious Party, was beaten up outside his own front door in Jerusalem earlier this week, targeted by a handful of far-right activists for his and his party's "crime" in supporting the evacuation.
Apart from their anger over this issue, Mr Barak's opponents are also incensed by the prisoner release programme, which yesterday saw 109 Palestinians and 42 inmates from Arab countries go free. Among those freed were more than 40 Palestinians convicted of murdering fellow Palestinians for so-called "collaboration" with Israel, and several dozen former members of the radical Islamic Jihad and Hamas groups.
Rather than freeing them, said an extreme right-wing activist, Mr Noam Federman, Israel should have "hung them all. . . in the town square". Meanwhile, the columnist Nadav Haetzni, writing in the Ma'ariv daily, likened Mr Barak's concept of the rule of law - "barring settlers and freeing murderers" - to those of Gen Augusto Pinochet and Stalin.