There were two interesting crossings at the Allenby Bridge yesterday. Coming from Jordan to Israel was the entourage of the Czech President, Mr Vaclav Havel, continuing a Middle East tour in which he praised the improvement in neighbourly relations since his last visit seven years ago. Heading in the other direction was an Israeli ambulance, summoned by the Israeli embassy in Amman, after two of its security guards were wounded in a drive-by shooting by a Jordanian gunman.
That two-way traffic said a lot about the current perilous situation in the Middle East: the peace gains that have seen mined borders give way to open bridges are now in danger of being wiped out as Israel's relations with all of its Arab neighbours deteriorate, and Jewish and Arab extremists sense an opportunity to kill off reconciliation and even drag the Middle East into another war.
King Hussein's personal commitment to peace with Israel was underlined again yesterday through his condolence calls on the injured Israelis and his telephoned regrets to Israeli leaders. But the shooting attack, claimed by the hitherto unknown group "Islamic Opposition", came only months after a Jordanian soldier shot dead seven Israeli schoolgirls at a border tourist site, and appears to further demonstrate the long-standing assumption that badly strained Israeli ties with the Palestinians will sooner or later lead to badly strained ties with the Jordanians.
New efforts to rebuild Israeli-Palestinian relations are getting under way this week in the United States, but the prospects are not good.
The Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, asserts daily that the five men who carried out recent suicide bombings in Jerusalem came from Palestinian Authority-controlled territory, and that the Palestinians had better start taking "the fight against terror" more seriously. Mr Yasser Arafat is still seething over the Israeli "compromise" deal that leaves 10 Israeli "guards" on duty at a home in the East Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of Ras al-Amud - an arrangement to which the Palestinians were not a party and which, to their dismay, has been endorsed by the Americans.
To add to the sense of growing instability, Mr Arafat, who reportedly fainted amid the heated debate at the weekend's Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Cairo, is now being watched obsessively amid fevered speculation about his health - speculation fuelled by a recent TV interview in which he appeared unable to control a trembling lower lip, and by reports of a succession battle among his top officials.
Tension has rarely been higher either inside south Lebanon, where Israel is nursing the humiliation of having lost a dozen commandos on a recent botched raid, and where the eldest son of the Hizbullah chief, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, died in a subsequent clash. Both sides may now be tempted to try to avenge their losses.
Given the fact that Lebanese army forces have already been drawn into some recent firefights and that Syrian troops are never far away, there is real potential for escalating hostilities.
While Mr Netanyahu yesterday described the regional tensions as "minor bumps on the route" to peace, opposition politicians are speaking openly of war, and the army is actually training for a possible "guerrilla war" with the Palestinians. In the most graphic expression of war fears, the leading Jerusalem Hebrew weekly headlined its latest issue, "Here it comes", above a picture of row after row of graves.
David Horovitz is managing editor of the Jerusalem Report
Mr Shimon Peres, architect of Israel's historic interim accords with the Palestinians, yesterday unveiled a private peace institute, saying peacemaking was basically economics. "We believe that peace is basically an economic exercise, the minute a country moves from political monopoly to economic emphasis, then peace will begin to reign in the midst of the nation," he said.
The Peres Centre for Peace is to be officially inaugurated next month, but the Nobel laureate for peace previewed it at a news conference yesterday.