Mr Dennis Ross, the hapless American peace envoy who has spent the weekend fruitlessly attempting to talk Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into attempting the US-imposed preconditions for the deferred summit, was returning to Washington last night.
He wasn't going home empty-handed. He was, rather, carrying a message of acute anger - a message from Mr Netanyahu to President Clinton that stated, in essence: Don't give us ultimatums, and don't try to tell us how much land to relinquish to the Palestinians.
In the course of three unhappy meetings over the weekend in Jerusalem, Mr Ross was reportedly made witness to Mr Netanyahu's "palpable anger" over what the Israeli Prime Minister termed the "unacceptable" preconditions and deadline for the Washington summit.
The US had announced the summit a week ago, saying that President Clinton would today host Mr Netanyahu and the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, for discussions to launch negotiations on a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, providing that the two sides could overcome their interim peace difficulties in time. In underlining his professed sense of fury and betrayal - because the Americans had previously pledged not to impose territorial demands on Israel - Mr Netanyahu is understood to have "slammed his hand on the table" in the course of his strained talks with Mr Ross.
He is also said to have catigated the American envoy over Mrs Hillary Clinton's remarks endorsing the Palestinians' right to statehood.
American officials are preferring to declare the Washington summit "delayed" rather than "dead." If they were to cancel it altogether, this would be tantamount to an admission by its guarantors that the peace process was at an end.
But it seems hard to envision circumstances in which peace hopes can now be revived. The American pressure for a 13 percent Israeli withdrawal, to be approved by today, appeared to represent a last throw of the dice - a minimum demand of Mr Netanyahu, with a maximum reward for him: The opening of the accelerated negotiations he has long been seeking on a permanent peace agreement.
And yet Mr Netanyahu has called the American bluff, and said Israeli security could not survive a land handover on that scale.
Since Mr Arafat, who originally sought a 30 per cent slice of the West Bank in this phase of the process, has made clear that he will not settle for less than 13 per cent, the two sides seem hopelessly at odds.
Mr Ross insists that "the differences that remain are not large". But they have proved impossible to bridge for more than a year, large enough to torpedo a summit convened by the President of the United States, and they show every indication of proving deep enough to bury the peace process before it ever reached the critical stage of talks on a permanent division of the disputed territory.
Jordan has arrested eight members of a foreign-backed Islamist group accusing them of being behind a wave of recent arson attacks in Amman, a government minister said yesterday.