SYRIA and Israel, the Middle East's most implacable enemies are again on a collision course. The rhetoric is escalating by the day, and the fear is that the level of violence may follow suit.
In an editorial earlier this week, the Syrian government newspaper Al-Ba'ath compared Israel's new Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, to Hitler, asserting that he was "aspiring to become the leader of new fascism and racism, and to retrieve the aggressive history of Hitler".
On Wednesday, in the television interview that probably provoked that editorial attack, Mr Netanyahu had unequivocally ruled out Syria's key demand from Israel - the return of the Golan Heights, captured during the 1967 war.
"The Syrians demand that we simply get off the Golan," he noted. "We have a different policy. We demand [the retention of the Golan, from which we were attacked.
President Hafez alAssad of Syria has been the most strident Arab critic of Mr Netanyahu's new administration. It was Mr Assad who initiated the Arab summit in Cairo last weekend, where he failed to win Arab support for a halt to all normalisation accords with Israel, but did manage to ensure the summit's final communique included a warning to Israel not to budge from the land for peace basis of the peace process.
According to reports published in Jerusalem in recent days, the Syrian President has also been holding a series of conversations with moderate Arab leaders, urging them to freeze reconciliation plans with Israel.
What's more, responsibility for Wednesday's shooting attack on the Israel Jordan border, in which three Israeli soldiers were killed, has been claimed by a radical PLO splinter group, headed by Col Mohammed Saeed Moussa, which has its headquarters in Damascus, as do numerous other anti Israeli Palestinian radical groups.
This week, Mr Netanyahu repeated his accusations that Syria was behind this and other recent terrorist attacks, and blamed Mr Assad for encouraging terrorism in Jordan and Turkey, too.
Issuing another warning to Damascus in a newspaper interview, he said: "The Syrian government needs to understand that we have no intention of playing by the Syrian rules, whereby we hold peace talks on one hand ... and have to absorb their indirect war, via terrorist attacks, on the other."