AS ISRAEL teeters on the brink of all-out war and a watching world looks on as Palestinian riots erupt into pitched gun battles and bloody massacre, the reaction is not just one of horror, but of dismay at the inevitability of this conflict.

For it has been coming ever since the narrow victory 101 days ago of rightist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel's general election.

He was, after all, elected on a ticket hostile to the peace process.

It was one that was bound to undermine the tenuous accord that, from a template brokered by the Americans, his predecessor had forged with the Palestinians, giving them forms of self-government and greater self-respect.

Indeed it was, perhaps, the narrowness of Mr Netanyahu's victory that worsened the situation.

He has been obliged to accommodate the hard-liners in his camp and so give himself less scope for compromise with the Palestinians. And compromise was the crucial factor that was needed, not only to sustain the peace process, but also the authority of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat over the hard-liners on his side.

Thus, having played the hawk, Israel's Prime Minister reaps now what he has sowed.

And how terrible that is.

The spark for this violence and bloodshed that has claimed more than 50 lives and left hundreds more wounded may have been Arab anger over the Jews opening a tunnel under one of Islam's holiest mosques, but the political powder keg that has exploded was added to, not lessened, by Israel's lurch to the right and away from the peace process.

Now, as onlookers are appalled by the mailed fist response of the Israeli government - the shooting down of stone-throwers, the spraying of rioters with bullets from helicopter gunships and tanks being sent - and by the inevitable response of the Palestinians taking up guns as well as stones, the question is: where now for peace in the Holy Land? For it is not just that the peace process has been wobbled by a more serious-than-usual riot, but that a new intifada is threatened, that a clash across the whole Middle East may be torched and that Israel is hurled from the threshold of peace with its Palestinian citizens to conflict with them and her Arab neighbours - and with no end in sight.

It may be that Israel was, in effect, bombed at the ballot box into its hard-line position by Arab terrorists, but the effect of it being seen to domineer and slow down the peace process - and even reverse it in the case of the construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank - has reaped this dreadful dividend.

Does it want that to continue?

Israel must realise it cannot afford it.

It must be pushed swiftly back to the negotiating table - above all, by international pressure led by the Americans - if the bloody scenes now continuing in Jerusalem, Gaza and elsewhere do not spill over into a war that goes on for years and spreads all over the the Middle East.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.