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While he was in Moscow building Israeli-Russian ties this week, his nearly 11-month tenure as Israel's prime minister was in deep trouble back home.

And Israel was facing the possibility of new clashes in the streets with a Palestinian population that feels betrayed.

From right-wing Israeli critics to a usually supportive President Clinton to his friend King Hussein of Jordan, every cornerstone of Netanyahu's political foundation was cracking under the weight of political scandal and a peace process threatening to explode into violence.

At the heart of Netanyahu's domestic troubles lay the still simmering Bar-On affair, plus three controversial foreign policy moves that backfired.

First came his cabinet's vote Friday of last week to hand over 9 percent of rural West Bank areas to the Palestinian Authority. That followed the announcement that Israel will go ahead with building 6,500 Jewish apartments on Har Homa in eastern Jerusalem, starting Sunday.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has also moved ahead with the long-threatened closure of Palestinian Authority-aligned offices in East Jerusalem.

In the Knesset, the epicenter of Netanyahu's worst crisis yet, the premier first came under fire from members of his own coalition, who threatened to vote no-confidence in the government after the West Bank vote. His critics contended Netanyahu was giving the Palestinians too much land in the first of three redeployments scheduled through mid-1998 under the Hebron agreements.

Nentanyahu met with hawkish coalition members Sunday before leaving for Russia, hoping to persuade them not to abandon his government. One, Shaul Yahalom of the National Religious Party, urged the NRP to quit the government, but to no avail.

Left-wing opposition members were also working to oust Netanyahu, compounding his domestic woes. Labor Knesset member Moshe Shahal drafted a bill to require a simple majority of 61 of 120 Knesset legislators to oust the prime minister without calling for new general elections.

Under current law, the no-confidence vote of a simple parliamentary majority would result in new elections for both prime minister and for the Knesset. A majority of 80 Knesset members voting no-confidence would result in a new vote for prime minister but no new parliamentary elections.

Hoping to maneuver out of his domestic quagmire, Netanyahu indicated that if his conciliatory approach with coalition members fails, he would play hardball and consider forming a national unity government with the Labor Party.

But opposition leader Shimon Peres said Labor would not play. Peres said he would not consider joining a unity government until police concluded their investigation of alleged wrongdoing in the short-lived appointment of Jerusalem attorney Roni Bar-On as attorney general earlier this year.

In that controversy, the leader of the coalition's Shas Party, Aryeh Deri, allegedly agreed to Bar-On's appointment in return for supporting the Hebron redeployment — an illegal quid pro quo that Netanyahu allegedly knew about.

The teetering peace process also appeared to hit its worst skid yet, with Arab anger over Har Homa and the West Bank redeployment plan boiling over.

Even Jordan's King Hussein, usually a personal friend of Netanyahu, wrote the premier a scathing personal letter that Israeli and U.S. newspapers ran on front pages.

Hussein said Netanyahu had committed "accumulated acts of a tragic nature" and that the recent Israeli housing and redeployment decisions may kill the peace process.

"Peace, which is the most important aim of my life, appears more and more like a distant mirage," the official Jordanian news agency Petra quoted Hussein as writing.

Jordanian officials, meanwhile, hinted that the Palestinian crisis could damage Jordan's relations with Israel. The two countries signed a peace treaty in 1994.

"The peace process is going through crisis, a real crisis," Jordanian Prime Minister Abdul Karim al-Kabariti said after talks Tuesday in Amman with Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai.

"We warn of unilateral moves that could lead us to difficult choices," Kabariti added.

Mordechai downplayed tensions with Jordan, saying there were misunderstandings that he believed could be overcome.

Netanyahu appeared even more isolated after Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat succeeded in gathering an emergency summit in Gaza, on Saturday of all days, of European states and even the U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, Edward Abington.

The summit signified an apparently successful move by Arafat to drive a wedge between Netanyahu and the United States, and heat up international pressure on Israel to give up even more West Bank land.

"Israel is pushing us into a corner, making us desperate," Mohammad Dahlan, head of the Palestinian security service in the Gaza Strip, told the Israeli daily Ma'ariv. "The street is heating up and about to boil."

Israeli security forces, meanwhile, were ordered to be on alert for any violent Palestinian reaction. Several hundred Palestinians trying to prevent construction of a new road near the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, outside Hebron, clashed Monday with Israeli security forces.

Witnesses said that at least 10 Palestinians were injured after Israeli forces beat back angry stone-throwers.

Netanyahu, while in Moscow, stood fast in the face of the widespread Arab anger.

"This kind of doomsday talk and the whole histrionic attitude towards obvious disagreement is itself not conducive to the [peace] process," he said.

"We have disagreement," the prime minister added. "We cannot at every stage of this agreement engage in cataclysmic predictions and talk of crisis and violence."