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JERUSALEM — With the Middle East peace process in its deepest crisis since the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, all eyes are turning toward Washington to see whether the Clinton administration can salvage it.

President Clinton took a step toward reviving the staggering process by dispatching Middle East envoy Dennis Ross to the region Wednesday to try to bring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat back to negotiations.

At the same time, a widespread sense of Israeli unease in the wake of last week's suicide bombing at a cafe in Tel Aviv was prompting renewed speculation that an Israeli unity government was imminent.

The horror and anguish at last week's outrage was, of course, universal in Israel.

Nevertheless, beneath the surface, much of the criticism was focused on the Netanyahu government.

Opinion polls showed that while a large majority of Israelis support the right, in principle, to build at Har Homa, only a slight majority believed the government's decision to exercise that right now was wise.

Since construction of the new housing project in eastern Jerusalem began last week, Israeli-Palestinian tensions have escalated, culminating in last week's bombing, which killed three Israeli women and wounded dozens more.

This week, Palestinians in some parts of the West Bank took to the streets in violent demonstrations reminiscent of the worst days of the Palestinian uprising from 1987 to 1993.

In conversations with ordinary Israelis, one heard — after the bitter condemnations of the bombing and of Arafat's failure to prevent it — expressions of doubt as to the government's handling of the peace process.

The process has stumbled so badly that it remains unclear whether even a national unity government could save it.

But talk of a such a government was running high. Yediot Achronot, Israel's largest circulation daily newspaper, ran an artist's version of a unity Cabinet on Tuesday. The portrait included six Likud ministers, six Laborites and six representing the small parties — the ultrareligious Sephardi Shas, the National Religious Party, Natan Sharansky's Yisrael Ba'Aliyah and The Third Way.

Yediot said Netanyahu planned to translate the drawing into reality within two weeks — just as soon as the ongoing police inquiry into the short-lived appointment of Roni Bar-On as attorney general reached its conclusion, provided that the conclusion did not spell the premier's political demise.

The Israeli media have closely chronicled a series of private meetings over recent days between Netanyahu and Labor Party leader Shimon Peres. They linked those meetings to visits Netanyahu made this week to Shas' spiritual mentor, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, and to a leading NRP rabbi, Avraham Shapira. He also met with the popular Jerusalem kabbalist, Rabbi Yitzhak Kadourie.

The prime minister's aides maintained that the idea of a national unity government was not raised in any of those meetings.

But few political pundits believed them. Nor did some of Netanyahu's Likud followers. The minister of health, Yehoshua Matza, one of Netanyahu's oldest and most loyal supporters, confirmed Tuesday that the idea of setting up a unity government was indeed under serious consideration.

Matza said the two major parties could reach a common platform in advance of the final-status negotiations with the Palestinians, assuming that the current crisis was resolved and that the peace negotiations resume.

He said Likud and Labor could agree on several issues: the unity of Jerusalem, continued Israeli control of the Jordan Valley, retention of the Jewish settlements, and opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state.

In Labor circles, however, there seemed to be — at least for now — much less enthusiasm for the unity scenario.

At a stormy meeting of Labor's Knesset faction Monday, only two members supported the idea, while Peres came under a barrage of criticism from members opposed to the party serving under Netanyahu.

"We can't keep saying that Netanyahu is incapable and stupid — and then not translate those opinions into political action," said Avraham Shochat, the former finance minister.

"The Likud are just using us," warned Ori Orr, the former chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

As the Knesset on Tuesday debated two no-confidence motions that later failed, Yossi Sarid, of the left-wing Meretz Party, blamed the prime minister for the deterioration in the political and security situations.

For his part, Peres insisted no unity proposal had been made, and noted that in any event Labor would want to await the outcome of the Bar-On probe.

He agreed with his critics that it would be far better to defeat Netanyahu than to join him. But given the situation under the new election law, that is not an option that might soon be available to the party.

Under the old system, a government could fall with a no-confidence motion and a new government could be created with the backing of a Knesset majority. Under the new election system, initiated just last year, the entire Knesset would have to stand for new elections, making it less likely that Knesset members would want to bring down the government.

"Above all, I don't want to defeat the peace process," said Peres, a key architect of the agreements with the Palestinians, known collectively as the Oslo Accords.

"What I am doing is looking for ways to save it."

In the meantime, however, many were looking to Washington to do the saving.

Reports from Washington and Jerusalem this week said Secretary of State Madeleine Albright might visit the region herself soon.

But for the time being, Ross, the U.S. envoy to the Middle East and Bay Area native, traveled to the region midweek to seek an end to the violence and try to bring the parties back to the negotiating table.

He was scheduled to meet with Arafat in Rabat, Morocco Wednesday night. Arafat, after dodging contact with the administration while traveling in Asia, finally accepted a phone call from Albright Tuesday night and agreed to meet with Ross.

A high-profile intervention by Washington would demonstrate that the second Clinton administration, with new faces in some of its key policy-making slots, was not turning its back on Middle East peacemaking, as some Israelis and Palestinians had feared — and as some hardliners on both sides perhaps secretly hoped.

American reactions to the current crisis have been characterized thus far by a certain amount of zig-zagging.

Officials in Washington at first denied Israel's claim, based on intelligence information, that Arafat had effectively given a green light to the fundamentalist Hamas to resume its terrorism.

After last week's suicide bomb blast, however, U.S. officials backtracked somewhat, demanding that Arafat make clear his opposition to violence. U.S. officials even said they were unsure if Arafat had given the go-ahead for new violence.

But the U.S. government's response was indicative of how much international opinion toward Israel has shifted.

The worldwide popularity enjoyed by the Labor-led government a year ago is not shared by Netanyahu's government today, despite its brief spell in the sun immediately after the signing of the Hebron redeployment deal in January.

The brutal attack in Tel Aviv on the eve of Purim did not generate anything like the outpouring of international sympathy that followed the spate of Hamas suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv a year ago.

While foreign governments have unanimously decried the ghastly act of violence itself, many overseas politicians added that Israeli "settlement-building" in eastern Jerusalem was virtually certain to prejudice the entire peace process and trigger more violence by Palestinian extremists.

The question is whether an Israeli unity government, or the United States, can steer the peace process out of its downward spiral.