On Saturday morning, hours after a Jordanian-born suicide bomber had walked into a crowd of Israeli teenagers outside a beach-front disco in Tel Aviv and killed at least 19 of them as well as himself, Israel's former prime minister, Mr Ehud Barak, agreed to an interview. It was one of the first he has given since losing his job in February. Praised by some Israelis, opposed by others for offering to relinquish all of the Gaza Strip, almost all of the West Bank and part of Jerusalem to Palestinian control, Mr Barak was unhesitant in blaming Mr Yasser Arafat for the sequence of events that led to the bombing.
The Palesinian leader, Mr Barak asserted, had deliberately resorted to violence following the Camp David summit last summer, in the hope that a new round of conflict, in which more Palestinians than Israelis would die, would restore to him the international support he had lost when President Clinton blamed him for rejecting a peace accord. Now, following the suicide bombing, Israel would have little choice but to hit back hard against Mr Arafat, Mr Barak indicated.
And yet, through Saturday and yesterday, as Palestinians stockpiled food and kept off the streets in anticipation of an attack, the skies were silent.
Where the "moderate" Mr Barak seemed to be reconciled to military action, his "hard-line" replacement, Mr Ariel Sharon, who considers Mr Arafat an unreformed terrorist, held his fire.
Many tearful friends and relatives of the 19 dead, and the dozens of teenagers who are still in hospital, have been pleading for the harsh response they want to believe might prevent further suicide attacks.
Dozens of angry, bitter Israelis spent hours close to the bomb site on Saturday, throwing stones and clashing with Arab-Israelis at a nearby mosque. Others demonstrated outside the Ministry of Defence, burning posters of Mr Arafat, and screaming "Death to the Arabs".
Within the cabinet too voices have been raised, some of them incredulously, at Mr Sharon's "indefensible restraint". But aides to the Prime Minister explain his thinking quite simply: for eight months, while Israel has absorbed an onslaught of international criticism for its use of "excessive force" to counter the intifada, Mr Arafat has claimed the high moral ground, urging an end to Israeli occupation and describing his people's behaviour as the unavoidable consequence of Israeli aggression.
No matter how plaintively Israel would argue that its fire, on the whole, was coming in response to Palestinian attacks, the death toll told its own story - five times as many Palestinian fatalities as Israeli. And the TV footage of well-protected soldiers opening fire on Palestinian youths bolstered this view. Now, though, the aides believe, Mr Sharon has turned that picture on its head. For almost two weeks, he has been ordering his forces to hold their fire whenever possible. The Palestinians have ridiculed his "unilateral cease-fire" as a "ploy", but the international community has started to take notice. And the maintenance of that policy in the wake of Friday's blast has brought about unprecedented international pressure on Mr Arafat, and his first Arabic cease-fire call since the intifada erupted.
Several government ministers made clear yesterday that they do not, for a moment, expect Mr Arafat to honour his pledge and make a "100 per cent" effort to stop attacks on Israel. But the very fact that, yesterday, he was able to arrange a meeting of all the disparate Palestinian factions, and have his officials co-ordinate policy with them, will have helped convince the world that talk of Mr Arafat lacking control is empty.
"The whole world, almost without exception, recognises that Mr Arafat's game is a lie," said the Justice Minister, Mr Meir Sheetrit.
What the ministers have so far left unsaid, however, concerns the likely grim conclusion to this current dance on the edge of the Middle Eastern abyss: when the next suicide bomber strikes, or the next car bomb explodes, Mr Sharon will launch a military assault on Palestinian installations - confident that the international community will be less condemnatory than it has been in the past.