Two hours after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up on a bus in Haifa yesterday, killing 15 Israelis to culminate the weekend's series of horrifying attacks on Israeli targets, Mr Jibril Rajoub, the head of the Palestinian Authority's West Bank security apparatus, gave a remarkable interview to Israel's Army Radio.
Listeners who tuned in late might have been forgiven for thinking that a top Israeli security official was speaking: In fluent Hebrew, Mr Rajoub described the Islamic fundamentalists who had dispatched the Haifa bomber, and those responsible for the killing of 10 young Israelis in central Jerusalem on Saturday night, as enemies of peace with whom "there can be no compromise".
The extremists, he went on, were destroying all the achievements of the years of attempted peacemaking. His security personnel, he pledged, would now set about arresting "those who plan these acts and all those who support them".
It was an impressive performance, but it left most Israeli leaders unmoved. Israeli military officials privately described the professed new readiness of the Palestinian Authority to counter the militants as "absolute rubbish".
The Israeli Labour Minister, Mr Shlomo Benizri, openly derided the notion of any future partnership between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, declaring: "We are talking about war and we have to respond accordingly." Israel had no choice, added the Infrastructure Minister, Mr Avigdor Lieberman, but to "topple the authority".
While Mr Benizri and Mr Lieberman hail from the right wing of the Israeli political spectrum, their scepticism, and their cynicism about Mr Arafat's intentions, extend much of the way across mainstream Israel. The country's most authoritative television and radio pundits were stressing throughout the day that the Arafat-controlled Palestinian media was hardly mentioning its leader's condemnation of the bombings and his ban on extremist groups flouting his ceasefire commitment. Indeed, Palestinian radio stations led many of their broadcasts not with reports of the two dozen Israeli dead and 200 injured, but with news of the killing of a Palestinian by an Israeli security guard at a bank.
Even after 14 months of bloodshed, the sense that Palestinian militants are striking at civilian targets almost at will seems to have pushed Israelis to new depths of hopelessness. The Jerusalem blast was followed yesterday morning by the killing of an Israeli father who came to collect his son from an army base in the occupied Gaza Strip. Then came the Haifa bombing, followed by two more shootings in the West Bank.
Dr Yisrael Lau, the chief rabbi, remarked bleakly that no sooner did he make a speech trying to comfort Israelis after one attack, than news broke of another. The obvious parallel is with February-March 1996, when four suicide bombings in eight days left 60 Israelis dead. Now, as then, friends and relatives lit mourning candles, left flowers and sat for hours crying at the sites of the attacks. Now, as then, small knots of extremist demonstrators held vigils calling out "Death to the Arabs" - even in Haifa yesterday, where the blast occurred in a mixed Jewish-Arab area and many victims were Arabs.
In 1996, the attacks led to a crackdown by Mr Arafat on the militants. But it came too late to prevent disillusioned Israelis voting for a change in government. The question today is whether, if Mr Rajoub's pledges of action prove genuine, they have come too late to prevent the current hardline Israeli government, pressured by a bitter public, from declaring war on the Palestinian Authority.