As Israel yesterday buried the senior commander of its forces in Lebanon, killed on Sunday by a Hizbullah roadside bomb, fears of a major new escalation of violence were receding.
Israel had threatened an intensification of its conflict with Hizbullah in the immediate aftermath of the killing of Brig Gen Erez Gerstein and three other Israelis, and did launch air strikes that night against Hizbullah targets. But by yesterday the Israeli leadership was talking of a diplomatic rather than a military solution to the tension.
Defence officials privately acknowledge that Israel lacks a realistic military response to the increasingly sophisticated and successful Hizbullah fighters, in part because it is restricted by the "understandings" brokered by the US in the wake of the last major Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon in 1996. Those understandings are designed to minimise civilian casualties in the conflict, and outlaw Israeli or Hizbullah fire at civilian targets.
In the bizarre framework of a war fought according to a mutually agreed set of precise regulations, therefore, Hizbullah was within its rights to target Gen Gerstein and his convoy, but Israel would be flouting the understandings were it to hit back at targets in Lebanese towns and villages.
Even if the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted to repeat the kind of sustained bombardment undertaken by his predecessor, Mr Shimon Peres, three years ago, electoral considerations would necessitate a rethink.
Mr Peres staged his assault just weeks before elections, and when misdirected shelling killed some 100 Lebanese refugees who had taken shelter at a UN base, he earned not only international condemnation but deep anger among Israeli Arab voters, undermining his re-election campaign. Mr Netanyahu would be deeply unwilling to risk alienating voters by following a similarly risky route.
Gen Gerstein's funeral at Kibbutz Reshafim, attended by Mr Netanyahu and almost all of Israel's political and military leaders, therefore did not appear to mark a turning point in Israeli policy.
The man eulogised by his immediate commander, Gen Gabi Ashkenazi, as "one of Israel's finest ever field commanders", a cool-headed, smart, dedicated fighter "who always led from the front", will be replaced by another fighter in Israeli military green, in an army looking in vain to the politicians to extricate it from the quagmire of south Lebanon.
Mr Netanyahu says he will withdraw Israel's troops from the increasingly misnamed "security zone" in south Lebanon in about a year. Mr Ehud Barak, the leader of the opposition Labour Party who hopes to oust Mr Netanyahu as prime minister in May's elections, is even more precise. "Come back to me in June 2000," he brags - assuming he is prime minister, that is - "and we'll have the boys home, with no damage to our security."
The third major prime ministerial candidate, the centrist leader, Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, also exudes confidence in predicting that, under his stewardship, "a diplomatic solution" will be found, an innovative approach to stem the flow of Israeli soldiers' blood in south Lebanon's mini-war with the guerrillas of the Iranian-backed Hizbullah movement.
But most of the electorate is only too aware that there is no magic formula and that the only route to tranquillity between Israel and Lebanon runs via a third Middle East country, Syria.
President Hafez al-Assad of Syria, as resolutely determined as ever to regain the Golan Heights captured by Israel in 1967, has used the Lebanon frontier to maintain pressure on Israel, to deny it the luxury of peace. Hizbullah gets much of its weaponry via Damascus Airport, and it is able to target Israel's troops in the security zone only because Syria's 35,000 soldiers in Lebanon give it freedom of action.
In return for the Golan Heights, Syria would intervene to call a halt to Hizbullah's activities, Israel could safely withdraw to the international border, and the cycle of violence would be broken. But at a price that no Israeli government has yet publicly admitted a readiness to pay.