As Israel marked the September 11th anniversary with memorial concerts, exhibitions and candle-lighting ceremonies, its leaders strenuously highlighted the parallels they saw between Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian regime.
Palestinian Authority (PA) officials, by contrast, mixed expressions of condolence for the lost American lives with assertions that their people were also victims of September 11th, while the Hamas spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, heaped criticism on the US for its "aggression" against the Arab peoples this past year.
Israel heightened its ongoing security alert and called in additional air force reservists in fear of airborne attack, but officials made clear that this was not in response to any specific threats.
They also revealed that Israel had been covertly monitoring the security precautions taken by foreign airlines that fly into Tel Aviv, that it was developing technology to protect civilian airliners against rocket attack, and that it planned to introduce a cockpit device that would guarantee early warning if an approaching plane had been commandeered.
Speaking at an official ceremony held in his office, Mr Sharon declared that "the suicide bombers of bin Laden", just like "the terrorism of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Tanzim and Hizballah, the terrorism engineered by the PA and the terrorist networks directed by Iran, were all inseparable components of that same 'axis of evil' which threatened peace and stability everywhere in the world".
His chief of staff, General Moshe Ya'alon, went further. Israel's current reoccupation of Palestinian cities had drawn no protest from the Bush Administration, he argued, because the US had stopped blaming both sides for the Mid-East deadlock and instead had come to regard "the conflict with the Palestinians as an inseparable part of the global war on terrorism". This change of stance, he said, had "great influence" on the army's "freedom of activity". On Palestinian Television, a spokesman for the PA's information ministry declared that the Palestinian people had been the greatest victims of September 11th - echoing remarks made on Monday by Mr Arafat, who charged that Israel had exploited the 9/11 attacks to try to brand him and the cause he led as terrorism, "although we are the victims of terrorism". Yesterday, Mr Arafat highlighted that he was "the first to give blood" to show the depth of his sympathy with the US.