ISRAEL: In the days and weeks leading up to yesterday's Arab summit in Beirut, Israel resisted heavy pressure to allow the Palestinian Authority President to attend.
The UN, the EU and, most significantly, the Bush administration wanted Mr Yasser Arafat to be allowed to leave Ramallah.
But the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, insisted Mr Arafat was doing nothing to thwart terrorism and the travel ban on him would not be relaxed until he changed that stance.
For the Israeli government, last night's suicide bombing in Netanya was the most bitter proof of the point. While his own loyalists, from the Fatah faction of the PLO, have been playing an ever-greater role in recent attacks on Israeli targets, and despite the ceaseless efforts of the US peace envoy, Gen Anthony Zinni, Mr Arafat had failed to do what Israel pleaded with him to do: issue a firm, Arabic ceasefire call. And, as significantly, behind the scenes he had failed to convey the message to the bombers and the gunmen that the attacks should halt.
Last Thursday, when a Fatah-affiliated suicide bomber blew himself up in downtown Jerusalem, killing three Israeli civilians, Mr Sharon chose not to order the kind of automatic military response that had followed previous such bombings - retaliation that has included air raids of police stations and other PA installations. In part, this was in deference to Gen Zinni, who professed himself optimistic about the prospects for a ceasefire.
As news of the Netanya bombing broke last night, however, the initial response from Israeli government officials was that there would be "no such restraint" this time. The toll of the dead and injured was too high. Mr Arafat, through his inaction, was demonstrating contempt for Gen Zinni's ceasefire efforts. And the timing and location of the attack - on the first evening of Passover, among hotel guests gathered together to celebrate the "festival of freedom" - was too painful and acute.
That the fundamentalists of Hamas, rather than Fatah, claimed responsibility for the attack cut no ice, since Mr Arafat is blamed for refusing to smash the Islamic extremist groups. The Israeli Internal Security Minister, Mr Uzi Landau, said bluntly: "We have to systematically destroy the terrorist infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority."
Earlier this month, in the largest Israeli military operation of the 18-month intifada, thousands of Israeli soldiers entered Palestinian cities and refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, moving deep into Palestinian-held territory, killing an estimated 150 Palestinians - most in gun battles, but many civilians too -- and briefly detaining hundreds more.
When the troops pulled out, amid criticism from the US and elsewhere, their military commanders and political bosses pronounced the operation a success. But privately, military officials acknowledged that the most dangerous intifada activists - those who recruit the suicide bombers and gunmen, and build the explosive devices - had escaped the army raids.
The question last night, in the wake of the privately acknowledged failure of that massive military onslaught, is what kind of response Mr Sharon and his ministers might now order.
And, most specifically, whether prominent figures among the Palestinian leadership might now be targeted.
Israeli officials say constantly that they believe one of Mr Arafat's West Bank chiefs, Marwan Barghouti, is directly involved in orchestrating attacks. For that matter, Mr Sharon repeatedly cites Mr Arafat himself as the head of "a coalition of terror".
The conventional wisdom has it that Mr Sharon has privately assured President Bush that he will not directly target Mr Arafat - not, at least, until the Americans have completed whatever they have in mind for Iraq's Saddam Hussein - for fear of prompting a colossal escalation in intifada conflict, perhaps even a regional confrontation.
In the wake of last night's attack - with so many more dead civilians and screaming fleets of ambulances again rushing dozens of wounded Israelis to hospital - it is far from certain that such assurances will still hold.