Way back in the mid-1990s, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, once mused publicly that he saw no reason for Israel to continue to maintain a presence at Netzarim, an isolated Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, home to just a few dozen families, protected at considerable cost and amid considerable tension by a large contingent of soldiers.
On Saturday at Netzarim, as most of the watching world has seen by now, 12-year-old Mohammed al-Durra died in his father's arms, their plaintive pleas for a halt to the gunfire that swirled all around them fatally unheeded.
Yesterday, at Netzarim, clashes again raged all day: there were low-level scuffles between Palestinian youths and the soldiers; intermittent exchanges of gunfire; moments of triumph for the Palestinians as a handful of youths scaled a disused water tower and pulled down an Israeli flag; an escalation of force from the Israelis as a helicopter gunship roared overhead, and let fly a missile that tore a chunk out of a building. There is every expectation that the clashes will resume again today.
What is lacking, ominously lacking, in this intensifying conflict, is any comprehension from either side about the motives of the other. Palestinian and Israeli Arab spokespersons profess bafflement at what they are calling the exaggerated Israeli response to protests sparked by opposition leader Mr Ariel Sharon's walkabout on Temple Mount last Thursday.
Israeli government officials profess bafflement as to why the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, would decline to publicly urge his people to stay off the streets, his policemen to stop firing at Israeli targets, when a permanent peace agreement had seemed just around the corner - a deal under which, inevitably, Israel would be pulling out of trouble spots like Netzarim.
And in the absence of understanding, conspiracy theories circulate. In some Palestinian accounts, Mr Sharon's visit was privately co-ordinated with Mr Barak, as a means of triggering the explosion that would free the Israeli Prime Minister from the need to compromise with the Palestinians in a peace deal. The next phase of the partnership: the formation of a Barak-Sharon emergency unity government, which will spare Mr Barak a general election and give Mr Sharon a career revival as the prime minister's number two.
On the Israeli side, the most prevalent theory is that Mr Arafat, only too aware that his intransigence at July's Camp David peace summit had cost him considerable international support, is carefully monitoring the TV footage of his people's suffering, and enjoying the expressions of Arab and world sympathy.
His choice now, runs this thinking, is whether to return to the negotiating table with strengthened global backing or to unilaterally declare Palestinian statehood in the midst of the mayhem.
Theorising aside, the five days of clashes have already changed one reality - the nature of the relationship between Israel's five million-strong Jewish majority and its one million Arab citizens.
Mr Hasham Mahmeed, an Israeli Knesset member, reflected popular sentiment in his community when complaining last night at the ferocity with which police have put down their street protests these past two days. "They are firing rubber bullets at people with no weapons in their hands," he exclaimed.
"Do you know what this is doing to young Arabs who dreamed of being genuine Israelis?"
Equally, Mr Barak has resorted to issuing statements stressing that most Arabs are loyal citizens, at a time when the intensity of the protests is effectively closing off parts of northern Israel from the rest of the country for hours at a time.