Should he or shouldn't he have fired? That was the question obsessing Israel yesterday, the day after a soldier, Assaf Miara, narrowly escaped from a mob of stone-throwing Palestinian students outside Ramallah in the West Bank in what some described as an attempted lynching.
The assault on the car carrying Mr Miara and a Jerusalem man, both of whom emerged with only slight injuries, was filmed by several camera crews. The impact of the footage prompted the Israeli government to issue new preconditions for further scheduled territorial concessions to the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat.
Mr Arafat yesterday rejected the new conditions, which included a demand that his Palestinian Authority "stop incitement and violence". More significantly, the United States also rejected the Israeli move, with the State Department declaring that the Wye peace deal "should be implemented as signed".
And while the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, was adamant that he would not sanction a further West Bank withdrawal, due in a fortnight, unless the new demands were met, government sources suggested that the bark might prove worse than the bite - that the Prime Minister had to talk tough ahead of a vote scheduled for next Monday, and now postponed, which might have led to the collapse of his coalition and the dissolution of the Knesset.
Palestinian protests led to another day of clashes with soldiers and police in East Jerusalem yesterday. The protests were focused on the demand for the release of "security prisoners" by Israel and exacerbated by Wednesday's murder of a Palestinian street-cleaner, apparently by a Jewish militant.
But the violence, and the prospect of a US-Israeli confrontation over the government's latest demands from Mr Arafat, were overshadowed in Israel by the debate regarding Mr Miara's behaviour.
Senior army officers said that the soldier, who was armed but whose M-16 rifle (contrary to standing orders for the West Bank) was not loaded, had "shamed" his uniform by not firing into the air to disperse his attackers, or even firing at them.
Mr Netanyahu appeared to share this assessment. He claimed that the attack was "organised, orchestrated . . . and fomented by the Palestinian Authority", and noted that, when lives were in danger, soldiers had "the full right, even the obligation" to do what was necessary to stop their attackers.
Amid army preparations to court-martial Mr Miara (19), whose gun was seized by his attackers and later returned to a Palestinian police station and thence to Israel, his mother Lisa insisted that his behaviour had been entirely appropriate.
If her son was ultimately jailed by the army for his conduct, she added, she would "use all my power" to extricate him from the army, and move overseas with him and his younger brother, who is about to be conscripted.
The widow of a soldier killed by a mob in a Palestinian refugee camp during the Intifada sided with Mr Miara, as did another Israeli soldier who was the victim of a similar attack in Ramallah four years ago.