A mere six hours after Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, formally submitted his resignation, his defeated hardline predecessor, Mr Benjamin Net an yahu, last night announced his return to politics, and his prime ministerial candidacy.
"Hour after hour", a greyer, leaner Mr Netanyahu told a press conference in Jerusalem, "people are pleading with me to come back and help the country". Israel, he added, "is in a terrible state. We can't go on like this."
Under his leadership, he promised, concessions to the Palestinians would stop and yet the Palestinians would be deterred from violence, Israelis' sense of personal security would be restored, and a network of stable relationships would be forged with Israel's Arab neighbours.
For all the drama attending this declared return, however, and although Mr Netanyahu is up to 20 per cent ahead of Mr Barak in the polls, it is far from clear that, technically, he will be able to contest the next elections. By resigning his position, Mr Barak has paved the way for new prime ministerial elections in early February.
As things stand, only members of the 120-seat Knesset are eligible to compete for the post. It would require an amendment to one of Israel's Basic Laws for Mr Netanyahu - who gave up the Likud party leadership and resigned from the Knesset after losing the May 1999 elections to Mr Barak - to be permitted to run.
At his press conference last night, Mr Netanyahu appeared to eschew this option last. Instead, he is pinning his second political career on a second alternative: He urged his fellow Knesset members to continue the process that they began at the end of last month, and vote through legislation for the dissolving of parliament.
Such legislation, which could theoretically be approved in a matter of days, would see the holding of general elections - with the position of prime minister, and all the seats in parliament, up for grabs.
In such a scenario, Mr Netanyahu could compete first for the leadership of the Likud, and then battle Mr Barak for the post of prime minister.
In a direct appeal to Knesset members to adopt this course, Mr Netanyahu asserted them to "give the public the right to choose" the leadership it wanted.
Mr Barak had shocked the political establishment by announcing, on Saturday night, that he would be resigning yesterday. His declared aim was to "spare the country" a lengthy election campaign. , which had been likely to focus on a polling day sometime in late spring. His undeclared aim, most observers believe, is to prevent Mr Netanyahu from running against him.
As the logistics of Mr Netanyahu's possible prime ministerial bid play out, Mr Barak has at least spared himself one confrontation. Amid much rumbling from ill-prepared would-be rivals, his own Labour Party yesterday unanimously declared him its candidate for prime minister.
Another confrontation rumbled on, however. Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian man who, they said, was placing a roadside bomb near a settlement south of Jerusalem. And worryingly for Mr Barak, the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat - on whom the outgoing prime minister is now depending for a partnership to end the 10 weeks of Israeli-Palestinian violence, and some kind of accord to help him win re-election - noted said yesterday that peace negotiations would "now be frozen."