Thirteen years after Yasser Arafat issued a symbolic declaration of Palestinian statehood from exile in Algeria, the Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, yesterday stood at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly to pledge Israeli support for an independent Palestine.
"There is support for Palestinian independence, for a Palestinian state," Mr Peres said. "We want them to breathe freedom."
Back in the putative Palestine, however, Mr Arafat appeared to be facing something of a moment of truth, as he attempted to manoeuvre between Israeli and international demands that he crack down on terrorism, and his own militants' insistence on maintaining, or even escalating, attacks on Israeli targets.
His dilemma seems to have crystallised around the case of Mohammed Tawalbe (22), an Islamic Jihad extremist whose name appears at the very top of Israel's West Bank "wanted" list.
According to the Israelis, Tawalbe has trained at least 11 suicide bombers including his own brother, Murad, who changed his mind after being dispatched to Haifa with explosives earlier this year and turned himself in to the Israeli police.
Tawalbe was arrested in his home town of Jenin on Wednesday night by the forces of Jibril Rajoub, Mr Arafat's West Bank security chief. As news of his detention spread, thousands of angry locals converged on the town jail and a hand-grenade was thrown at the local governor's office.
By then, though, Tawalbe had been spirited away and jailed to the south, in Nablus. Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders say that his arrest underlines the appalling "collusion" between Mr Arafat's Palestinian Authority and Israel.
Sources close to Mr Arafat hint that Tawalbe was actually arrested for his own protection against continued Israeli attempt to kill him.
They also note that a top-level European Union delegation is due here this weekend, and that it would greatly benefit Mr Arafat's international image if he were seen to have jailed so prominent a militant, and hint that he might be freed soon after the EU leaders have gone.
However, unconfirmed Israeli reports suggested that Tawalbe had been freed last night in a capitulation to the militants. Israeli officials noted that in just such a capitulation, the Palestinian Authority gave in to angry demonstrators and backed away last week from an attempt to arrest another Islamic Jihad leader, Mohammed al-Hindi, in Gaza.
Mr Peres stressed in his UN speech yesterday that to smooth the path to Palestinian statehood, Mr Arafat's regime "must establish one authority over all arms, all armies and all use of arms". So long as terrorism persisted, he said, "Israel has no choice but to defend its people. Suicide bombers have no respect for life, their own or others."
Marwan Barghouti, a professed Arafat loyalist who has also openly defied the authority's ceasefire calls, asserted in an Israeli radio interview that were Israel to withdraw from all occupied territory, "all the factions. Hamas, the Jihad, Fatah, all of them" would halt attacks on Israel. But the only way to achieve that withdrawal, he argued in a separate interview, was to maintain the intifada.
Aides to Mr Arafat insist that were Israel to stop its "targeted killings" of intifada kingpins, he would have more public support to crack down on the militants himself.
The Israelis say they don't believe him. Israeli forces yesterday entered Palestinian territory in parts of Gaza and the West Bank to make arrests, and a Palestinian man was killed when Israeli tanks and other forces entered Gaza's Khan Younis refugee camp and destroyed homes in an area from which they said settlements had come under mortar fire.