An awful lot rode on the summit at Sharm al-Sheikh but, now that it has achieved a success of sorts, even more rides on whether it can be implemented.
Since, by general recognition, the Israelis got much more out of it than the Palestinians, that means whether Palestinian violence will come to an end or, to be more precise, whether Yasser Arafat can ensure that it does - and yesterday's fighting at Nablus will not help matters.
The Israelis contended that Arafat instigated and manipulated it all from the outset. That is a very partisan view. Yet the whole summit was premised on the assumption that, even if he didn't start it, he could certainly quell it. It is a huge burden on one man's shoulders.
Whether he can bear it is vital, not just for Israel/Palestine but for the whole region.
Emotionally and politically, the Middle East converges on Palestine; Palestine ramifies throughout the Middle East. That is the old-new lesson of the past two weeks.
And the Middle East order is in danger of massive convulsion. Everyone, implicitly at least, recognises that. There would have been no Sharm al-Sheikh were it otherwise; President Clinton would surely not, for the umpteenth time, have so brusquely interrupted the scheduled business of his high office.
Arafat is, in effect, a stalwart representative of the regional and international establishment. He is the chosen instrument of the peace-seeking, wholly dependent on US and Israeli favour.
Yet, at the same time, he is still in part what he always was, a revolutionary, the leader of a national liberation struggle. He cannot truly join the established order until the peace process is complete. He needs to use the weapons of struggle still available to him.
There is a continuous, sometimes outright, conflict between these two roles. And now his career, and perhaps his life, is on the line.
On the one hand he has committed himself on paper to halting the violence, essentially on Israel and America's behalf. He has done so with a view to resuming the peace process.
However, in his "revolutionary" self, does he really want to halt it?
This is because he has got so little in return. Can he really, people ask, sacrifice so much blood for some paltry diplomatic gain?
This is at a time when more and more Palestinians are saying that if the process is to resume at all, it must be on a new, more favourable basis.
Or, if he wants to, can he stop the violence? Immediately after Sharm al-Sheikh, local leaders expressed their anger and disappointment. These included not merely Hamas religious militants but his own followers, such as the Fatah chief in the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti, who said: "Arafat can give orders to the police but not to me and the people."
The revolutionary in Arafat may conclude that the only possible course is to give his followers their head. This, however, may lead before long to the Israeli reconquest of the territories and his own capture, exile or death.
For him to die a martyr would clearly be better than to die a traitor. And to die a traitor is very likely what would happen to him were he, in deference to Israel, Arab regimes and the US, to turn his police, previously engaged against the enemy, against his own people.
That is the Arafat and Palestinian dimension. On the wider Arab front, the regimes will breathe more easily again, at least for a while, if the intifada does cease. But, here again, does Arafat really want them to?
As the establishment figure, he is as corrupt and undemocratic as any of them but, as a residual revolutionary, he still has the power to shake them.
And the longer the violence goes on the more he will do so. If he wants the Israeli enemy to feel real pain, he wants his Arab friends to feel threatened. He wants them to go to the Arab summit conference tomorrow as frightened of their pro-Palestinian public as he can make them.
After all, Palestine encapsulates and exacerbates all the Arab people's manifold discontents.
Who, asked the pan-Arab newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, could have imagined, a mere fortnight ago, that two Saudis would be hijacking a plane to Baghdad to publicise their demand for social justice in the Kingdom and the removal of foreign troops?
"Change is coming to the Arab world. Ordinary people are beginning to rebel against the humiliation in which they live. This change was bound to start sometime, after the corruption of the regimes broke all records, the republics [like Syria] turned into hereditary monarchies, and the commanders of Arab armies devoted themselves to self-enrichment", the paper said.
IF THE regimes are in trouble so is the US. As Arabs see it, the US has clearly failed in its attempt to decouple Palestine from the rest of the Arab world. "The US is panicking," says al- Quds, "because the regional order it put in place after the Gulf war is threatened with collapse. That would risk oil being freed from US control, and democratic regimes coming to power that put their people's interests above the US's."
It may seem absurd that so tired and deeply vulnerable a figure as Arafat should have influence so far beyond his pathetic patch of sovereign Palestinian soil. "What is this man," asked an Israeli newspaper, "who can drive the whole region, indeed the whole world, crazy? But if only as the supreme embodiment of his cause, as Mr Palestine, extraordinary influence he undoubtedly has."
Many Israelis are saying that Arafat is no longer a real partner for peace; that it would be better to wait for the emergence of a new leader they could do business with. Some even suggest that once the Palestinians enjoy the benefits of democracy that will happen as a matter of course.
What this argument ignores is that it is precisely because Arafat, for all his revolutionary, trouble-making capacity, is so very much like the rest of the existing Arab order, so undemocratic and corrupt, that he has gone as far as he has in seeking peace on Israeli terms.
It also ignores the fact that the new Palestinian intifada, and the street protests which are its echo reverberating round the whole region, is part of a pent-up popular craving for self-expression. Any new leaderships, Arab and Palestinian, it eventually throws up will almost certainly be far less accommodating than the present ones.
For Israel and the US, the only thing worse than trying to make peace with Arafat would be trying to make it without him.