That is why in Washington, London or Paris, governments must sweat to build political consensus for going to war, while in Jerusalem, war resolutions enjoy wide parliamentary support. Israeli governments find it hard to pass peace treaties through the Knesset. That's where political difficulty lies.

Israel's military operation against Hamas in Gaza, now in its 10th day, is an excellent example of this rule. The war enjoys strong public support among Israel's Jewish majority. Only Israel's Arabs, identifying with their Palestinian brothers, and the far political left, which is all but pacifist, have protested against it. All the rest have united behind the government, including the more established left. The novelist Amos Oz, a moral compass for Israel's peace camp (and an eventual critic of the 2006 war in Lebanon), gave his blessing to the war.

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John McCain visited back in March but did not make much of a splash. Barack Obama by contrast, touring Israel on Wednesday, received rock-star treatment from the media. Israel's top politicians, immersed as they are in political crisis and expecting a leadership change following Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's corruption case, scrambled for a slot in Obama's 24-hour schedule.

Obama's itinerary included much of the usual for high-level foreign VIPs: visiting the Holocaust Memorial and the Western Wall in Jerusalem, calling on President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and making a quick visit to the Palestinian Authority's Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. He also took a helicopter trip to Sderot, the border town near Gaza that has been hit by thousands of Palestinian rockets in recent years. Now Sderot is quiet, thanks to a cease-fire with Hamas, but Obama had his own near encounter with local terrorism. Several hours before his arrival on Tuesday, a Palestinian bulldozer operator ran over passersby near Obama's hotel in Jerusalem. Two dozen people were wounded before the perpetrator was shot and killed.

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When I grew up near Tel Aviv in the 1970s, Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza were an indispensable part of the environment. Many of them worked in construction sites, laboring to turn my hometown's strawberry fields into a modern suburb. Others stood every morning in line at the town's highway intersection -- a common sight in Israeli cities then -- waiting for their chance to get a day job. Luckier Palestinians got jobs filling gas at service stations, washing dishes in restaurants and bars, or fixing cars. They served Israeli customers, and were even given Hebrew aliases by their employers. Thus, Ghazi became "Roni" and Mustafa turned into "Moti." Despite a class system problematic in its own right, many of these workers experienced at least a measure of integration.

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Strategically, the Gaza takeover marked a clear victory for Iran and its allies in the Arab world, and another setback for the pro-American, moderate Arab nations willing to compromise with Israel. After winning the Palestinian parliamentary election in January 2006, Hamas grew ever stronger in the Gaza Strip as violence increased between Hamas and Fatah. Under Saudi pressure, both factions eventually agreed to form a "unity government," but it couldn't hold. Violence resumed, and Hamas proved itself a more effective force than Fatah, whose commanders fled Gaza, leaving their soldiers alone in the final battle, which lasted barely three days.

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The severe criticisms about his leadership and Olmert's refusal to resign are, of course, making headlines in Israel. But the Winograd Commission did not criticize only the top leaders and their decision-making process. It criticized the very logic of going to war at all, without proper goals, and without sufficient operational plans and training. It cast serious doubts on the Israeli reflex of retaliation and reliance on military force.

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Israelis were surprised by the visible inability of their military, considered the strongest and most sophisticated in the Middle East, to defeat a guerrilla army of a few thousand fighters. Having become accustomed to quick victories against Arab armies, as in the wars of the past, the current reality in Lebanon has been unprecedented and unexpected.

Israelis were astonished by Hezbollah's seemingly intact ability to hit northern Israel with a daily barrage of 100-200 rockets, holding about a million people in shelters, regardless of what the Israel Defense Force was doing to the Lebanese. And they were shocked by the government's incompetence in dealing with the plight of the Israeli civilian population in the rear. The fact that Lebanon's civilians have been hit much harder was hardly comforting.

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Dayan died in 1981, but had he lived today, he would undoubtedly have repeated his age-old analysis. This summer started out as the best one that Israel has had since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada six years ago. Tourists filled Tel Aviv beaches, the stock market hit its all-time high, and the government, flush with unexpected budgetary fat, lowered taxes and discussed cutting defense and beefing up welfare programs that had been cut in previous years.

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War is back, and it has put Israel's new government to a tough leadership test. Both Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and defense minister Amir Peretz are new to their jobs and, unlike their predecessors, lack military experience. The public is carefully evaluating their handling of the crisis: Are they capable of defusing it and restoring the relative calm that Israel has enjoyed in recent months, or will the situation deteriorate further? Can Olmert and Peretz, despite their civilian background, give the public a sense of security and rein in their generals? With Sharon in power, Israelis knew they had a seasoned battlefield commander at the helm. The new team has yet to prove itself.

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Yet "the big bang," as Israelis have termed their political rearrangement, has left the public indifferent. Despite a string of surprising events -- the incapacitation of Ariel Sharon, the popular prime minister, the Hamas victory in the Palestinian election -- the campaign never caught fire with the public, and voter turnout was the lowest in any parliamentary election in Israel's history. The big surprise of Election Day was the success of the new Pensioners Party, which attracted many young voters disillusioned with a "corrupt system" where "all politicians are the same." The Pensioners, led by a former spymaster with a colorful history, flew below the radar of pollsters and journalists to win seven seats in the 120-member Knesset.

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Peres' gloomy prophecy came true on Jan. 25, when Hamas won a landslide victory in the Palestinian legislative election, ending four decades of exclusive rule by Fatah. Despite the fact that it is only a quasi state, with most of its putative territory under Israeli control, the Palestinian Authority put on a show of democracy unprecedented in the Arab world. For the first time ever in the region, the masses voted down the ruling party.

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Concluding his fifth year as prime minister and approaching the age of 78, Sharon was on his way to a third electoral landslide in Israel's coming March 28 parliamentary election. The adoring public supported his efforts to maintain business as usual, after his sudden hospitalization for a stroke on Dec. 18, and prayed for his survival.

On Thursday, he was scheduled to undergo heart catheterization in order to prevent another stroke. But he had collapsed the night before from a brain hemorrhage, and was taken half-conscious to a Jerusalem hospital. Minutes after his arrival at the E.R., his powers were stripped away and given to his deputy, Ehud Olmert. True to form, the Sharon period ended in drama, this time in a personal life-and-death battle.

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In an unprecedented development, Israelis will have to pick their next leadership from among three contending parties: Sharon's new and yet nameless party; Labor, led by newcomer Amir Peretz, Israel's trade union boss; and the incumbent Likud, where no less than seven candidates aspire to head the party, with former premier Binyamin ("Bibi") Netanyahu leading the pack. Recent polls have given the edge to the popular Sharon, but the race has just begun, and Israeli election campaigns are notorious roller coasters, with the new, three-way race creating even more uncertainty.

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The first day of forced evacuation -- the settlers were allowed to leave on their own until Wednesday -- went better than planned. The massive concentration of force decided the battle even before it began, and both settlers and soldiers have shown remarkable restraint. There was almost no physical violence, only verbal abuse by angry settlers, who equated the government's forces to Nazis deporting Jews to their death in the Holocaust.

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Driving up the hills to Jerusalem, with its heavily religious population, one sees an abundance of cars with orange stripes tied to their radio antennas and external mirrors. Down in secular Tel Aviv, there are more and more blue stripes. The war of colors is the public expression of a deeper debate, centering on Israel's direction and the ability of its democracy to absorb an act as deeply divisive as Sharon's disengagement.

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When Israeli Jews mention "demography," what they really mean is their fear of becoming a minority in the land, given the Arab population's higher fertility rate. Public threats by their adversaries, that "the Palestinian womb" will eventually decide the decades-old contest for Palestine, are fueling this fear. The recent intifada, the four-year Palestinian-Israeli war of attrition, convinced many Israelis that their country's future as a Jewish state, as opposed to a binational one, is dependent upon winning the demographic war. Even die-hard right-wingers, former believers in "greater Israel," now advocate partition along ethnic lines, with a large Jewish majority on the Israeli side. And in recent years the "demographic left" has grown stronger, certainly compared to Israel's shrinking ideological left. In the end, it seems, births have helped the Palestinian cause more than bombs and bullets.

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"The four-way summit" convened last Tuesday at the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, at the tip of the Sinai Peninsula, followed the same old script. The host, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and his distinguished guests -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and King Abdullah of Jordan -- played their roles exactly as planned. Abbas and Sharon declared a cease-fire after more than four years of Palestinian-Israeli fighting, which cost the lives of thousands, but ended in a draw. They shook hands for the photographers to show the end of the intifada, and spoke about a new chapter in their two peoples' troubled relations. Sharon put security on top of his agenda, demanding an active Palestinian fight against terrorist groups. Abbas called for movement on the "road map," the plan for Palestinian statehood, asking Sharon to support him by releasing old prisoners serving life sentences in Israel for their past involvement in deadly terror attacks.

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Indeed, in recent weeks the pieces of the political puzzle appear to have been arranged in Sharon's favor. His archenemy, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, has died and been replaced by the moderate Mahmoud Abbas, aka Abu Mazen. Sharon's indispensable international backer, President George W. Bush, has been reelected. And most important, Sharon has reasserted his political control at home. He formed a new coalition with the left-leaning Labor Party, headed by his old friend Shimon Peres. Increasing numbers of Israelis believe that he will fulfill his pledge to withdraw from all of Gaza and four settlements in the northern West Bank, slated for July 2005. The Palestinian intifada has all but run its course, while the Israeli economy is rebounding from a recession to renewed growth and an all-time stock market high.

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Sharon's original timeline was very upbeat. He wanted to pass the referendum and present the plan for Cabinet approval on Sunday, then make a triumphant trip to Washington next week. He planned to address the annual conference of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, along with his great friend Bush. There could not possibly be a better stage for an Israeli leader than during an American election year when the incumbent president craves Jewish support. Israeli officials proposed a Sharon appearance before a joint session of Congress. Alas, the prime minister had to call off the visit. Less than a month after his most successful encounter ever with Bush, he has nothing new to tell him.

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Israelis took the news of the Gaza operation with mixed feelings. While having zero sympathy for the killed sheik, who had been a quadriplegic since childhood and had spent years in Israeli jails, many Israelis fear the inevitable Palestinian revenge. In many Israeli homes, parents are telling their children to avoid buses and crowded public places that might be prone to Palestinian suicide attacks. True to form, Yassin's comrades pledged to retaliate fiercely. Israeli officials responded with their customary comments, predicting a mixture of short-term escalation with long-term weakening of Hamas.

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