But by alienating Obama, mainly with that Holocaust horror show he put on at the AIPAC conference, Netanyahu has probably damaged his ability to go to war against the Islamic republic. The administration doesn’t trust him, doesn’t like him, doesn’t agree with him and doesn’t support him on a war that the president described publicly and pointedly as one that could cost American lives.

Veteran Israeli peace activist and writer Uri Avnery noted: “Not since Eisenhower was president has Israel ever gone to war without explicit, prior American approval.” Pissing off America while preparing for war is terrible statesmanship for an Israeli prime minister; it’s also lousy politics. Israelis, for all their grumbling about Obama, consider U.S. support second only to their country’s own military power as a vital national security asset. Furthermore, poll after poll shows they much prefer America’s air force, not Israel’s lesser one, to try to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Netanyahu came home to charges of fear-mongering from the media and center-left opposition. “Netanyahu and his government have to stop these hysterical analogies with Iran,” said Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni, adding that they were making Israel, not Iran, the focus of the world’s worries. Channel Two political correspondent Rina Matzliach said that while harping on the Holocaust was a sure winner with AIPAC, it “didn’t help the prime minister overseas, and caused a certain discomfort among the public here.”

Netanyahu overplayed his hand in Washington last week, and now, having likened the Iranian threat to the Nazi threat and having vowed before AIPAC, America and the world to stop it, he finds himself more isolated internationally than ever.

Why did he do it? Because as much as American liberals are put off by Netanyahu, he’s got American neoconservatives, evangelicals, Israel lobbyists and other nationalist hawks eating out of his hand. If he’d had two Muslim-bashing Republicans instead of two Democrats in the White House during his tenure as prime minister, by now Netanyahu might be building settlements on the moon.

“My friends, 2012 is not 1944. The American government is different. You heard it in President Obama’s speech yesterday,” he told 13,000 AIPAC delegates, including what he described as “over half of the Congress.” He’d just held up photocopies of two letters the American Jewish Congress had sent to the U.S. War Department in 1944, imploring it to bomb Auschwitz, and then he quoted the War Department’s refusal, stressing the department’s point that bombing Auschwitz “might even provoke more vindictive action by the Germans.” Even on television, there seemed a shocked hush in the convention hall.

The Israeli prime minister goes to the White House to try to get Obama on his side for a war on Iran, and a few hours later he gives a speech to half the world about how Israel can’t trust anybody but itself, and pulls out two extraordinarily embarrassing U.S. letters from 1944 to illustrate.

“Everyone understood that he didn’t bring in two letters from 70 years ago to make the point that they’re irrelevant,” wrote Nahum Barnea, the country’s most prominent journalist, in the Yediot Aharonot daily. “The message went over loud and clear: Iran is Nazi Germany, Bushehr is Auschwitz, Israel is on its way to the Holocaust, and the U.S. administration continues to stand by and watch.”

Amazing.  But was it any more amazing than Netanyahu’s reproachful, televised lecture to a silently suffering Obama in the White House last May, when he sought to foil a move to restart peace talks with the Palestinians, meanwhile misrepresenting the president’s plan to his face?

Bibi’s hazing of presidents didn’t begin with Obama; after his first White House meeting with Bill Clinton in 1996, the president was later quoted by his Mideast envoy Aaron David Miller as having said about his visitor from Jerusalem: “Who the fuck does he think he is?” Clinton asked. “Who’s the fucking superpower here?”

In another spat with Clinton during a visit to Washington, the Israeli newspapers bannered the prime minister’s private boast of his ability to use Congress as leverage: “I’ll set this town on fire!”

At the start of another trip to talk with Clinton, Netanyahu made it a point to pay his first respects to Jerry Falwell, who at the time was distributing a video accusing Clinton of selling drugs and being an accomplice to murder. “Benjamin Netanyahu is the Ronald Reagan of Israel!” Falwell told a Washington ballroom crowd of pro-Israel hawks when the prime minister made his entrance.

Netanyahu’s American roots run deep. In the late 1930s, his father, Benzion, was secretary in the U.S. to Vladimir Jabotinsky, the ideologue of maximalist Zionism, then gathering American support for the movement in Palestine. Convincing the United States that it has the same interests and enemies as Israel was Benzion Netanyahu’s approach 75 years ago, and it’s still his son’s approach today. With post-9/11 Republicans and AIPAC-trained Democrats, he can be frank; with more liberal interlocutors, he uses other methods.

Netanyahu tipped his hand in 2001 when, during a condolence visit to a family of West Bank settlers hit by terror attacks, he held forth on how he’d manipulated the Clinton administration, not knowing that the TV camera was on.

“I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move in the right direction … They won’t get in our way,” he said. While maintaining that “80 percent of Americans support us,” he said Clinton had been “radically pro-Palestinian,” so he had to marshal all his will and cunning to gain what seemed to the Americans an innocuous guarantee regarding the peace talks with the Palestinians. But with that guarantee, he told the family, “I actually put an end to the Oslo Accord.”

He didn’t actually end it, but he certainly slowed it to a virtual halt; the end came later. Now he’s marshaling all his will and cunning to get a Democratic president with views very similar to Clinton’s to either stay out of his way on Iran, or, better yet, do his bidding. This Israeli prime minister still thinks he’s the superpower when talking to the man in the White House, and he evidently figures that that’s going to bring him closer to getting rid of Iran’s nuclear installations.

What can explain Benjamin Netanyahu’s behavior? Only a hubris that knows no bounds.

What’s more, signs are that he doesn’t have the Israeli public behind him for a unilateral attack on Iran, and his military/intelligence chiefs, along with the great majority of his cabinet ministers, are showing no eagerness to board the war train. Just three weeks ago Israel seemed to be leaning hard toward war. Since then, though, there’s been a softening of Israel’s posture (if not Netanyahu’s) – due to the scandals, rising American opposition to a solo Israeli attack, and the sinking in to the public that the war they’ve been hearing about for years may actually be at hand.

So the leverage Netanyahu purports to wield over Obama – a readiness to attack Iran in the coming months unless he is satisfied that the president will do so himself by an acceptable deadline – may not be all it seems. It’s questionable whether the Israeli leader, whatever his intentions, has the necessary domestic backing to start such a daunting war in the near future, especially with the president promising repeatedly that if all else fails, America will do the job.

In his AIPAC speech, Obama said the best approach is to “Speak softly. Carry a big stick.” Netanyahu, given his diminished leadership stature and the fretful mood at home, could be doing just the opposite.

On the weekend that Netanyahu left for the U.S., the top story in Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest selling newspaper, was built around an exhaustive interview with Uzi Arad, who was Netanyahu’s most loyal lieutenant and head of the National Security Council until he was forced out a year ago. Arad describes a prime minister’s bureau in Jerusalem brimming with intrigues, where aides scare the boss about the supposed schemes of their rivals – “and Netanyahu is easy to scare,” says Arad. He goes on to say that Sara Netanyahu accused him of being an “informer,” and complained to him through a prime ministerial aide that his secretary was a “leftist.”

In the following edition of Yediot, Nahum Barnea, co-author of the story and the country’s most prominent journalist, said that during the series of interviews with Arad, what troubled him was “essentially one question: Is Netanyahu, as revealed in this interview, a man whom Israelis can trust with the decision of whether to attack Iran or not?”

Netanyahu replied to Arad’s charges in lordly fashion, citing the proverb: “A man shall not be judged on words spoken in time of distress.” To this, Barnea wrote: “But a man shall be judged on weakness of character, on the panic that strikes him every time his wife gets upset, on an absence of leadership, on hypocrisy and lack of credibility. These are the issues that should worry every [Israeli] on the way to a decision on Iran.”

Amir Oren, national security columnist for Ha’aretz, agreed, arguing that in view of Arad’s “proximity to the events and his reliability,” his story indicates “that Israel, on the verge of an adventurous war, is in untrustworthy hands.”

On the same day that Yediot published Arad’s revelations, Ha’aretz’s lead story was that Netanyahu had been questioned for hours by the powerful state comptrollers’ office over the scandal known as “Bibi-Tours,” in which the Netanyahus allegedly took extravagant trips abroad on the tab of the prime minister’s acquaintances and donors. As in past entanglements, Netanyahu said politically motivated journalists and other enemies cooked the whole thing up.

The Arad and Bibi-Tours affairs come less than two weeks after the “Eshel affair,” in which Netanyahu blamed three top aides for going first to law enforcement instead of to him with a secretary’s accusations of sexual harassment against his chief of staff (and his wife’s close confidant), Natan Eshel. The three reportedly said law enforcement authorities instructed them to keep it secret from their boss for fear he would tell Eshel and undermine the investigation. In a public statement upon Eshel’s resignation under censure, which he tendered to avoid prosecution, Netanyahu praised him for his “dedicated service.”

The character issue – Netanyahu’s duplicity, disloyalty, arrogance and rashness, as testified to by numerous former colleagues and supporters – went a long way toward losing him the 1999 election after three years as prime minister. During that term, cabinet minister Dan Meridor said upon quitting his post that Netanyahu had fostered a “culture of lies.” Cabinet minister Benny Begin (son of Menachem Begin) said Netanyahu was “shameless” in his dishonesty. (Meridor and Begin, however, are ministers in the current cabinet.)

Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, military chief of staff during most of Netanyahu’s first term, said upon retiring from duty and entering politics that Netanyahu was “a danger to Israel.” He and another cabinet exile, ex-defense minister Yitzhak Mordechai, said they’d had to rein Netanyahu in from undertaking untold “adventures” – just as retired Mossad chief Meir Dagan said he and other military/intelligence chiefs had to do with Netanyahu (and his alter ego Defense Minister Ehud Barak) during the current term.

Now the character issue is dogging the prime minister again. As the Arad affair echoed in the media, I asked Lipkin-Shahak, who opposes a strike on Iran, if he trusted Netanyahu to act wisely in what is being called the most fateful a decision an Israeli prime minister has ever had to make.

“I think Netanyahu, as he’s been depicted lately, is still a danger – in many respects,” said Lipkin-Shahak over the phone. “Time after time he shows himself to be someone who has difficulty making a decision, as a prime minister who gives in to pressure. He used to say that he remembered seeing the British soldiers in their red berets when he was a child in Jerusalem. The British left Jerusalem before he was born. I’m not comfortable with a prime minister like that.”

Lipkin-Shahak added that to the best of his knowledge, the current chiefs of the military and intelligence services oppose an attack on Iran – which has been reported repeatedly about the heads of the military, military intelligence, Mossad and Shin Bet, and has never denied by any of them.

This brings up the other crucial weakness in Netanyahu’s march to war that’s been coming into focus: The public doesn’t want Israel to attack Iran on its own. A poll published last week by University of Maryland Prof. Shibley Telhami and the Dahaf Institute, Israel’s leading polling agency, found that 81 percent of the public opposes an Israeli strike on Iran without American support. The reason is clear: fear of retaliation. Fifty-one percent of those polled thought the ensuing war would last months or years, compared to 37 percent who expected it to last weeks or days. Sixty-eight percent thought Hezbollah, with its estimated 50,000 missiles, would join Iran in striking back at Israel.

For the last few years, this country has been almost free of terror, while the economy, at least for the top half of the population, has never been better – and Israelis are in no hurry to give that up. Military intelligence chief Aviv Kochavi made headlines recently with his statement that 200,000 enemy missiles are pointed at this country at any given time; the message seems to have sunk in.

In November, after hearing an estimate from somewhere that 50,000 Israelis would be killed in the blowback from an attack on Iran, Defense Minister Barak tried to calm the public in a radio interview. “There is no scenario for 50,000 dead, or 5,000 dead — and if everyone stays in their homes, maybe not even 500 dead.” he said. No sigh of relief was heard over the land.

Among the 35,000 residents of Dimona, the Negev desert town near Israel’s nuclear reactor, which is a natural target for Iranian retaliation, a lot of people are naturally worried about the day after an Israeli attack.

“It’ll be the end of the world. Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas, everybody will be against us,” said Meir Turgeman, an elderly man sitting in the city square.

Dimona’s mayor, Meir Cohen, supports an attack if sanctions and diplomacy don’t stop Iran’s nuclear program, and when I asked if he was concerned about the consequences for his town, he replied: “I think that today, all of Israel is one big target.” Not much relief there, either.

In his remarks at the White House before meeting with Obama on Monday, Netanyahu emphasized Israel’s absolute right to be “master of its own fate” – i.e. to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities even if America disapproved. That evening, in his speech to the AIPAC convention, the prime minister rolled out yet another Holocaust analogy to drive home his point. “Never again will the Jewish people be powerless and supplicants for our fate and our very survival. Never again.”

Netanyahu has been talking like this his whole life; he was bred on this worldview, it’s in his genes. Israel’s prime minister is a true believer, and if he could start a war with Iran just on his own ideological zeal, the attack might have been launched a while ago. But he will need a lot more than zeal to overcome the opposition of his war council, of many in his cabinet, of the U.S., of the rest of the world, and finally of his own people.

It would take an amazingly strong leader to pull that off, and Bibi Netanyahu does not fit the description, to say the least. Which means there’s reason for hope after all.

While all this seems true, it doesn’t necessarily tell you which of them is more determined to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, and Ha’aretz is reporting (here and here) that U.S. officials say Barak is the one. As National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon and National Intelligence Agency chief James Clapper arrived in Jerusalem this week to press the case against an Israeli attack, Ha’aretz reported:

The Americans are particularly worried about the hawkish line that Defense Minister Ehud Barak has adopted on the matter. They apparently have the impression, however, that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has yet to come to a final stance on the dispute.

Knowing where Netanyahu and Barak stand on the Israeli political spectrum is little help in gauging which one will be more in favor of the military option when decision time comes, which could be as early as spring. Their war records as prime minister, their character, their readiness to withstand American pressure, and the power relationship between them are much stronger indicators of what they will do on Iran than their views on West Bank settlements.

For all their militant rhetoric, neither one ever started a war from the prime minister’s office, which was held by Netanyahu for six years (1996-99 and 2009-present), and by Barak for a year-and-a-half (1999-2001). Both followed standard-issue, tough Israeli policy on Palestinian terror, but the most notable military move by either one was Barak’s withdrawal of armed forces from Lebanon. (The most enthusiastic warrior of 21stcentury Israel was the most dovish P.M. of all on the Palestinian question: Ehud Olmert, who in three years fought Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and in between bombed Syria’s upstart nuclear reactor.)

Judging by their records, then, neither Netanyahu nor Barak is eager to attack a foreign country. But the specter of a regime as radical as Iran’s closing in on nuclear capability is something Israel has never faced, so past performance counts for only so much.

As for which man is more likely to stand up to pressure from the Obama administration, that’s clearly Netanyahu. He and President Obama are fundamentally different, not to say natural enemies. The prime minister is a Toscanini in orchestrating congressional opposition to White House strong-arming.

For Barak, White House pressure was never much of an issue. He was regarded as an ally by Clinton and Obama, until the current administration saw he was stringing them along on Netanyahu’s sincerity about peace. Now that he’s reportedly considered the true Iran hawk in Israel’s government, the White House would seem to have little use for him.

“He panics under pressure”

Then there’s the character issue, and on this score I’d say Barak would be more likely than Netanyahu to point for war. One of the three most decorated soldiers in Israeli history, Barak has bragged about killing Arab enemies while “seeing the whites of their eyes.” He’s a menacing individual, a systems analyst with a taste for violence; while playing “no, after you” with Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000, he grinned while manhandling the Palestinian through the door. Years later, in his political comeback, Barak stormed a Labor Party stage, his bodyguards tailing him, tore the microphone out of a party elder’s hand and demanded that the membership give him his way. He’s more ruthless than Netanyahu, and no less ambitious.

As for the prime minister, if this were strictly an issue of character, or personality, I think that when the moment came to bomb or not to bomb, he would back off. To quote Ariel Sharon: “Netanyahu lacks the sound judgment and iron nerves required of an Israeli prime minister. He panics under pressure.” On the basis of personality alone, bombing Iran and starting what could turn into a long regional war seems too big for Bibi. Political cartoons often show him in a nervous sweat. It’s commonly noted in the media that he is intimidated by his (third) wife, Sara, and that she runs her own personal “court” inside his bureau. As Israeli leaders go, he radiates instability.

Commenting on the latest shakeup in Netanyahu’s office, Yediot Aharonot diplomatic correspondent Shimon Shiffer wrote on Wednesday: “I’ve been covering the activities of prime ministers since Menachem Begin. I spent many hours watching their bureaus at work, and I can honestly say that I’ve never come across a working environment so divisive and anarchic as this one.”

The only prime minister’s office he ever covered that rivaled Netanyahu’s for intrigue and disorder, Shiffer wrote, was Barak’s.

I asked two retired Mossad chiefs, an army ex-chief of staff and a former defense and foreign minister, all of whom made life-or-death decisions separately with Barak and Netanyahu, which seemed more likely to go to war with Iran, and which seemed to have more influence over the other. The Mossadniks and the army man had no comment,  another indicator that the Israeli security officials don’t care to debate the issue publicly. Former defense and foreign minister Moshe Arens, a hawk on Iran, said there was no reason to assume the two men differed in their views. As for which had more influence over the other, Arens said: “I don’t know. Maybe they themselves have no way of knowing.”

Much has been written about the two men’s relationship, which goes back 40 years to when Barak was Netanyahu’s commander in Sayeret Matcal, Israel’s most legendary  commando unit. Barak, at 70, is eight years older than the prime minister. Face-to-face, the defense minister would seem to be the senior partner. However, there’s no evidence that Netanyahu is submissive at work to his former commander.

Moreover, Barak needs his one-time lieutenant much, much more than the other way around. Without Netanyahu, the defense minister’s political career is over. In recent years he’s become terminally unpopular on a personal level with the public and his political colleagues. He’s highly respected, though, as Israel’s top military technocrat, which is the reason Netanyahu keeps him around.

But the most important element in the power relationship between the two, certainly in a decision on starting a war with Iran, is that Netanyahu is the prime minister and Barak isn’t. It will be Netanyahu calling (or calling off) this shot.

Myself, I cannot envision him as prime minister of Israel on the day after Iran has reached the point where it is beyond Israel’s ability to stop it from building nuclear weapons, a point Israelis estimate will arrive around September. I can’t imagine Netanyahu envisioning himself in such a helpless predicament facing such a threat. From childhood, from his family – especially his 101-year-old father, Benzion, a great historian of the Spanish Inquisition whose stated political views make his son’s seem positively  liberal – from the heroic death of his brother, Yonatan, in the raid on Entebbe, from his understanding of history, Bibi Netanyahu inherited, and has nurtured, a grim certainty of what happens to Jews when they are vulnerable.

Speaking about International Holocaust Day in a cabinet meeting early this month, he said that what’s changed for Jews since the Holocaust is “not the lack of enemies – the same will to exterminate the Jewish people, first of all the state that was founded; that will remain and has not changed.” What’s different, he said, is that now Jews have the power and will to defend themselves.

“The Jewish people, the government of Israel,” he said, “have the right, the duty and the capability to prevent another extermination of the Jewish people or attack on its state.”

On May 5, Netanyahu will be at the White House to hear from Obama why he shouldn’t go to war. According to Ha’aretz, the president will come to the meeting armed with a statement of support from Israeli President Shimon Peres, who will convey it privately to Obama at the AIPAC convention.

The Americans will be ganging up on Netanyahu, isolating him from his supposedly more hawkish partner, Barak. But even by himself, Netanyahu should prove an awfully hard nut for Obama to crack, especially on the matter at hand.

According to Yediot, the new talking points read: “Iran and Hizbullah are behind these terror attempts. If this is what Iran is doing now, imagine what it will do if its nuclear arms project reaches the goal.” The tabloid’s story was headlined “Iran’s long arm,” and the subhead read, “Israel to the world: ‘Terror acts show nuclear Iran cannot be allowed.’” The story’s ominous tone meshed perfectly with the talking points.

Israel’s whole body politic – politicians, media, influential public figures and public at large – is  now leaning into a war with Iran. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s recently reported opinion that Israel would likely strike between April and June is shared, give or take a month or two, by countless others.

The consequences of such an attack range from a bilateral missile war and intensified international terror attacks, to a regional war involving weapons of mass destruction. Israel may not pull the trigger, of course. But at this point, that seems the only realistic working assumption.

Israeli talking points are coming faster and sharper. Iran’s nuclear project is marching toward the “zone of immunity,” says Defense Minister Ehud Barak. “It is our duty to rely on ourselves when we are concerned with a threat to our very existence,” says Netanyahu. Their apparent aim is to create an aura of inevitability around an imminent Israeli strike. Leading the drive, Netanyahu and his one-time army commando unit leader, Barak, want full support at home and no serious opposition from the U.S. if and when they send the jet bombers on their mission. Naturally, they would prefer that the U.S. do the job – inflicting lasting damage on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure could well be beyond Israel’s military capability – but from here, at least, the American military option looks unlikely, certainly within a time frame Israel accepts.

Some skeptics think Netanyahu and Barak may just be engaging in psychological warfare aimed at keeping Western economic pressure on Iran, the goal being to force or scare the Tehran regime into giving up its pursuit of nuclear weapons, which it denies pursuing. But it’s hard to imagine anything short of visibly destroyed hardware on a massive scale that might convince Israel’s leadership that the nuclear threat had been lifted.

Yet while there is skepticism about the leadership team’s true intentions, there is virtually none being expressed here about the wisdom of going to war. The paucity of dissent is remarkable, not to say depressing, in a country that prides itself on being a “vibrant democracy.”

At the end of last week, the media were talking about which towns had good bomb shelters and air raid sirens and which didn’t. The likelihood that Israel would soon be attacking Iran had begun to sink in. An antiwar demonstration was held across the boulevard from the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv. About 25 people showed up. They held signs that read, “Don’t bomb – talk” to the evening rush hour traffic going past. One driver honked.

I asked a sidewalk passerby, a woman in her mid-20s pushing a baby carriage, what she thought of a possible government decision to bomb Iran. “They sit up there, they’re smarter than me, whatever they decide, I’ll support,” she said. A fellow of about 20 on a skateboard said: “I’m not for war, I’m against war. But if somebody is going to attack you, if your enemy is going to attack, don’t you think you have to attack him first, for the sake of survival?” I asked if he thought Iran would attack Israel first. “I don’t know, I’m not privy to all the information. But good luck,” he said, and skated off.

For all the famous outspokenness of Israeli politicians, not one is speaking out against an attack, not from the moderate opposition nor the “peace camp.” Peace Now, a group that has organized huge demonstrations going back 30 years against the Lebanon War and the occupation, has said not a word about the extraordinarily high-risk war of choice that looms in the very near future.

The news media, with the exception of the liberal Ha’aretz newspaper, is fully on board. The mainstream media reflect and reinforce public opinion, which shows weariness with settlement-building and settlers, but automatic support for any decision taken in the name of security, especially in the face of a nuclear threat from a regime like Iran’s.

The tone is set by the red-on-black scare headlines in the tabloids and the grim facial expressions and bracing reports from correspondents on Channel 2, which dominates TV news. On the night of the Bangkok bombing, Ehud Ya’ari, dean of the country’s so-called Arab affairs correspondents, reported that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was expected on Wednesday to inaugurate the uranium enrichment facility in Fordo, a site built deep underground in the side of a mountain. “Thus,” said Ya’ari, “Iran’s nuclear project enters what Defense Minister Ehud Barak calls the ‘zone of immunity.’” Draw your own conclusions, folks.

Except for Gideon Levy at Ha’aretz, no well-known newspaper columnist or TV commentator has come out against a war; nearly all are worried and noncommittal. But one of the most influential columnists, Yediot’s Sever Plocker, a passionate centrist with long-standing contacts around the Israeli establishment, wrote a column Tuesday titled “Israel won’t blink first.” Declaring that “the State of Israel, as the national home of the Jews, has decided to prevent Iran from possessing nuclear weapons,” Plocker maintained that unless Iran freezes its nuclear weapons program and allows international inspectors into the underground sites and even the “secret” ones, “zero hour” will soon arrive. “No begging will stop Israel at that point. There will be a war,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, the literary triumvirate of Amos Oz, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua, Israel’s loftiest voices of peace and enlightenment, have remained silent. President Shimon Peres, who has put his days as a peacemaker far behind him, is warning only about the dangers of a nuclear Iran and not at all about those of an Israeli attack.

So what’s going on? What is this lockstep march to war in a country that made peace with Egypt and Jordan; that at times tried to make peace with the Palestinians; that absorbed missile attacks from Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War yet held its fire at America’s behest; that had “warriors for peace” in the Prime Minister’s Office, “peace governments” and a “peace camp”?

It’s all gone. Since the Palestinian intifada ended the “peace process” in 2000, Israelis blame everything that goes wrong, every political dispute, violent or nonviolent, completely on the other side. No politician, commentator or other public figure who seeks mainstream approval can be thought of as “weak on security” or “naïve about the Arabs.”

Yet the reaction to the Iranian nuclear threat has deeper roots than that. While Netanyahu is known for his Holocaust analogies on this issue, his predecessors going back to Yitzhak Rabin 20 years ago have all lobbied the world to stop Iran from going nuclear, which has been marked “unacceptable.” Since Menachem Begin ordered the 1981 attack on Iraq’s reactor (over the opposition of Peres and war heroes Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman), Israel has lived by the doctrine that no enemy in the Middle East will have nuclear weapons. After the 1981 attack, it acted on this doctrine a second time in 2007, under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (and defense minister Barak), with the airstrike on Syria’s embryonic nuclear facility.

So the issue for Israel isn’t just the Iranian regime’s jihadist craziness and Holocaust denial. Israel bombed the Iraqi reactor when Saddam Hussein was the Reagan administration’s man in the Gulf against Iran. It bombed the Syrian installation before Bashar Assad started slaughtering Syrians en masse, when he was offering Israel land-for-peace negotiations.

While it’s true that Iran isn’t just any Middle Eastern enemy, the Israeli doctrine applies to all of them.

Only one person has made a real effort to reverse the country’s course, and lately he’s given up, too. At the start of last year, upon finishing his legendary tenure as Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, then the country’s unchallenged supreme warrior, did the unprecedented. He began speaking out openly against an attack on Iran, calling it “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” and warning that afterward, “the regional challenge that Israel would face would be impossible.” He was going public, he explained, because “there is no one to stop Bibi and Barak” from undertaking such a “dangerous adventure” now that he and the other military and intelligence chiefs, who had the clout to rein in the political leadership, were retiring.

Last week, after months of silence, Dagan resurfaced to announce he’s heading a new NGO to change Israel’s parliamentary system – an old chestnut of the good government movement that seems conspicuously irrelevant now. For nearly a year, Dagan raised a flag, and when he saw hardly anyone behind him, he lowered it. A few high-level ex-warriors, including two former army chiefs of staff, warned against the consequences of attacking Iran. But these were isolated remarks that got very little attention; in the public’s mind, the antiwar movement began and ended with one man.

I asked a retired army general who agrees with Dagan’s views why he and the many others like him didn’t get together and sign a letter in a major newspaper, or hold a press conference, or do something that might start a public debate over this fairly fateful matter; after all, Israelis listen to generals. He replied that he and his fellows didn’t have the information that those around the cabinet table had, they didn’t know if the government really intended to order an attack, and they didn’t want to take the chance that this was all “psychological warfare,” which they would be undercutting if they spoke out.

“You have to understand,” he said, “Israel is a small community, everybody knows everybody else’s opinion, so you have to be responsible. That’s the way I was educated.”

No opposition – that’s what Netanyahu and Barak want, and at home, that’s what they’re getting.

As for opposition from the Obama administration, it has been awfully muted. The Republican presidential candidates (with the exception of Ron Paul) have  been gung-ho, which has much to do with the administration’s wariness toward Israel in this election year. But then how strong an argument for restraint can the administration make to the Israelis, after repeating for years that a nuclear Iran is “unacceptable” and that “all options are on the table”?

Vestiges of that concern were still echoed by Palestinian negotiators after Barak
and Mubarak exchanged a warm handshake amid the snapping flashbulbs in Alexandria
Friday. “What we heard from Barak at the press conference was more music than
words,” Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath told the Associated Press.
“We want to see him starting the peace process with implementation of Wye, and a
real cessation of settlement activity.”

But among his supporters in Israel and among Western leaders, the meetings this
weekend mark a dramatic turnaround from the Netanyahu era. In his first steps as
prime minister, and in the formation of his ruling coalition, Barak has sent a
clear message that peace is once again at the top of the Israeli political agenda.

The key clue comes from Barak’s decision to include the ultra-religious, but
relatively dovish Shas party in his coalition instead of the Likud. After the aged
hawk Ariel Sharon, who succeeded Netanyahu as Likud leader, demanded control
of the peace process, Barak turned him down and went with Shas.

Shas, an ultra-religious Sephardic (Middle Eastern Jewish) party, is by far the
fastest-growing political party in Israel. It grew from 10 to 17 Knesset seats
(out of 120) in the last election, putting it just behind Likud (19 seats and
falling) as the third-largest party in Israel.

Shas is dovish almost solely because its founder, spiritual leader and
all-powerful decision maker, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, believes that the Torah requires
that parts of the holy land of Israel be sacrificed if this will save Jewish
lives. While Shas follows Yosef’s dictates, most of its supporters — many of whom are
religious, but less so than the Shas leadership — tend to be more nationalistic
and less willing to give up land.

Unlike other religious parties, Shas is not involved in sending Israeli settlers
into controversial new Israeli housing projects in the West Bank. United Torah
Judaism, an ultra-religious Ashkenazic (European Jewish) party, is also in the
government, and has loose but growing ties to the settlements. Its policy on the
peace process tends to be hawkish, but not automatically so.

The party that, more than any other, represents the settlers is the National
Religious Party. It has also joined the Barak government — mainly to safeguard, to
whatever extent it can, the settlements’ welfare. The NRP is against giving up
any land, but it also recognizes that a large majority of the Israeli public
wants the peace process to continue, so it has become increasingly pragmatic. If
Barak gets to the point where he’s making extensive concessions of land to the
Palestinians and Syrians, the NRP is likely to leave the government. UJT might
also leave. Shas, however, is a good bet to stay — because of both its dovishness and
its abject dependence on government money to finance its social and educational
network in Israel’s slums, from which the party draws most of its support. As the
largest of the three religious parties, Shas is the most important to Barak. If
Shas leaves, Barak would probably have to reach out to Likud to keep his
government from crumbling.

On the domestic front, Barak has turned away from Israel’s experiment with
Thatcherism by reappointing Rabin’s finance minister, Avraham Shochat — who became
the Netanyahu government’s whipping boy because he had dared to spend the
taxpayers’ money on schools and roads. (He had even wanted to put a tax on stock
market winnings!)

Barak also elevated the most dovish Zionist party of all, Meretz, and gave it
control of the most coveted ministry of education.

To make his radical moves — to give up most, if not all, of the land conquered in
1967, and uproot possibly tens of thousands of settlers from their homes, in
return for peace on every border — Barak is convinced he needs wide support among
the various warring tribes of Israel.

So far, he’s gotten it. He’s crafted a broad-based coalition which includes
religious and right-wing parties that are not friends of the peace process. But at
the same time he’s built the engine of the government out of dovish parties like
One Israel (the reconstructed Labor Party), Meretz and others. Barak placed all
the decisive ministries — including defense, which he kept for his own party — in liberal hands. His politics have always hewed as close as possible to the
mythical Israeli center, but faced with forming a government, he had to make a
choice between right and left, and he chose left.

But if his reputation is to be believed, Barak’s motives may have more to do with
self-interest than any particular ideological bent. He is notorious for his
excessive appetite for power and control, earning the nickname “Napoleon” among
his countrymen.

He left some of the most talented, popular Labor Party figures out of the upper
reaches of his cabinet, showing a preference for reliable loyalists. Out of 17
ministers, he appointed only one woman, and no Arabs (who make up one-sixth of
Israel’s population). This is in keeping with backward Israeli tradition; Barak
isn’t any worse than his predecessors, but then he built his campaign around the
promise of “change.”

In front of a crowd or on television, he hardly ever manages to inspire, and then
only mildly. Most of the time he’s so leaden that his supporters applaud strictly
to be polite, or obedient. Barak comes with no trumpets or doves; those left with
Rabin, and they won’t return until the soldiers come home from Lebanon, or the
peace is finally nailed down with the Palestinians, or maybe until Assad gets off
a plane at Ben-Gurion Airport. Israelis won’t be easily impressed by Barak, and,
because they’re Israelis, will be quick to run him down.

Barak said all along that he wanted an inclusive government, including left,
right and center; religious, ultra-religious and secular. He believes Rabin was
plagued, and ultimately killed, because he tried to make a revolution with only
half the country behind him. Barak wants to complete the revolution — to draw a
final border between Israel and the Palestinians and let the two peoples go their
separate ways.

Barak has also made it clear he wants to make peace with Syria. That will likely
mean giving back the strategic, and symbolic, territory of the Golan Heights,
which Israel annexed after 1967′s Six-Day War. A return of the Golan would
allow Israel’s soldiers in Lebanon, who have been fighting since 1982, to finally
get out.

But Barak is by no means a peacenik. In his 35-year army career, he got to know
Arabs mainly as blood enemies. (So, of course, did Rabin.) He remains obsessed
with security precautions, with holding on to that radar station on yonder hill,
and he means to make a deal with the Palestinians that Israelis will accept. The
problem — the old, familiar problem — is this: What Israelis are ready to give up
isn’t even close to what will satisfy the Palestinians.

The Palestinians’ line remains unchanged: Arafat has called for a return of all
the land Israel won from Jordan in the Six-Day War to create a Palestinian
state that includes East Jerusalem as the state capital. There
are roughly 350,000 Israelis living in those places now; it is inconceivable to
ask all of them to live under Palestinian rule, or to move them all out. Both
sides are going to have to soften their positions a great deal. Barak, who
swears never to give up any part of East Jerusalem, and wants to hold on to
substantial parts of the West Bank, has a long way to go before he can meet the
Palestinians somewhere in the middle. Nobody knows if he — or Arafat — is willing
to go that far.

What is known is that for the first time in three years, Israel has a prime
minister who treats Arabs, even Arafat, with respect — and a prime minister known to keep his word. This alone gives the peace process a strong, symbolic jolt — though much of the hard negotiating remains unfinished.