There are all kinds of commissions of inquiry about wars, even ridiculous ones, such as Ehud Olmert's. There is never an inquiry into the failures in negotiating peace. Their victims, after all, are not quantifiable. Yet, the prime minister's political behavior at present is no less dangerous than the way he ran the war. It is paving the road to another war. Olmert's attitude toward negotiations with the Palestinians and with Syria and Lebanon is fraught with mistakes and pretense. What's absent from the prime minister's head, and wasn't there before the war, too, is an iota of true intention to conduct a serious discussion about the future of the territories.

How do we know this? Because time after time he declaimed a promise of withdrawals if negotiations did not succeed and did everything to prevent dialogue with the Palestinian Authority. His predecessor, who is now acclaimed because of his disappearance and the quality of his successor, at least evacuated the Gaza Strip settlements. Olmert is not budging even one millimeter. In the meantime, he is approving more building in the territories. All this is tiringly familiar, but was obscured by a cruel war. While getting bogged down in Lebanon, he sent the Israel Defense Forces to shell, kill, torture and further impoverish the population of the territories. This insane summer shunted aside the continuing rampage of the army in some Palestinian region that we are tired of hearing about.

The tragic truth is that Olmert is now preoccupied mainly with Ehud. There is no point in giving him advice that, he assumes, will accelerate his nosedive in the polls. He does not want to hear that the right thing to do now, for the needs of the nation - as opposed to his needs - is to launch a comprehensive political initiative. Why does he need that headache when he might have to shift the coalition rightward and after the muscle-flexing he did in declaring the Golan Heights Israeli forever? But despite this pressurizing personal difficulty, the time is right - as it has been since the failure of Ehud Barak at Camp David - because there is no other way to extricate Israel from the grip of threats of hostility in the territories, from the direction of Iran, and again Lebanon.

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Despite Olmert's bombastic demand to get back the abductees before a discussion about the release of prisoners, negotiations are under way (though the prime minister denies their existence) for a mutual release in both sectors. The gimmick is that Israel, for the sake of some kind of dubious honor, will release hundreds gradually. This is a small sample of what is necessary and possible in the broad scope of the conflict.

Not for the first time, the 22 foreign ministers of the Arab League spoke last week about a peace conference along the lines of Madrid 1991, which, in the end, led to Oslo. The same decision was also made four years ago by the Arab League summit in Beirut, on the basis of the Saudi plan. Israel did not react then because of the clauses relating to the right of return and to Jerusalem. Is it that the Arabs, contrary to us, have to present their final stand at the outset? The initiative for a conference next spring will likely be presented this month at the United Nations. Our ambassador there will deliver a brilliant speech against it.

In the near future, after the prisoner exchange, Olmert may meet, despite everything, with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. Apparently, it has not crossed his mind to prepare something for the meeting that will turn it into momentum toward a serious follow-up. He and his predecessor did not want Yasser Arafat; thereafter, they were contemptuous of his replacement; and after that, they wanted to topple Hamas and the star of the elections, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. No creative concept emerged in the Israeli mechanism of denial and refusal toward the Palestinians concurrent with bombing and starving them. The Qassam rockets on the Negev, like the rockets on the North, were not a spur to dialogue, to relieve the suffering in Gaza, to try top projects of the sort that even Shimon Peres has grown hoarse talking about. Instead, we fired thousands of pointless shells and killed hundreds in the past few months alone. The crossings at Karni, Erez and Rafah were shut down. Half the workforce in Gaza is unemployed. Per capital income in the territories is 1:300 in relation to in Israel. And they will keep up the shelling as long as this enables the conflict to be kept on the back burner.

The battered leader of the Labor Party has begun of late to talk a little about a political initiative. His status is even wobblier than that of the prime minister, he sounds like a poor man's dove. His threats to bolt the government are also empty. Behind all the spin-type badmouthing, Olmert and Amir Peretz know that they have to keep on hanging together, otherwise a cruel political reality will hang them separately. The upshot, too, is that it's impossible to give advice to Labor. It will continue to be dragged in the wake. As long as an interim report of a commission of inquiry doesn't say differently, the defense minister will insist, in pursuit of his lost honor, on continuing to play the part and spout the rhetoric.

It all sounds pretty terrible - and it is. Of course, there is no one of weight at the shaky top who will dare talk about an international understanding with Iran, with Europe's assistance, instead of brandishing empty threats. Why, for example, will Israel not agree to desist from its outdated policy of ambiguity and allow supervision of its nuclear program in return for international supervision in Iran? The British prime minister, who is due to arrive here at the weekend, will find a confused leadership, filling up its empty emergency depots ahead of future events, quaking at the thought of an investigation. Maybe it is possible to suggest to Tony Blair, at the painful end of an excellent tenure, to behave differently than Israeli leaders who are glued to their seats, to place all his prestige and the remnants of his term in office on the line for a shift in this accursed business of living by the sword.