One lovely Friday at 1:32 P.M., a momentary shadow passed over the sidewalks, cafes, boulevards, traffic jams and the general glad hullabaloo of the weekend. It was a kind of brief blink of the pleasant winter sun, like the shadow a plane sometimes casts on the way to landing. No one's heart skipped a beat - until a few minuets later, when the strange thundering noises and first blasts began to be heard.

Before that, everything was just as always: the guy in the kiosk organized the high stacks of thick weekend papers, and because it had been a week without any special events, the papers carried different headlines. "Man falls into elevator shaft one year after nephew run over," one headline said, and the other, "Olmert: Assad not serious, no reason to talk to him."

On the Nahalat Binyamin mall, N., an artist, poet and marshmallow sculptor, was setting up her collection of lampshades and bookmarks. In the absence of buyers, she perused one of the newspaper commentaries: "Some in the Prime Minister's Office are advising Bashar Assad to look in the mirror. There he will see 'tall and stupid at the top,' as the saying goes - an irresponsible type who never stops yammering. If his intentions were serious, he would do the elementary thing and at least disband his army before even starting to think about talking about negotiations." Her eye caught another report: Olmert made fun of Assad with the German foreign minister: "Did you know that Kissinger got an upset stomach every time he visited Damascus?" Later, these remarks would go down in history as another example of trivialities and arrogance on the eve of an apocalypse, alongside the famous complaint by Golda Meir on the eve of the Yom Kippur War that "Kreisky didn't even offer me a glass of water."

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But something serious and big suddenly went wrong, because the first muted explosion - which might still have been attributed to a sonic boom or a distant suicide bombing - wasn't the last. It was followed immediately by an almost incessant series of powerful blasts from different directions. The counters and tables of the cafes were abandoned, as people started to run every which way; there was no more consolation in the street. The question "What is it? What is it??!" hung heavy in the air like a reeking cloud that refuses to dissipate. Anyone who tried, hands shaking, to use his mobile phone heard nothing and realized instantly that "the cellular systems had crashed." People rushed home - to the computer, the television, the radio, to some sort of phone, thirsting for information. A taxi driver shouted to someone, "The radio says there are strikes all over the country!"

The whole country ... in other words, this time there is no place even to escape to!

- An eternity seemed to pass before the Internet was updated and until the three television channels broadcast bulletins. At 2 P.M. it was already official: Syria had launched a general offensive against Israel, in integrated coordination with Hezbollah.

A few minutes after the start of the special newscasts, the commentators were united in their view: President Assad had simply gone bonkers. Or, as Major General (res.) Yossi Peled, who somehow situated himself simultaneously in two studios, put it, "Guys, I want to tell you something that will maybe actually make the nation of Israel happy: President Assad has simply decided to commit suicide. I am crying and laughing when I say this. Because what he did today is nothing less than suicide. I just feel sorry for his nation."

Major General (res.) Eitan Ben-Eliahu cautioned against euphoria - "Because, after all, there is a war, with quite a few dead already in the first strike" - but agreed that Assad was as good as dead, and maybe Ahmadinejad, too. He rattled off the ways in which Assad had decided to commit suicide through us: aerial pulverizing of infrastructures, shutting off the electricity in Damascus and Beirut, destruction of bridges, eradication of roads, sending Syria back to the Bronze Age. The generalysts - that is, the generals-turned-analysts - also quickly noted "one more marginal but important detail": the window of opportunity that had been created to liquidate Khaled Meshal by carpet-bombing from Tyre to the Iraqi border.

- "Can I say something?" Peled interjected with a certain gaiety. "I want to tell you something that's maybe hard to hear, but I'll say it anyway. Look, the truth is that we were just waiting for this war! This isn't guerrilla-schmerilla, or organizations-schmorganizations. This is total war, the kind for which the IDF was invented to bring sweeping victories!"

Roni Daniel agreed. The morale in the studios soared, in contrast to the utter chaos outside. Some of the panel members were even seen laughing as the channel cut away for commercials.

- In Ramat Aviv, in front of the Institute for Petroleum Research close to the campus, against a background of gathering smoke, a small group of people was running about frantically, shouting, "Where's the key to the shelter?! Who shut the shelter?"

- "Is there a shelter here at all?" mumbled the most distinguished of the group, an eminent elderly man, as his colleagues pounded on a side door made of tin, in front of which were brooms, jerricans and the rusting engine of a motorboat. The elderly man was obviously concerned and irate: "A scandal! A new war before we finished submitting the lessons of the last one! Did you at least take the documents?"

- "This way, this way!" shouted a bald man wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses. "Here, on the steps. It might stink a little of urine, but it's safer, Judge Winograd."

Half a year had passed since the war ended in a hasty patchwork cease-fire. The economic damage was enormous. New taxes were imposed. Thousands were killed. And now Israel agreed to talks with Assad.

"I'm sitting here and tearing out my hair," Yaron London castigated the prime minister in an interview. "Why?! Why?! Why did we need this war, with its thousands of dead and terrible destruction, in order to agree after it to what we could have agreed to without it?"

The prime minister did not bat an eyelash. "Yaron, Yaron ... I first of all suggest that you calm down. To calm down is good, even for journalists. When you're sitting in the place that I sit, maybe you'll begin to understand things that even you - begging your pardon, with all respect - are not capable of understanding ..."

- "Understanding?!?" The interviewer almost gagged and his eyes darted about in incomprehension. "What is there to understand here?!! Understand??! The reality was thrown in our faces despite all the warnings!! Now suddenly we're ready to withdraw to the ridgeline? Only now?! As though there was no precedent with Egypt?!"

- "Calm down, Yaron," his colleague Motti Kirschenbaum sent a steadying hand. "Calm down ... The next thing you know, the prime minister will start to think that he's guilty of some blunder here ..."

- "Gentlemen," the prime minister said. "Get serious for a minute, even though I know how hard that is for you. But you have to understand that now, after the war, a new reality has been created ... An opportunity for a strategic upheaval ... I ask you: What logic is there in this bleeding and this continued bloodletting? ... In the new situation that was created we received proof that Assad is a serious leader, someone we can talk to ... Let me, let me finish ..."

A year later the ninth Winograd Committee issued partial conclusions about what would come to be known as the "Isru Chag War" - as on the aftermath of Jewish festivals, Syria had launched the war not to win it, but to jolt Israel, in the aftermath of not getting a response to two years of importuning Jerusalem to begin negotiations. The conception holding that Syria was "weak" and would not dare inflame the region, or that "there will be a war only in the summer," collapsed instantly on that bitter winter day. The Israeli aerial pounding cost the Syrians almost their entire infrastructure and their armored units, but their ballistic might took Military Intelligence by surprise.

In any event, no force could stop the "bleeding borders" that now gushed from Rosh Hanikra to the Jordanian border: borders of skirmishes, with a constant trickle of Katyushas, rockets and terrorist infiltrations with Iranian and Syrian backing. The tranquillity of the B&Bs, the Golan Heights vineyards and the quiet border in the north became a distant memory. Guarding the porous border necessitated massive call-ups of reservists and exacted a high economic and human price, and a war of attrition turned the Israeli triumph into a pyrrhic victory, lacking even a political solution.

The committee also found that operational lessons from the previous war had not been applied. Tank crews that were ordered to advance discovered that the turret had been sent for renovation and re-equipping as part of the lessons of the previous war; the Arrow missiles were again not put to the test - that's all we needed - in part because the chief of staff did not want to reveal to Izenkot where they were; brigade commanders who were ordered to re-sweep Bint Jbail found that they had municipal maps of Kiryat Motzkin. The committee leveled extremely sharp criticism, with the addition of a special personal remark by Judge Winograd about the condition of the shelters.