At the beginning of the week an assessment from an authorized intelligence source of Syrian President Bashar Assad's latest peace-related statements landed on the desks of Israel's leaders. Assad's words, said the document, reflect "a real desire to reach an agreement." Yes, it used those very words. "A real desire."

The leaders responded to this angrily: Assad shouldn't be taken seriously, said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. At a candle-lighting in Givatayim, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni called the voices from Syria "a load of cacophony" and, adding a bit of moralizing in a didactic tone, she declared: "The burden lies on our shoulders, the shoulders of the leadership, and sometimes it is necessary to know how to ignore the dramas and the headlines."

Defense Minister Amir Peretz (the "outgoing" minister, as he is being called by his party colleagues) was more moderate; he is after all "the head of the peace headquarters," as he himself defines it. Like an embarrassed child who has been sent to stand in the corner, Peretz muttered something about "the need to use every opportunity for peace with the Syrians, even though other voices are also being heard from there." The problem is that Peretz is so weak politically, so battered, so extinguished and so eulogized, that no one counts him. He will not, of course, do anything with this, unless it will help him in the primaries and then his efforts won't be serious.

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The most surprising, or perhaps not, was the stand of Vice Premier Shimon Peres. If his colleagues furiously rejected Assad, he did so with true wrath. He mustered all of his life experience as head of the real peace camp in order to pour scorn on the Syrian in a serious of interviews to the media, which were sent to him by the grateful prime minister's people. Peres did not disappoint. He revealed himself to be a very effective prosecutor. If Olmert emerges unscathed from the nyet-saying to Assad, Peres will have a considerable part in this. His enlistment at the prime minister's side was so astonishing that in the corridors of the government, they wondered: Is there a deal here that is connected to the race for the presidency, or gratitude on the part of Peres to Olmert for having transferred the Red Sea-Dead Sea "Peace Canal" project to him?

But the interviews with Peres were nothing compared to the following comments that he made on Tuesday evening at a conference in Upper Nazareth, in which he participated along with the prime minister. When Peres' turn to speak came, he went on stage and said: "I want to tell you a little secret about the prime minister ... All of the newspapers are asking, 'What will we tell Assad, what will we tell the Hamas.' The prime minister thinks: What will we tell Upper Nazareth, what will we tell Halutziot [referring to the new settlements in the Negev, in the sands of Halutza, in the establishment of which Peres is involved in his capacity as Minister for the Development of the Galilee and the Negev - Y.V.]." The audience applauded weakly. Peres went on: "The enemies will change, the building will remain. Therefore," he concluded, "the matter of construction is Israel's first security."

Not peace-shmeace, not Syria-Shmyria. Construction. The Ariel Sharon of the 1980s and the 1990s could not have said it better. In a matter of moments, Peres would have sent his listeners to run and take over the hilltops in the Golan Heights.

He also had something to say about the state comptroller. "In the 1950s," Peres related, "the state comptroller was a much smaller entity and it was possible to do a lot of things. We took money from where we needed to take it, and we established settlements. This wasn't proper, but that's how we established the state."

Someone asked Peres this week: If you were the prime minister, you would have already sent 10 envoys to the forests of Scandinavia or palaces in Morocco to sit with the Syrians and hear what there is to talk about. Peres replied tiredly, lethargically. He has the impression, he said, that Assad doesn't really mean it. And anyway it isn't possible to go forward in both the Palestinian channel and the Syrian channel at the same time. It is necessary to concentrate the effort on the Palestinian one.

It appears that this fatigue has spread throughout the entire political system. Despite Assad's extraordinary messages, no real, probing, profound debate has occurred here. Here and there a headline has appeared in a newspaper; here and there an article has been written. Arcadi Gaydamak's buses made a lot more noise.

Opposition leader Likud MK Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu was quoted saying that he is in effect prepared to sit with the Syrians. He very quickly came to his senses, remembered who and what he is, and retracted that remark. In the meantime Likud MK Silvan Shalom had already overtaken him and said that Bibi would be prepared to sit even with Iran. And then Netanyahu said of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that he is Hitler and that we are in 1938 and Germany is trying to obtain atomic weapons.

Then everyone went off to the Knesset to hear the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra's concert to mark the 70th anniversary of its founding.

Peretz's primary path

The next story exemplifies more than anything what is happening in the Defense Ministry, or more precisely, in the defense minister's bureau, these days. A few days ago a rumor spread that Amir Peretz was soon to deliver a dramatic speech on "Israel's defense doctrine" for the coming years. This speech was described as a turning point, a milestone, not only in Israel's defense doctrine, a sanctified value in its own right, but also in Peretz's career, as defense minister. This is the speech that was supposed to symbolize the end of Peretz's failed rookie period at the ministry, and the labor leader's decision to take a new path: security-related, sharper, experienced, stronger, better. There was only one problem with this story: There was no such thing. It never happened.

It was invented by one of Peretz's political aides, who thought that it could help the boss against his party rivals, MK Ami Ayalon, former prime minister Ehud Barak and MK Danny Yatom, from whose chests defense doctrines spring. He, the aide, did not understand that a "defense doctrine" is not a press release, but rather an extensive project upon which a professional team labors for a year.

It is doubtful that Peretz knew this story, which rolled around out there for a number of hours until it was thoroughly checked, and the air went out of it with an embarrassing noise. This, as noted, is just an example that casts light on what has been happening in recent days and nights in the blue tower opposite the Azrieli Mall in Tel Aviv. This does not mean that Peretz is cut off from the panic all around him, that he is sunk up to his neck in security matters and leaving it to his aides to deal with the primaries. He is not. There is nothing that is engaging him more than the desperate battle that he's conducting for the survival of his political life.

A person who is au courant with what is happening at the ministry this week described Peretz sitting in a most highly classified security discussion, when suddenly a note was brought in to him about some uncomplimentary political posting on one of the Internet sites. All at once, relates the person, Peretz lost his concentration and his attention and at that moment, he says, the discussion ended. That is, the discussion continued, but the defense minister was no longer there. That is, he was there, but not mentally.

Another person who is involved in the life of the ministry, and political elements that are identified with Peretz, relates that his timetable is now focused only on politics. "He will prefer a meeting with an Arab party membership recruiter, the head of a clan from some village, to dealing with the dozens of investigations of the war," one of the defense ministers party colleagues nastily says of him.

"He has returned to his origins - to the One Nation party people, to the workers' councils, some of which are attached to the Defense Ministry, to the Histadrut labor federation people, of whom only few have remained loyal to him," says one Peretz supporter. "Through them, he is working on the party membership registration drive that will determine his fate." (This drive will end, according to the decision of the Labor central committee, on January 31.)

At the end of a meeting of the Labor Knesset faction last week, faction chairman MK Yoram Marciano, a Peretz loyalist, announced that among those present in the room was Shoham council head Gil Livneh, who was interested in saying a few words. Livneh rose and asked Peretz about building some sort of military base adjacent to his locale. The political connection was so transparent, so crude, that the members in the room blushed, wriggled in discomfort and begged: Nu, really, this isn't the place. Not Peretz. This is how he fights his wars. By every means at his disposal. Without taking prisoners. Informed sources relate that during this past week alone his people have registered between 3,000 and 5,000 party members. If only the Israel Defense Forces were so determined, so focused on the target, in the last war.

On Wednesday evening he held a support rally at party headquarters in the Hatikva quarter in South Tel Aviv. The hall was bursting with former One Nation people. The texts were defensive, belligerent: "You aren't going to defeat us so fast," Peretz shouted. "Even when the smell of gunpowder is penetrating my bedroom I go out and say: I desire peace, I do. I desire peace, I do."

He complained that he has not been allowed to "realize" his beliefs, referring apparently to Olmert's refusal to appoint him as finance minister. He sounded like someone playing around with the idea of creating a coalition crisis around the budget, after having realized that Olmert had again succeeded in turning him into the bad guy in the affair of the additional funding for the defense budget.

A crisis like that now, in Peretz's pressured and pressuring personal political circumstances, will not be taken seriously, even among his supporters - never mind the party members - and by public opinion. To the veteran reporters Peretz's rally was reminiscent of Netanyahu's on the eve of the defeat of 1999: a lot of false enthusiasm, a lot of balloons decorated with red and blue stripes, but beneath the surface of the cheers and the songs about honor and respect, there wasn't much meat, not to mention honor or respect.