Bradley Burston

If there is one resource that Netanyahu knows how to leverage, it is terrorism.

Timeline of key events in the crisis that threatens to engulf the Sharon premiership.

You need look no further than soccer or golf to know that sports can be a religion. And you need look no further than the playing fields to find those who believe baseball to be the Judaism of sports.

When Ariel Sharon began singling out settlements for future eviction, he knew just where to look. These were the settlements that a majority of Israelis wished never had existed. Settlements for which even the settlement movement itself had shown little support.

If, indeed, an order is issued to kill the truce - and if it is to be a Palestinian who pulls the trigger - the instructions may well come from abroad. Tehran, Beirut and Damascus are the most likely sources of such an order.

In a disconcerting dress rehearsal for the prime minister's withdrawal plan, soldiers who had been confronting Arabs for years in the Second Intifada have found themselves under rock barrage, curses and fists in a new uprising conducted by Jews.

As the Intifada grinds on past its fourth anniversary, directed by militants with an apocalyptic vision founded on literal self-destruction, there is mounting evidence that grass-roots Palestinian fervor for its message has begun to flag.

It is the High Holidays, the time of year when Jews are commanded to have second thoughts. On the left, where second thoughts are often second nature, doubts have emerged over the disengagement, and the prime minister's 'severe deficit of legitimacy.'

At this point, Sharon has little option but to put his money on a unity government. But in his long steeplechase out of Gaza, Sharon's most immediate barriers are a maze of obstacles standing between him and a stable ruling coalition.

For many even on the far right, the Rabin killing remains an act with neither parallel nor conceivable explanation, a crime that the right itself must ensure never happens again - but one which, some believe, could recur at any time.

The disengagement plan remains firmly clamped to the drawing board, still far from the slightest hint of substantive implementation. Nonetheless, perhaps more than any development since Oslo, the plan has radically re-engineered the workings of the right.

Opponents argue that the disengagement plan could threaten the very future of Sharon's existing political legacies - the settlements and the Likud. Comrades fret that the plan could put an abrupt end to the PM's long career. If Sharon is to survive, what are his options?

Independence Day marks the home stretch of the most important campaign of Sharon's life. A week ago, it seemed that the fight for his Gaza plan was one battle that Sharon couldn't lose. Now it seems it may fail, and in a uniquely Israeli manner: death by ambivalence.

The Vanunu story has something for everyone - intrigue, betrayal, secret agents and seduction, shadowy trials, pathos and religious epiphany, and above all, the nation's most publicly vilified traitor. The story may also have something in it for the State of Israel.

Refusal to serve in the military, and attitudes toward those who refuse, have long functioned as a sensitive barometer of Israeli society as a whole. Clearly, in the three years of the war in the territories, something has changed.

Israeli officials have begun to weigh compensation plans to help settlers uprooted from their homes. A legislator argues that 'the moment that the opportunity is granted to leave the settlements in a respectable manner, people will leave in a gallop.'