Six comments on the situation

1. This isn't based on authoritative information or knowledgeable sources. But my sense is that the silence that has prevailed recently about Gilad Shalit indicates that a prisoner exchange is on the brink of being concluded, and his release is close. Very close.

2. People who saw the footage of a clumsy Benjamin Netanyahu slipping off the ladder leading from a gunship down to a rubber dinghy while visiting a naval base this week must have gasped. He looked as if he were going to fall into the sea, but he was saved by a crewman. All's well that ends well.

But anyone following the news that day learned that there are different ways of falling down. The decision to announce the construction of 900 apartments in Jerusalem's Gilo neighborhood was akin to falling on one's head, politically.

Quite rightly, the White House issued a statement rapping Israel for this slap in the face to American efforts to arrange a successful dialogue between the sides. Bibi can claim 10 times over that "there's no crisis with the United States," but what will he say to the White House's expression of dismay at the Israeli government's move? Bibi may be a comeback artist, but at his age, people don't change, and there's nothing that can be done about it.

3. Do you know why couples don't make out in Dizengoff Square in broad daylight? Because a hundred passersby would stand around and give them advice. That's more or less what the cabinet looks like, with its 37 ministers and deputy ministers and its chaotic administration. It either makes or doesn't make confused decisions that have made us the whole world's lepers, the object of boycotts and condemnations.

Looking back, or more accurately, looking forward, the obvious solution would be for the prime minister to appoint a supreme advisor, a kind of Henry Kissinger - an intellectual, but a smart one, a historian independent of the political system.

You'll say he already has Uzi Arad. But with all due respect, Arad is a quarrelsome type, far from the above description. Reading Kissinger's memoirs, especially the section about the management of the Yom Kippur War crisis and how he led Israel first to refrain from defeating the Egyptian Third Army and then onto a track toward peace, one can only regret that we don't have anyone like him here. Not because such a figure isn't available, but because Bibi thinks that he is unique, and second to no one.

We managed to get Stanley Fischer to come be governor of the Bank of Israel, and now economists all over the world are praising him for his handling of the Israeli aspect of the global crisis. There are enough Jewish brains in Israel and abroad from whom a wise and authoritative counselor could be enlisted - someone whose authority Bibi would accept not only about what should be done, but mainly about what should not be done.

4. In 10 weeks' time, Menachem Mazuz will end his term as attorney general. He began it with inexplicable leniency for the Sharons in the Greek island affair, but during the second half of his term, he became the terror of the political leadership. Unlike his predecessor, Elyakim Rubinstein, who was wont to quote tiresomely from the Jewish sources but displayed unforgivable leniency toward important politicians, Mazuz acted slowly but relentlessly. Former president Moshe Katsav summoned the attorney general to complain that a former secretary was blackmailing him, but Mazuz didn't swallow the tale. He set standards that his successor will find it difficult not to uphold.

Nevertheless, Mazuz should try to leave a clean desk. Ten weeks is not a long time, but it is long enough to at least decide on the Avigdor Lieberman case. With a cloud of corruption hanging over his head, it is a disgrace to the country that he travels around the world as its foreign minister, even though he doesn't really handle the state's foreign affairs.

5. Jordan didn't manage to do it in two wars, but a few hundred ultra-Orthodox rioters are taking over Jerusalem. It is inconceivable that every Saturday, they should bring the city to a standstill with their violence, or that they should dictate to an international corporation like Intel that it must not operate on Shabbat, thereby increasing unemployment and driving other firms away. Just before the plant decided to close, a solution appeared to be in the offing: A few dozen non-Jews (or shabbos goyim in Yiddish) would work on Saturday. But in the next stage, we may well see Interior Minister Eli Yishai demanding that these foreign workers be thrown out, too.

But these goings-on in Jerusalem pale into insignificance when compared to the scandalous attempts by some of the ultra-Orthodox and their rabbis to buy Israel Defense Forces soldiers in order to create a climate of refusal to evacuate settlements.

The IDF's top brass today is less political than it has ever been before, and one third of our crack combat forces wear skullcaps. It is vital that these rabbis be arrested and prosecuted for trying to bribe and incite soldiers to mutiny and to make our very best troops into traitors.

6. After the farce of the abortive attempt to pass the biometric database bill, the chief of staff has now ordered all officers to undergo lie detector tests before they are promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel, with an eye to stopping leaks to the media. I move that they start doing these tests on top politicians, because that's where the leakers - as well as the criminals, liars and schlemiels - really abound.