Branded an incompetent failure last spring by the Winograd Committee's interim report on the Second Lebanon War, told publicly by his foreign minister that he ought to resign, and since further discredited by the opening of three criminal investigations into alleged financial improprieties, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is nonetheless rising in the polls.

Not, it should be stressed, rising high, but moving inexorably out of the abysmal single figures of a few months ago and on through the teens. This is not because the Israeli public is slowly learning to love its prime minister. And though there may be a grudging admiration in some quarters for his sheer bloody-minded determination to retain a job that so much of his electorate so plainly regrets giving him, that's not the secret of his slow float upward in the polls, either.

It is, rather, a consequence of Israelis' near-desperate desire for peace - or, more accurately, for a means to sever our connection to the Palestinians. Having concluded years ago that the conflict that had so obsessed his predecessor was unsolvable for the foreseeable future, US President George W. Bush has now U-turned and is engaged in a last-ditch, end-of-second-term bid to secure progress. And since Olmert is making discernible efforts to crown this improbable mission with glory, a proportion of the Israeli public, as so often in the past, is apparently willing to suspend its disbelief, put aside the bitter skepticism born of brutal experience, and give Olmert its backing.

With each passing year, the strategy of delegitimizing Israel by depicting it as the recalcitrant holdout against viable compromise with the Palestinians gains more adherents. It was hugely boosted by Yasser Arafat's post-Camp David peddling of a mendacious account of Israeli rejectionism, is now the dominant narrative in most of Europe and, thanks to the efforts of Messrs. Carter, Walt, Mearsheimer et al, is taking an ever-greater grip in the United States as well. (The campaign is enhanced by the rewriting of Middle Eastern history, notably by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to present the establishment and maintenance of the modern State of Israel not as the belated restoration of an ancient sovereign power, but as the implantation of an alien and intransigent entity imposed on a blameless Arab world in order to salve Europe's Holocaust-scarred conscience.)

In truth, however, mainstream Israel is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths, and contemplate extraordinary risks, in the cause of a viable separation. When Ehud Barak returned from Camp David seven years ago, having offered to relinquish far more territory than he had previously intimated and to concede a sovereign Palestinian role in Jerusalem, he was met with greater demonstrations of support than denunciation. Since then, Israel has risked rending its own social fabric to drag 8,000 Jews out of their homes in Gaza without even the cover of an accord, and would have reelected Ariel Sharon, with his unstated blueprint for a likely withdrawal from 90 percent of the West Bank, had his own failed health not intervened.

Now the Olmert government is publicly contemplating the previously unthinkable notion of a 100% West Bank pullout, with one-for-one land-swap adjustments to maintain the larger settlement blocs. Like Barak before him, the prime minister is openly questioning Israel's need for a united Jerusalem that takes in the Arab neighborhoods. And the peace-parched Israeli public's response is less hysterical opposition than gentle encouragement in the shape of an upturn in the prime ministerial personal popularity ratings.

Of all the "final status" issues, it is only on the question of refugees that the government, and public opinion, are holding firm, rejecting the national suicide inherent in a capitulation to the notion of a "right of return" to Israel for millions of Palestinians. Barely 20 years ago, mainstream Israeli public opinion resisted the very idea of Palestinian statehood. Today, the only substantive Israeli objection to a Palestinian state is that it not be achieved, whether by violence or demographics, at the expense of ours.

Here is where Mahmoud Abbas and the "moderate Arab states" might be expected to make their voices heard, to mirror the energetic ideas for compromise being floated by the government's indefatigable trial balloonists with conciliatory scripts of their own, most especially on the refugee issue. And yet, mere weeks before the scheduled convening of the Annapolis summit, from the Palestinian side there is only silence.

THE PALESTINIAN academic Sari Nusseibeh, formerly Arafat's PLO representative, observed famously some years ago that the primary right that the Palestinians should be seeking was the right to freedom, and that this right took precedence over the claim to a "right of return." Indeed, he argued that the paramount right to freedom would never be achieved so long as their leadership insisted that millions of refugee descendants be granted permission to live within the sovereign borders of the State of Israel.

At a large gathering of Middle East politicians, academics, businesspeople and others, a senior Egyptian minister once assured me that the Arab world in general, and the Palestinian leadership in particular, recognized all this, and that the wording of the Arab peace initiatives now being advanced, with their references to an "agreed" solution to the refugee issue, represented the formal reflection of this shift. That word "agreed," he said, indicated that Israel's needs would have to be satisfied in the determination on the fate of the refugees.

And yet today, even while Iran terrifies the likes of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia by seeking nuclear clout to reinforce its Islamist ambitions, and as the Islamist Hamas cements its hold on Gaza and looks to repeat the feat in the West Bank at Fatah's expense, neither the moderate Arab leaders, nor Abbas, have been able to bring themselves to make this critical compromise explicit and thus begin to pave a constructive road forward. A road forward that would help save their own regimes by proving the emptiness of the extremists' bleak vision.