Even would-be friends of Israel don't know which vision of the country they should be defending. How can they know, when we won't make up our own minds?

The elections are still more than a week away, but I can tell you already who lost. Israel did.

The polls consistently indicate that Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud will be the biggest party in the next Knesset. Tzipi Livni's Kadima would have to manage a late surge to surpass it, but having long since lost the center-right, it is now losing part of the center, too, and is slipping backward. Ehud Barak's Labor party has been bolstered by his perceived efficient performance as defense minister in the confrontation with Hamas. But Labor lags far behind, and is looking over its shoulder, worrying that Avigdor Lieberman's Israel Beiteinu will overtake it as Israel's third largest party. We will, thus, almost certainly be electing a right-wing or center-right government to replace the center-left coalition led by Kadima.

All this I know, as do you. What I don't know, clearly and specifically, is which Israel it is that these key parties want to lead toward, if given the opportunity by our voters next week. Many of the smaller parties do have defined positions; these more minor parties, though, will not be dominating the next coalition.

Most importantly, I don't know if the Likud, our likely new party of government, is committed to dramatically expanding Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, as several of its Knesset members-in-waiting dearly hope; whether it will restrict expansion to "natural growth," without building new settlements, as Netanyahu has indicated; or whether it might even prove susceptible to pressure for a settlement freeze and the dismantling of homes.

Will the man who chose not to firmly oppose the Gaza disengagement until it was too late to stop it, now seek a hard-to-discern middle path on security and negotiation? How will he reconcile pressures from the Obama administration, on one side, and the hawks on his own Knesset list, on the other? Does he have a clear goal in terms of Israel's permanent contours, or will his be a reactive prime ministership, defined by the pressures placed upon him at home and abroad and his ability to maneuver, short-term, between them?

Likewise, I don't know if Kadima, in the unlikely event of its continued primacy, is bent on accelerating the negotiations its outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been conducting with the Mahmoud Abbas-led Palestinian Authority, in which Olmert was desperately striving to reach an accord on all areas of dispute, involving unprecedented readiness for territorial compromise. Or whether Kadima's new leader, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, would adopt a more cautious approach, notably as regards the fate of Jerusalem. Or whether a more hawkish stance, as set out by her defeated party leadership rival Shaul Mofaz, would prevail.

Then there's Labor, the party that, at Camp David in 2000 and in the subsequent final months of president Clinton's administration, sought and failed to achieve a permanent agreement with the Yasser Arafat-led PA. I don't know whether, even as a junior coalition partner, it would push for further concessions than those considered by Barak back then. Those concessions, it will be recalled, fell some way short of the parameters apparently contemplated by Olmert in recent months. Labor in the years up to and including Camp David, after all, confidently predicted that it would be able to reach a permanent accommodation with the PA while expanding Israeli sovereignty into five, 10 or more percent of the West Bank.

And finally, there is Israel Beiteinu, enjoying a dramatic rise in the polls by playing on rising Israeli Jewish concerns over deepening Arab hostility. I don't know how seriously it would seek to press its trademark demand for a remaking of Israel's sovereign borders, to redraw the line so that predominantly Arab areas adjacent to the West Bank border in northern Israel were redesignated as part of a Palestinian state, in return for the annexation by Israel of parts of Judea and Samaria with a heavy settlement presence.

Since our politicians have refused, entirely predictably, to reform our dismal electoral system, and we are thus condemned to further years of multi-party paralysis - excuse me, multi-party government - this already muddy picture will be further confused by the conflicting goals of the coalition partners.

And, yes, Israel will be the loser.

ISRAEL'S OFFICIAL public relations head honchos are feeling rather pleased with their performance during Operation Cast Lead. They note, accurately, that articulate spokespeople were made available to set out Israel's case in a variety of languages as the conflict unfolded.

They note that when the IDF killed 30 or more civilians at a UN school in Jabalya on January 6, the heavy civilian loss of life did not prove a turning point that massively exacerbated international criticism and constrained ongoing military action - in contrast to a similar incident during the war against Hizbullah in 2006. The difference, this time, was that the IDF Spokesman produced a chapter-and-verse response almost immediately, including the contention that a Hamas mortar battery had fired on the IDF, the names of two Hamas operatives purportedly killed in the return fire and footage of fire from the same school area in 2007.

But such "achievements" notwithstanding, any official Israeli PR contentment is wildly misplaced. Israel achieved impressive, if limited, military success against Hamas, confronting, though still not yet entirely halting, the rocket fire, while keeping IDF losses to a minimum and enjoying the backing of an efficiently marshalled home front. The portents are not good, but the jury is necessarily still out on the efficacy of the much-touted new mechanisms to prevent Hamas from rearming and strengthening.

But overall, on the media-diplomacy battlefield, Israel suffered a stinging defeat. Its legitimate insistence that Hamas brought disaster down upon the people of Gaza has not widely resonated. Its legitimate assertion that it sought to minimize civilian fatalities - pursuing pinpoint targets and warning locals to leave areas that were about to be attacked - when fighting an enemy that had ruthlessly placed Gaza civilians in the line of fire, is widely dismissed.