Q. How does the election of Amir Peretz as leader of the Labor Party affect the Israeli electoral scene and the prospects for progress with the Palestinians?

A. It almost certainly accelerates the countdown to new elections in Israel. To what extent, if at all, it will generate new momentum with the Palestinians is a function of Peretz's political fortunes in the coming months.

Peretz brings to the Labor party a cohesive and comprehensive political philosophy that favors the lower socio-economic strata and an Oslo- or Geneva-style peace process. He argues that support for Likud's policies among the development town Sephardic Jewish periphery is a direct result of its impoverishment, which Likud's radical free market policies have deepened in recent years with the connivance of the Likud's coalition partners from Labor. Poverty and hawkishness, Peretz states, are two faces of the same problem. He wants to pull Labor out of the ruling coalition immediately and lead it in early elections against the Likud. His defeat of Shimon Peres in the primary, his youth and earthy charisma all resulted in a dramatic leap for Labor in the post-primary opinion polls, from 20 to 28 mandates, with the additional mandates drawn from Meretz, Shas and Shinui. Peretz's fellow Labor MKs, nearly all of whom opposed his election, are now technically obliged to honor the political strategy of the elected head of the party and its candidate for prime minister.

PM Sharon, whose Likud party was in any event teetering on the brink of elections and even fragmentation, may maneuver to try and delay the decision in the Knesset for a few weeks. But Labor will no longer support Sharon's budget, and can probably muster a majority in favor of dissolving the Knesset. Sharon may be encouraged to move quickly into elections by the effect Peretz's election has had on the Likud: there are indications that the party's "rebels", who have consistently opposed Sharon since he first developed the disengagement policy, now feel impelled to rally round him and generate party unity precisely because Peretz presents such a radically different platform. While Likud loses no votes to Peretz's Labor in the post-primary opinion polls, Likud leaders like Sylvan Shalom have expressed concern that Peretz will erode support for the right in general among Sephardic/eastern voters and down-and-out new immigrants and retirees, and attract Arab votes as well to Labor. And if Sharon is still tempted to slam the door on his Likud detractors and form a new center party, perhaps with the disappointed Peres, he must now recognize that the energetic 52 year old Peretz will make it look like a geriatric club.

Peretz, former mayor of Sderet in the northwest Negev near Gaza, won the primary by galvanizing some 28,000 votes, mainly from lower income Laborites, and by exploiting the organizational infrastructure of the Histadrut, which he heads, against a lackluster campaign by Shimon Peres, the perennial "loser". But at the national level, Peretz's policies will not be easy for a Labor campaign to sell.

Some of his economic demands--raising minimal wage, increasing subsidies, enlarging the deficit and increasing taxes--are the exact opposite of what Binyamin Netanyahu as finance minister instituted in recent years in leading the country to impressive economic growth rates, and appear to many economic commentators and industrialists as a throwback to a discredited economic era. Peretz's boosters, including industrialist Beni Gaon, counter that he is a social-democrat in the Blair mold, and point to the need to reverse the impoverishment of the lower socio-economic strata that has given Israel the largest income gap between rich and poor in the developed world. Peretz's demand to move budgets away from defense, settlement building and road development in the territories and into the development towns, the Arab sector and education are reminiscent of the late Yitzhak Rabin, and could prove a vote-getter.

This brings us to the peace process, where overall Peretz's positions are reminiscent of Amram Mitzna, who lost so decisively to Sharon in January 2003 (and who just quit politics in disgust). Peretz wants to reopen peace negotiations with the PA/PLO immediately, regardless of terrorism, and believes he can reach a Geneva-type agreement. Will this position have more voter appeal against Sharon in early 2006, now that Sharon has embraced disengagement and the security fence, than it did three years earlier, when he basically had no initiative at all to offer voters? Polls indicate that as many as 25 percent of Labor voters are now planning to vote for Sharon, and Peretz will be hard put to win them back.

Peretz's election is undoubtedly a dramatic departure in Israeli politics. For the first time, a major party will be led by an authentic representative of the "second Israel", a Moroccan-born Jew from a development town (Peretz was preceded at the helm of Labor by Binyamin Ben Eliezer, an Iraq-born Jew, but his credentials were essentially in the security sphere). Peretz is charismatic, and a seasoned politician. As head of the Histadrut he restored the labor union's credentials as a canny campaigner for workers' rights. His left wing views are far more acceptable to Israel's lower socio-economic strata, many of whom have become "tribal" Likud voters, than the Ashkenazic, Tel Aviv-based traditional leadership of Labor and Meretz. He leads a modest life-style and can effectively attack government corruption, from Sharon on down. He projects the "fire in the belly", the "killer instinct" needed to win an election. His backers argue that the Labor establishment fears him because he intends to bring much-needed new faces into the party's electoral lineup, and that the traditional Labor leadership is arrogant, bordering on racist, and the voters know it; Peretz declares he will exorcise the "racist demon" from Israeli politics.

Peretz's critics point out that he has virtually no political experience at the national level, none of the "essential" security background usually valued by voters, and no university education. He will be opposed by the security establishment (present and retired) and by powerful business interests. Some fellow left-wingers claim he displayed dictatorial tendencies in the Histadrut and abused that organization to "persuade" members to vote for him, and still got only a plurality (42 percent) of the votes in the primary. Yossi Beilin, an old political comrade-in-arms, says bitterly of Peretz as Histadrut leader: "before you represent the right positions you need to be a human being". His policies, his critics argue, are an anachronistic disaster; he will crash worse than Mitzna did, leaving Sharon firmly in power. Ehud Barak predicts that elections led by Peretz will render Labor little more than a 10 MK "boutique" party. In this regard Peretz may be hard put to gain the approval of the Labor Central Committee to pull the party out of the government.

Will Israel's next, post-election governing coalition be more dovish than the outgoing one thanks to Peretz's positions? This will depend to a large extent on how Labor under Peretz fares in the elections, whether Peretz wins over his many critics from within the party's traditional leadership and, indeed, whether he would join a coalition as junior partner (he avows he will not). Meanwhile, for the next six months or so, a lively election campaign will dominate Israeli life, and progress with the Palestinians will be minimal at best.

Q. How will the suicide bombings at three Amman hotels last week affect Israeli and American strategic interests?

A. By influencing Jordan's policies, these bombings could conceivably affect the country's relations with the US and Israel, with which it has close strategic alliances.

It was not surprising that al Qaeda/Iraq targeted Jordan last week. It has been trying for some time now; on August 19 of this year it fired missiles from Aqaba against US ships in the harbor (one went astray, into Eilat) in an abortive attack, and it was just a matter of time until it succeeded. The attack was but one facet of an extremely complex relationship between Jordan and Iraq.

Jordan is predominantly a Sunni Arab country, and many Jordanians tend to sympathize with the loss of power by their fellow Sunnis in Iraq and to applaud the terrorist exploits of Iraqi al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. About 300,000 Iraqis took refuge in Jordan during the Gulf wars against Iraq, and many are seen as a kind of Sunni, pro-Saddam fifth column. King Abdullah and his regime, on the other hand, cooperate closely with American intelligence and operational efforts against the Iraqi Sunni uprising, to the extent that Jordan is seen by many in the Arab world as a "CIA base". It has also become a commercial base for trade and development in Iraq: a safer place from which to do business in nearby Baghdad than Baghdad itself.

To further convolute the issues, Abdullah has publicly warned the US against enfranchising the Iraqi Shi'ite majority, for fear of a "Shi'ite arc" emerging on Jordan's borders, embracing Iran, Iraq, Syria (whose Alawite rulers are an offshoot of Shi'a Islam) and Hizballah in Lebanon.

Zarqawi's attack on the three hotels in Amman, then, was intended as a signal to the hostile Jordanian regime rather than to the relatively sympathetic Jordanian population. In taking credit for the attack, Qaeda stated that Jordan became a target because it was "a backyard garden for the enemies of the religion, Jews and crusaders. . . a filthy place for the traitors. . . and a center for prostitution", and that the attack was intended to put the United States on notice that the "backyard camp for the crusader army is now in the range of fire of the holy warriors".

At least in the short term this Qaeda strategy appears to have backfired: the attacks had the effect of generating anger at Zarqawi for deliberately targeting fellow Muslims, and enhancing support for the regime. The latter is responding with a sharp crackdown on pro-Iraqi Sunni activists in Jordan, and can be expected to increase its intelligence cooperation with the US and possibly with Israel as well, in an effort to ensure domestic stability. Jordan, a weak state with a problematic demographic base surrounded by more powerful neighbors, tends to gravitate toward the more friendly of those neighbors when threatened on another front. In this case, Israel qualifies as a friend.

One additional aspect of the attack that was apparently unanticipated by Zarqawi is that it focused on Palestinians rather than on the western hotel guests who were presumably targeted: the three hotels are all owned by Jordanians of Palestinian extraction; the wedding party where most of the casualties were suffered was attended by many Palestinians from the West Bank. One village near Jenin recorded 17 dead in the attack, and four prominent West Bankers, including two senior security officials, were among the dead. Here the immediate effect has been a black mark for suicide terrorism in general, along with an enhancement in West Bank-East Bank solidarity. The latter development dovetails with increasing discussion in Jordan of the possibility of renewing closer political cooperation between Palestine and the Hashemite Kingdom.

Finally, this attack serves notice that the Qaeda terrorist front is gradually expanding out of Iraq as a result of the US occupation and is moving closer to the West Bank, with all this may imply for Israel's own fight against radical Islamist terrorism.