Soon you will take the measure of the new prime minister of Israel. You will surely hear how the premier views the present and the future. But what you will need to know, at bottom, is how the new leader of Israel looks at history and specifically his or her place in it.

You will know. If, when you meet the new premier, you do not sense an all-consuming fire in the gut, a willingness to give everything-literally, if need be, life itself-to the cause of peacemaking and a shift in the very core of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, you will know that the supremely hazardous steps vital for a true peace will not be taken during the term of this premiership.

It is this fire of prophecy-the compulsion to bend (in fact, to render straight) the course of history-that transformed Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, Ariel Sharon, and Yitzhak Rabin, all of whom were once viewed as implacable hawks and immutable hardliners. In each case, the personal price of changing a worldview for the sake of peace was horrible. But, in each case, they willingly and with sweeping leadership took on the mission, along with the risk.

Oddly, the crucial question is not whether it will be Tzipi Livni or Benjamin Netanyahu, Kadima or Likud. The Likud Party, founded on the right-wing revisionist principles on which both Netanyahu and Livni were raised from infancy, has been home to the most dramatic, the most unforeseen transformations in Israeli political history. It remains the only party to have uprooted established settlements (scores of them) in Sinai, Gaza, and the West Bank. Having once ruled out any concessions of land for peace, it is Likud alone that has pulled Israel out of more than 90 percent of the land captured in the 1967 war.

This is not to suggest that either Israelis or Palestinians still believe in the straightforward equation of land for peace. The heritage of the 2005 disengagement for Gaza is a sad one. Israelis have come to sense that if they cede land, they will be rewarded by rocket attacks. Palestinians have come to conclude that even if Israel pulls settlements and troops from occupied land, the travails of occupation will not abate.

At the same time, upheavals over the last decade, while setting back peace efforts in the short run, have also broken down long-established impediments to peace moves and may pave the way to a future solution.

Intifada, the disengagement, the Hamas-Fatah street civil war, and the death of Yasir Arafat have all contributed to a profound realignment of the political structure both in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The challenge of your administration is to look at both sides with fresh eyes; to avoid the inevitable sinkholes; to seize and expand on unforeseen events as new openings; and to recognize when a particular conjunction of cynical pragmatism, out-of-the-box imagination and determined leadership can be leveraged into progress toward a solution.

Israelis and Palestinians will be closely monitoring your work toward resolving the wars in Iran and Afghanistan, managing the confrontation with Tehran, and defining relations with Damascus.

You will know soon enough if Israel's new leader has the stuff to value a place in history over position in opinion polls. If the answer is yes, your administration will have resources unavailable to your predecessors.

Thanks to the flawed but nonetheless astonishing precedent of the disengagement, and to George W. Bush's explicit endorsement of two states for two peoples, there is bipartisan support for the core concepts of a future peace deal based on the removal of settlers to Green Line-hugging settlement blocs and exchange of territory.

In the wake of the failure of terrorism and rocket attacks, and widespread Palestinian horror at the excesses of Hamas fighters in their 2006 campaign to oust Fatah from Gaza, recent polls have shown new openness by Palestinians to accommodation with Israel. Hamas, as well, has inched toward support for an arrangement that could allow it to accept a Palestine along 1967 borders.

Israel, meanwhile, has said officially that it was prepared to treat seriously-albeit with alterations-the Arab League initiative for a comprehensive peace based on full recognition of Israel in return for a full withdrawal to pre-1967 war borders.

One more thing.

As a calamitous decade in Mideast peacemaking comes to an end, it remains the case that most people on both sides still favor peace, though few on either side still believe in it.

Speak to them. Speak to them directly. Rely less on White House formalities and airport ceremonies and the entire shopworn summer stock repertoire of visits here and there.

You've shown you know how to run a campaign. Run one here in the Middle East. By satellite, by cable, online. Speak to people in their homes. Bring them a message of real hope.

They'll listen to you. Both sides.

They want to hear what you have to say.

Bradley Burston is a columnist for Haaretz Newspaper and Senior Editor of Haaretz.com. He is a recipient of the Eliav-Sartawi Award for Mideast Journalism, presented at the United Nations in 2006.