As a caretaker prime minister, Olmert will try to keep those talks alive and bequeath a flurry of regional diplomacy to his successor.
The prospects are good. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to return to the Mideast this month to keep working with Israeli and Palestinian Authority negotiators. Hamas, the Islamic militant Palestinian group that runs Gaza, appears interested in upholding a month-old cease-fire and getting many of its prisoners freed in exchange for captured Israeli soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit.
The peace talks Olmert launched with Syria, through Turkish mediators, enjoy the backing of Israel's military and could progress further if the next U.S. administration supports them as well.
But the survival of his peace agenda depends too on the cohesion and direction of Kadima, the centrist party that Olmert helped his mentor, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, start in 2005 by breaking away from the right-wing Likud.
Sharon's debilitating stroke thrust Olmert unexpectedly into the top job. As acting prime minister, he managed Kadima's victory in the March 2006 parliamentary elections and won a four-year term. Until that breakthrough, Israel's politics had been sharply polarized between the dovish Labor Party and the hawkish Likud.
Under Olmert's guidance, however, Kadima has shown ideological strains that could break it apart.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is running for party chairman in a Sept. 17 primary against Shaul Mofaz, a more hawkish former defense minister. Olmert says he'll resign after the party vote, allowing the winner an opportunity to form a new government.
If the next Kadima leader fails to do that, a general election will be held and probably will be won by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader and a critic of Israel's peace negotiations.
It was Olmert's stunning setback at the hands of Syrian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon two years ago that propelled his peace overtures to Syria and the Palestinians. Hezbollah's feat in holding off Israel's military for 34 days emboldened Hamas to increase its paramilitary arsenal in Gaza and step up its rocket attacks on southern Israel.
The two gravely wounded Israeli soldiers captured at the start of the Lebanon war came home in coffins last month in a swap for five Lebanese prisoners, bringing some closure to the conflict.
