The strike, which began at 4 p.m. Israeli time, will last until midnight. At midnight, employees will vote on whether to continue to the strike or go back to work.

The website is currently not being updated and the strike is expected to affect publication of both the English and Hebrew edition of Thursday’s newspaper. Friday's paper will not be affected.

A two and a half hour strike last week failed to produce desired results.

"It is regrettable that the union doesn't understand that something has happened in the newspaper industry that requires adapting expenditures to the reality of the business," said Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken. "The decision to strike will not strengthen Haaretz, but weaken it."

Looks like even in Israel, newspapers aren't immune to budget woes.

My friend tells me Carter had a focused forward expression, he was on a mission. "Do you think someone is going to try and knock him off?"

The concern reflects a couple of realities. At 82, Carter would seem to have found a spiritual model in one of the heroes of his book, Anwar Sadat, who, at Carter's urging, took on the orthodoxies in his own culture to sign a historic peace agreement, and who gave his life to do so. Carter is taking on the orthodoxies in his own culture, with the same sense of all or nothing.

The venom he is encountering on the Jewish right is staggering. Even I'm surprised. Marty Peretz has called him a Jew-hater. Shmuel Rosner, the Haaretz correspondent who not long ago rated American presidential candidates on the degree to which they ignored the Palestinian issue, with obliviousness being a positive, has branded him a likely antisemite. And in doing so, subscribed to the most parochial formulations offered by neoconservative Iraq-warrior Eliot Cohen.

When will the Jewish universalists in American life come forward? That is the great threat Carter poses to the parochial: that others will start to care. And a policy that has been commandeered by a small set of interests will at last become the business of the American people. A bestseller with the word "apartheid" in the title—we're getting closer and closer to the Elian Gonzales moment, the moment when the American people wake up and realize that a fanatical lobby is not representing America's best interest.

Again the real journalistic responsibility here is not to repeat the smears of the Rosners and Peretzes, but to examine the simple question: Is what Carter is saying of the Occupied Territories true? Having been there, I say it is.

He is also intellectually corrupt. When he says that America's biggest job is to reach "hearts and minds" across the Arab world and says that this is to be achieved by imposing democracy in Iraq, he has learned nothing from a bloody and horrifying experiment that has weakened America. He knows better. There's one thing that America can do tomorrow to reach hearts and minds across the Arab world, and that is to listen to what those Arabs say they want: for the U.S. to commit itself to a peace process in Israel/Palestine that will end the humiliation of the Palestinians and end attacks on Palestinians and Israelis. That commitment by American leaders might even help in the eventual stabilization of Iraq, indeed in reforming Islamic dictatorships.

Per Haaretz, the recent election has resulted in there being 13 Jews in Lieberman's club, our nation's most elite club, the Senate. That is 10 times the national percentage of Jews, 1.3 percent. This in spite of dire warnings from Gabriel Schoenfeld and Abraham Foxman about the return of anti-Semitism. These guys are simply wrong. The truth is that Americans like Jews in power, trust them with power. The great challenge to Jews in power is to recognize a reality in the Middle East that goes against the ideology of mainstream American Jewry, the Israel lobby, and most of the money that helped Lieberman rewin his seat: Palestinians have been too long denied the right to self-determination. (And the destruction of their hopes is corrupting Israel's soul...)

Something else about this debate is the roster. On one side are the inevitable Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. Joined now by Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Israeli foreign minister, who in his fine new book on the Arab-Israeli "tragedy" acknowledges the Zionists' "expulsions and atrocities" that resulted in ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948.

On the other side John Mearsheimer is joined now by the eloquent Rashid Khalidi and the redoubtable Tony Judt, who in a brilliant piece in Haaretz last spring described Israel as an indulged adolescent that refuses to grow up. (Though, witness Haaretz, the discourse on these issues in Israel is at a much higher level than ours). Expect the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis to be textured and expanded by the addition of an Arab and a Jew. To gain the psychological and geographical dimension that the authors, realist political scientists, were not able to supply. Their achievement in breaking the seal last March will only be magnified in this way. An event not to be missed!

Then the anti-tank rocket came bursting out of a nearby school, slamming into the tank’s right flank in between the gunner and his commander.

“There was a boom, flames and smoke,’’ recalled Corporal Mizrahi, the right side of his face peeling and shriveled from first-degree burns, his arm sewn up in several places from shrapnel and a bandage over the roof of his nose. “My whole face was covered in blood.”

Wheelchair-bound in the orthopedic ward of Haifa’s Rambam hospital, Corporal Mizrahi took consolation in the knowledge that the Merkava armor ultimately saved his life. Over the weekend, a four-man Merkava crew from his battalion was killed by a Hezbollah anti-tank missile.

Celebrated as one of the most heavily protected tanks in the world and the embodiment of the might of Israel’s ground forces, the Merkava tanks seemed to become practice targets over the last three weeks for Hezbollah anti-tank missile teams. And as a ceasefire went into effect this week, footage of smoke billowing from paralyzed Merkava tanks are likely to remain burned in the collective memory as one of the dominant images of a war gone awry.

“The tanks are a symbol in this war. In other conditions, 15 tanks could conquer a country,’’ said Eyal Hurwitz, a former infantry commando sent on special missions in Lebanon. “As an Israeli, I can’t bear to watch a tank exploding on live television. It kills us.”

At the end of a war considered by Israelis as a just fight for survival in which they were supposed to crush Hezbollah, the country turned inward with angry questions about why the army finished off a month of fighting in a disappointing stalemate.

In the middle of the war, Army Chief of Staff Dan Halutz sidelined the general overseeing the ground war in Lebanon, marking the first time in more than three decades that a general had been so publicly rebuked in the middle of a war. With the war over, General Halutz himself is on the firing line.

Avshalom Vilan, a Knesset member from the dovish Meretz party, was one of the first politicians to call for a state commission of investigation like the ones set up in the aftermath of debacles in the 1982 Lebanon war and the 1973 war.

“I can’t call it a failed war, because most of the time there wasn’t even a war, except for the last four days,’’ he said. “There was an operation here, and there was an operation there.”

A week into the fighting, Mr. Vilan—a stocky veteran of Israel’s Sayeret Matkal elite commando unit—joked with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that the military seemed to be taking its time.

“I told him, ‘Come on, I can’t remember a long war in the Middle East,’” he recalled. “There was an assumption that we are not limited in time, and that we have all the time we need.”

Among the myriad questions that await investigators is an explanation of just how the vaunted tank became so exposed to Hezbollah rocket fire.

Hebrew for “chariot,” the Merkava was first developed in the 1970’s by the legendary Gen. Israel Tal to ensure Israel’s superiority against rival ground forces from Egypt and Syria.

The tank was the first to be designed with its engine in the front, in order to absorb a head-on strike and protect its relatively small four-member crew. Today’s Merkavas come with a 105-millimeter cannon, two machine guns on the slab turret and a cruising speed of 50 miles an hour.

“Anyone who you talk to will say it affords greater protection to its crew than any tank in the world,’’ said Michael Oren, a military historian and senior fellow at the Shalem Center. “No tank is considered impenetrable, but it was considered Israel’s powerhouse. Here you have a tank that costs $2.5 million that is being taken out by a shell that costs $900.”

As the current conflict progressed, questions about the Merkava’s viability could even be overhead in the corridors of the Kirya, Israel’s Pentagon.

That’s partly because the tanks were operating in some of the worst possible terrain. At their strongest when dashing across flat sandy plains, the tanks in Lebanon were puttering around rocky slopes while navigating the back roads so as to stay off booby-trapped highways. And the slower the tanks, the more sluggish Israel’s ground operation against Hezbollah became.

It took Corporal Mizrahi’s crew about five hours to navigate the 15-mile trip from the Israeli border to the village of Kila.

“You always feel exposed, because it’s open territory,’’ he said. “There’s nothing much to do. They hide in these holes and jump out and open fire.”

Military experts say that Israeli intelligence knew ahead of time that the Iranian-backed Hezbollah fighters had gotten shipments of Russian- and French-made Sagger missiles.

What isn’t clear is whether Israel’s army knew how many missiles they would face, and or about the ace firing displayed by some Hezbollah missile teams.

“They knew where to fire and how to fire,” said Corporal Mizrahi.

The Israeli army declined to provide numbers for the tanks that were hit or destroyed, though the Ha’aretz newspaper last week estimated Hezbollah had struck at least 20 tanks.

To be sure, military planners anticipated heavy losses in a ground war in Lebanon, a factor that probably played a role in the much-criticized decision to wait until last week to widen the offensive. Was the vulnerability of the tanks part of that calculation?

Rafi Noy, a former brigadier general who oversaw ground operations in Lebanon, said that the tanks became exposed because they were deployed in far too few numbers.

“When it’s one tank against one group of rocket shooters, the tank is going to be very vulnerable, and it’s going to be easy to hit,” he said. “If you send dozens of tanks in, the same tank might still be vulnerable, but at least you can smother the group of rocket launchers.”

Whatever the reason for the failures, the realizations came too late, after three weeks of devastating losses.

Back at the hospital, Corporal Mizrahi reflected, picked dead skin away from his face, and talked about his Lebanon curtain call—a march to an evacuation helicopter in a flak jacket, underwear and boots—and the unfinished business left behind.

“There are cells that we never caught. If we had more people, we could have caught them,’’ he said. “Soldiers went in there and got injured without reaching the goal. The kidnapped soldiers didn’t return. Hezbollah can rearm. And the next time, they’ll have a better knowledge of how we fight.”

(I felt the same way about Israel when I read a leading politician's comments in the Jerusalem Post about why Israel turned down Syria's offers to make peace over the last few years: "'Why should we negotiate with the Syrians and give up territory when they are too weak to threaten us?' was the understandable reasoning behind our refusal to answer Bashar [al-Assad]'s repeated offers to sit down with us and negotiate peace." Israelis like to say Arabs are sore losers. Well Israel is a sore winner.)

The Forward editorial ends by boldly taking on the Israel lobby, saying that the U.S. has got to apply pressure for a regional peace. "Bush has been convinced by self-appointed spokesmen for Israel and the Jewish community that endless war is in Israel's interest," the Forward says. Well-said. The U.S. needs to wake up.

The piece echoes other critiques of Israel-U.S. relations in the last few months: the Walt-Mearsheimer bombshell on the Israel lobby, and Tony Judt's attack in Haaretz on "The Country That Wouldn't Grow Up."

The shock is that Bob Herbert is now saying something along these lines on the Times Op-Ed page, a place given to Tom Friedman's explanations of all Israel's choices and David Brooks's construction of camouflaged bunkers for fleeing neoconservatives. I admire Herbert's courage and hope he stays on message. Many Americans are confused and disturbed right now, and share his instincts. Herbert has done what a columnist should do, and told them how to think.

The piece generated enormous comment in the Israeli daily. Then yesterday it was published in the Financial Times in England. A provocative argument by an eminent professor (himself Jewish), which includes an extensive passage about American opinion of Israel—has it been published in the United States? I emailed Judt to ask him.

The Swiss, the Spanish, the English and the Israelis themselves are capable of hearing this argument. Not Americans. For "the usual considerations." If Israel is the country that hasn't grown up, we're the parent who's in denial.

"I am planning to run for Mayor in the 2009 elections," Adolfo Carrion tells the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Later in the piece, he does say he's backing Ferrer this year.