His successor, Mr Olmert, faced strong criticism of his handling of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war and he was investigated in several corruption scandals.
Stopping or drastically reducing Palestinian rocket fire will be the political touchstone of this military campaign, as it was in the month-long war between Israel and Hizbullah, Lebanon's well-armed Shia movement, in the summer of 2006.
Both sides -- Israel and Lebanon -- campaign and rouse support based on the 2006 war.
In early 1996, after the last time Israel offered Syria the entire Golan Heights for peace, Syrian-backed factions in Lebanon unleashed a volley of Katyushas on Israel, which led Israel to launch a mini-war.
Indeed, to the extent that radical Islam grew stronger during this encounter, it was not the Sunni zealots of al-Qaeda who benefited but their rival pretenders to leadership of the Muslim world: notably the Shia leaders of Iran and, after the 33-day war with Israel in 2006, Iran's Hizbullah co-religionists in Lebanon.
In 2006, the UN reported that some 720 Somali jihadists aligned with al-Qaida fought with Hizbullah in Lebanon during its war against Israel.
The Kadima-led leftist government was unable to secure European support for Israel in the Second Lebanon War.
In his soon-to-step-down speech on July 30th, he skated over the Lebanon war but referred obliquely to Israel's bombing of an alleged nuclear facility in Syria last September.
Israel, in its 2006 retaliation against Hezbollah, and the all-out war with Lebanon that followed.
Expressing utmost concern at the spiralling deadly violence and destruction in Lebanon, the Security Council today called for a full cessation of hostilities in the month-long war between Israel and Hizbollah, mapping out a formula for the phased withdrawal of the Israel Defence Forces from southern Lebanon, while up to 15, 000 United Nations peacekeepers help Lebanese troops take control of the area.
Their second goal - and perhaps Olmert's primary objective - was to erase the public's memory of Israel's strategic failure in the Second Lebanon War.
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