No one ever said that Ben-Gurion was a nice guy. But even his opponents tend to agree that it is unlikely there would have been a Jewish state without the Old Man.

"If any of the subsequent prime ministers were to have been in Ben-Gurion's place in 1948, we wouldn't have a state today," says Eppelbaum.

Ben-Gurion taught us, he says, that "not everyone can be prime minister." Meaning, he set such a high standard that his was a very hard act to follow.

So, hard, in fact, that Levi Eshkol suggested that Moshe Sharett go next. He did. And B-G had to be called back from retirement to "save" the country.

His accomplishments were on a grand scale. He brought Israel through the 1948 War of Independence. Bolshevik-style, he cracked down on political opponents outside Labor (communists, Jabotinskyites and Arabs), all the while dominating Labor (and therefore Israel) well into Eshkol's term.

Ben-Gurion was a bulldozer. He usually got what he wanted.

He opened highly divisive negotiations with Germany on Holocaust reparations. Opponents, led by Menachem Begin, rioted outside the Knesset; hundreds were injured.

But Ben-Gurion's policy brought - starting in 1952 - millions of desperately needed German deutschmarks to build the state. ("Blood money," Begin called it.)

B-G also set the course for the country's security policy: Fedayeen attacks would seldom go unanswered.

What kind of man was he? Tough, hard, humorless - not a people person.

"Although he inspires hero worship, there is little warmth in his relationship with those around him," his biographer Robert St. John wrote.

Eppelbaum puts it this way: "We needed a dictator. We had a dictator." The quintessential right man at the right time.

Moshe Sharett (Shertok)

Who knew from Moshe Sharett? He was the William Howard Taft of prime ministers. Like the obscure US president, who followed a much better known predecessor, we might vaguely know the name, but not much else.

But the "new" historians have resurrected Sharett's memory, arguing that he was more inclined to pursue peace with the Arabs than others in Labor's ruling elite. He understood them, and spoke their language fluently (plus seven others), the result of his having spent some of his early years living in Samaria.

He believed that, far from being warlike, the Arabs tended mostly to respond to Israeli aggressiveness.

In The Iron Wall, Avi Shlaim writes that Sharett "viewed the Arabs as a people and not just as an enemy - a 'proud and sensitive' people... [who] have 'extremely subtle understanding and delicate senses.' "

By any stretch of the imagination, Sharett was not a trigger-happy prime minister. Take the events of the night of March 16, 1954. An Eilat-bound bus was attacked by Arab infiltrators from the West Bank. Eleven passengers were slaughtered.

How would Israel respond?

Sharett declared: "A retaliatory operation in reaction to such a bloodbath would only diminish the terrible impact of the murder, and put us on the same level as the murderers."

In those instances when he would order retaliation, the response would be limited in scope. This stance had so little support in the military establishment that Sharett sometimes learned about retaliations only after the fact.

Using sound bites that Peres would popularize in the Oslo era, Sharett asked a Hebrew University audience: "Are we going to launch war, or do we intend to promote peace?"

As prime minister, he was even willing to consider "safe passage" for Palestinian Arabs from Egyptian-held Gaza to the Jordanian-held West Bank.

"I have finally obtained independence," he wrote on his first day in office - from Ben-Gurion, he meant.

Sharett won some political battles against Ben-Gurion but ultimately lost the war. The Old Man "un-retired" and became Sharett's defense minister in February 1955. Three months later, Sharett had to concede the No. 1 slot back to Ben-Gurion.

Levi Eshkol

Levi Eshkol was the LBJ of Israeli politics: A wealth of behind-the-scenes political experience; outstanding one-on-one people skills, but a terrible public speaker, and a media flop.

Fortunately for Eshkol, when he took over from Ben-Gurion in June 1963, Sharett had already served the role of "failed successor."

Not that Eshkol was home free. His biographer Terence Prittie says that he faced "violent" hostility from Ben-Gurion.

Still, compared to Sharett, Eshkol was far more competent in dealing with Ben-Gurion's intrigues.

Eshkol "taught us how to be a prime minister," says Eppelbaum. An excellent administrator, he was a career nation-builder, responsible for hundreds of settlements and kibbutzim.

Yet, his decision-making style led Yigal Allon to quip: "When Dayan is hesitating, his admirers say that he is thinking; but when Eshkol is thinking, his critics say that he is hesitating."

Eshkol was the "most Jewish" of the prime ministers, Eppelbaum says. He had Yiddish, not just as a language but as part of his cultural worldview.

While he was as manipulative as the next politician, he was essentially a mensch who could laugh at himself.

He led the country through the 1967 Six Day War. After the war, he said: "We shall never return to the conditions prevailing before." He was, however, ready to make concessions along the lines of the Allon Plan: "The river Jordan," Eshkol declared, "must be a 'security border' for us."

He was the only PM to die in office of natural causes. He suffered a fatal heart attack on the morning of February 26, 1969.

Eppelbaum doesn't give Eshkol the highest possible rating because he abandoned the idea of "land for peace." That, to Eppelbaum's way of thinking, makes him a tad too far to the Right.

Golda Meir

Golda, Eppelbaum says, "taught us that not every leader can be a prime minister."

Maybe. But many American Jews liked her no-nonsense persona. And they were downright proud of her perfect English, kvelling when she appeared on Face the Nation.

The native-born Eppelbaum pokes fun at her failure to master Hebrew, by quoting Abba Eban: "She has a Hebrew vocabulary of 400 words. Why does she only use 200 of them?"

To hear Golda tell it, she was a retired foreign minister living on a pension when, in 1969, the country prevailed upon her.

Aged 70, she had recently relocated from Jerusalem to a comfortable flat near her family in Tel Aviv.

Eshkol's sudden death caught Labor unprepared for a succession battle. Rivals Allon, Dayan and Pinhas Sapir each wanted to replace Eshkol; party bigwigs sought a temporary, compromise candidate, and Golda was seen as a perfect custodian.

She writes: "I honestly didn't want the responsibility, the awful stress and strain of being prime minister. I became prime minister because that was how it was, in the same way that my milkman became an officer in command of an outpost on Mount Hermon. Neither of us had any particular relish for the job, but we both did it as well as we could."

Eppelbaum says Golda didn't do us any favors. Her personality made her unsuitable for office. She was authoritarian, intolerant and inflexible. "Overly conservative," he says disdainfully.

That's also the line Shlaim takes in The Iron Wall: "The differences in temperament between Golda Meir and Levi Eshkol were very striking. She was a fighter; he was a man of compromise. She was dogmatic and domineering; he was open-minded and often hesitant. She was intransigent; he was flexible."

Golda may have been closed-minded, but she certainly took advice from one quarter with disastrous consequences.

"On Friday, October 5 [1973], we received a report that worried me. The families of the Russian advisers in Syria were packing up and leaving in a hurry. It reminded me of what had happened prior to the Six Day War, and I didn't like it at all."

But when she checked with Dayan, and IDF Chief of General Staff David Elazar, they told her not to worry.

"How could it be that I was still so terrified of war breaking out when the present chief of staff, two former chiefs of staff [in her cabinet] and the head of intelligence were far from sure that it would? Today I know what I should have done. I should have overcome my hesitations" and ordered a full-scale IDF mobilization.

She should have. The war cost Israel 2,838 dead and some 8,800 wounded.

Eppelbaum credits Golda with few accomplishments. Hebrew University Professor Yehezkel Dror agrees with Eppelbaum that Golda was probably our "worst" prime minister.

Dror says she failed to appreciate the importance of the Palestinian element and ignored the ethnic divide inside Israel that led to the creation of Israel's Black Panther movement.

Her blackest mark, as far as the Left is concerned, was her attitude toward the Palestinians. Her views about them, according to Shlaim, were formed in the pre-Independence period and had hardly changed. He quotes her as saying: "It is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people, and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them... They did not exist."

Yitzhak Rabin

You can't say "we hardly knew ya" of Yitzhak Rabin. Thanks to the media spotlight - the White House ceremony with Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton comes vividly to mind - Rabin was one of the world's best recognized leaders.

He may also have been the least understood.

His murder leaves us asking "what if?" What if he had not been assassinated? What if he had tried to reach out to his political opponents instead of ostracizing them? What if he had lived to implement Oslo by insisting on reciprocity?

Rabin is less well remembered for his first term. The clearest recollection many people have relates to Entebbe, when terrorists hijacked an Air France airliner to Idi Amin's Uganda. Rabin ordered the historic July 4, 1976, rescue.

Nine months later, he was gone, quitting over an illegal bank account his wife, Leah, maintained in the US.

It would take him 15 years to climb his way back to the top.

By the time he did, the scoop on Rabin was that he was a "Labor hawk." He was the Dwight Eisenhower of Israeli politics - a general turned colorless politician.

Eisenhower surprised Americans when he broke with the armed forces lobby to warn of a US "military industrial complex."

Rabin's decision to overturn long-standing policy and get on board the Oslo Express was an even more radical about-face.

We do not know whether Rabin was in on Oslo from the start. That's what Arab players like Abu Ala believed. That's also the view of historian Shlaim.

In any event, on the morning of September 10, 1993, Rabin initialed a document recognizing the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Because Rabin played his cards so close to the chest, as Eppelbaum says, we'll never know the process that brought him to the determination that the strategic clock was running against Israel; that the PLO - now on its last legs in Tunis - had to, somehow, be manipulated into offsetting a malignant Islamic fundamentalism that was taking root in the West Bank and Gaza.

Abba Eban found Rabin inscrutable.

Was he a closet leftist? In Personal Witness Eban recalls joining Eshkol in wondering - back in 1968 - whether Rabin would make a suitable ambassador to the US. Eshkol was worried that Rabin's heart was not with the Mapai faction of Labor but with the more left-wing and Marxist Ahdut Ha'avoda. By 1992 Eban was wondering if Rabin was a closet right-winger because of his "platform of castigatory menace toward our Arab neighbors."

Rabin's method of decision-making may have left people wondering, but on a personal level things were straightforward.

Not a charismatic personality, he was abrasive to the core. Says Eban: "He was the sort of man who, if anyone stopped him in the street and asked him politely for the time of day, might well reply, 'Why don't you buy a watch?' "

Henry Kissinger adds: "Rabin had many extraordinary qualities, but the gift of human relations was not one of them."

Eppelbaum looks for a balance. Behind that brusque exterior, he says, was a "good heart."

After Rabin's assassination on November 4, 1995, by an anti-Oslo fanatic, he was practically canonized by supporters.

Eppelbaum's assessment is less worshipful. Rabin was a politically ambitious player, suspicious and doctrinaire in his outlook.

Interestingly, in weighing Rabin's accomplishments, Eppelbaum points foremost to the first term: The 1975 interim agreements with Syria and Egypt; ending the recession; and advancing social legislation.

Menachem Begin

If Sharett was a name most Diaspora Jews hadn't heard of, Menachem Begin's was the name most Diaspora leaders and Israeli elites didn't want to hear.

He was the Barry Goldwater of Israeli politics. Honest. Earnest. Dangerous.

From the creation of the state, the Labor Party (in one form or another) monopolized the political system. But in a surprise upset, in 1977, the former IZL commander and perennial opposition leader became prime minister.

The foreign press was horrified.

Time helpfully instructed its readers to pronounce Begin's name by rhyming it with the loathsome Dickens character Fagin. Newsweek called Begin a zealot and fundamentalist. The New York Times called him "hard-line."

There would be no honeymoon for Begin with Jimmy Carter's administration. Yet Carter, like everyone else, was stunned when on November 20, 1977, Egypt's Anwar Sadat broke a 29-year-long taboo and set foot in Israel.

The prospect of peace with Egypt was met with rage. The Palestinians in particular unleashed a wave of devastating attacks. One of the worst took place on Shabbat afternoon, March 13, 1978, when 11 PLO terrorists landed off the coast near Caesarea and killed 37 Israelis, wounding 76.

Yet, despite this difficult environment, never had a prime minister faced a less supportive Diaspora leadership. Behind the scenes, the Carter administration worked hard to "disassociate" the support American Jews might have for Israel from Begin's pro-settlement policies.

Begin also found himself in hot water with the Reagan administration. In June 1981 - 10 years before the Gulf war - he ordered the Air Force to destroy Saddam Hussein's atom-bomb factory near Baghdad. Begin called the bombing "an act of national self-defense."

Intense international condemnation followed. Even the US voted to condemn the air strike in the UN Security Council.

If Golda's tragedy was the Yom Kippur War, Begin's was the June 1982 Lebanon War.

The war started out as a reprisal against a terrorist attack, and with clearly defined goals: to stop Arab terrorist assaults like the ones against Ma'alot and Kiryat Shmona, and rocket attacks on Galilee coming from Fatah-land in south Lebanon.

Israel achieved most of its initial strategic goals.

The infrastructure of the terrorist network was smashed. But Israel over-reached, not stopping when it was ahead.

With the assassination of Israel's ally, Christian warlord Bashir Jemayel, the entire Lebanon campaign unraveled. Christian Arab paramilitary forces slaughtered some 300 innocent Palestinians in an area that was nominally under IDF control.

The media blamed the Jews and Israel's image took a further beating. Israel's missteps also turned the Shi'ites of south Lebanon against it. While the PLO itself had been banished from Lebanon, the war (now against Shi'ite Moslem fundamentalists) turned into a quagmire that sapped Israeli lives and resolve.

On August 28, 1983, Begin told an astounded cabinet: "I cannot go on," and left the room.

He did not explain the decision, though observers said he was emotionally distraught over the death, several months earlier, of his beloved wife, Aliza, and the rising casualty figures for IDF soldiers in Lebanon.

Whatever the reasons, Begin retreated to his home and became reclusive for the remainder of his life.

Yuval Elizur and Eliahu Salpeter, in Who Rules Israel, describe Begin as "a rarity" among Israeli politicians. "When the state was proclaimed, Begin emerged from the underground and called on his followers to obey the laws of Israel," despite the fact that his bitter foes would have a stranglehold on state power.

Only when the Knesset debated the reparations agreement with West Germany did he come close to urging revolt.

He lost, quit politics, and went into self-imposed exile in Switzerland for six months.

His "fiery oratory" was in complete contrast to his extremely polite manner and considerate personality. As a party leader, he tended to be autocratic. But as a national leader he was a democrat, and a defender of law and justice.

Begin's biggest accomplishment, says Eppelbaum, was the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, and the bombing of Iraq's nuclear facility. His most grievous failure was the Lebanon war.

Yitzhak Shamir

Yitzhak Shamir is the George Smiley of Israeli politics. Like the character in the John Le Carré spy novels, Shamir spent most of his career in the shadows.

He was a leader of the underground Lehi and later a Mossad operative. Like Smiley, Shamir cultivated a nondescript image. But unlike the plump Smiley, the diminutive Shamir is ascetic and, even compared to Smiley, taciturn.

Shamir doesn't even have his own entry in the 1974 Encyclopaedia Judaica.

His modus operandi is understatement, as in this description of reaching the top spot: "When the time came for someone to be chosen to take Begin's place my name came up. The people who proposed me were those who, several years earlier, had recommended that I be appointed foreign minister. I myself said nothing."

Shamir is an ideological true-believer; steadfastly holding the line against criticism from the Left.

He nurtured settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, but backed the GSS when it cracked a ring of 25 vigilante settlers who conspired to blow up Arab passenger buses.

After Ben-Gurion, Shamir turned out to be the longest-serving prime minister.

Eppelbaum can't help but admire Shamir's survival skills.

His restraint kept Israel out of the Gulf war, saving the anti-Iraq coalition. Shamir also gets credit from Eppelbaum for delivering Israel to the Madrid Conference. "He understood that it is impossible not to talk to the other side."

The seventh prime minister was not a party animal. "In private life, I also lived by rules I had learned long ago under different circumstances. I ate little, didn't smoke, hardly drank though I had once appreciated a brandy, went on long walks whenever conditions permitted and, thanks to [his wife] Shulamit's forbearance, came home daily for a lunch and nap, returning to the office till evening."

Though not observant, Shamir, like Begin, was always respectful of Jewish tradition. Shamir took no calls on the Sabbath, reserving the day for family and privacy.

It's too early to tell how Sharon's premiership will play out, and hard to believe that Barak, Netanyahu and Peres have truly given up all hope for a return to the top spot. Eppelbaum considers Netanyahu bright but lazy; says Barak could yet make a good leader if he learned from his mistakes, and not surprisingly given their ties, thinks Peres, though egotistical, is an extraordinary politician.

Having looked at the careers of the prime ministers who are no longer on the scene, and with misgivings about the comeback wanna-bes, what characteristics should the next batch of prime ministers bring to office?

The answers now seem obvious: solid administrative skills, superior intelligence, emotional stability, a knack for working with people, the ability to persuade through the media and high ethical standards.

We want someone affable but not mercurial.

Who is that person?

So, before we part, I ask Eppelbaum who would make a good prime minister?

"Let's pray that the Sharon-Peres team has longevity," he answers.