The first time I met Gabi Cohen was a week before Israel's May 17th national election. He was a man on a mission: to topple Israel's hardline Likud Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
A lifelong supporter of the rightwing Likud, Cohen had worked tirelessly in 1996 to help bring Netanyahu to power. But, he said, he'd had enough of the prime minister's lies, his poisonous rhetoric and his empty promises.
Cohen, born in a working-class neighbourhood, crossed the political lines and worked into the night in the southern Negev desert capital of Beersheva to put the leftwing Labour leader, Ehud Barak, in office.
I watched him jump to his feet, squealing jubilantly, as the TV exit polls on election night forecast a landslide Barak victory. The day after the election there was a message on my office answering machine. It was Cohen. "It's a new morning," he crowed. "The sun is shining. We're in power."
But Israel, it seems, is a country that devours its leaders. A little more than two months on - and only a month since Ehud Barak knitted together a coalition and took office - Cohen sounds like a spurned lover. "What about all his promises to help the poor?" he barks. "He's already putting up the price of bread."
On the phone from Beersheva, he tells me that Barak is already worse than Netanyahu. "With all the diplomatic activity it's as if he's selling the country, but none of us knows what the price is because he doesn't tell the nation what he's doing," he moans. "At least Bibi [Netanyahu] spoke to the people, told them his plans - even if he was lying!"
If Barak envisioned a 100-day grace period, he can forget any generosity of that magnitude. Israelis are forming opinions, and fast. Already he has been labelled a militarist for surrounding himself with a horde of former military men; a Napoleon for his one-man, solo style; and a sexist, because there is only one woman in his cabinet. "He's a total chauvinist, Mr Macho, Mr Army," an unimpressed female friend of mine told me.
Even the extent of his recent travels - aimed at getting the Middle East peace process back on track - are the subject of sniping remarks. A Jerusalem taxi-driver recently remarked ironically, to me, as he waited at a red light and leaned forward lazily on his steering-wheel, that he didn't know what to make of Barak because the prime minister had hardly been in Israel since taking office.
Maybe he had a point. In my head I listed the countries Barak had already visited - the United States, England, Egypt, Morocco and Russia. All in the space of a few short weeks.
The taxi-driver doesn't seem to be the only confused citizen. Mark, a left-wing friend of mine who strongly supported Barak, the candidate of the left, complained to me just the other day that he was unimpressed by the prime minister's efforts to alter the Wye Plantation peace accords signed with the Palestinians, and that he hoped Yasser Arafat would remain resolute in his insistence that Barak implement the agreement to the letter.
Barak, though, does still seem to have at least one consistent, if unwitting, ally - Benjamin Netanyahu. When they're finished griping, most Israelis, especially those with left-wing opinions, pause, sigh, then utter a relieved closing comment: "Thank God, at least Bibi's not in power!"
In his efforts to bring peace to his people, Barak has another ally - fatigue. Israelis, sceptical of fairytale endings but tired of war, sound ready to make the painful compromises that a deal with the Syrians and the Palestinians will entail. "I'm ready to get off the Golan Heights if that's the price of peace with Syria," says Beersheva's Gabi Cohen. "It pains me to say it, But yes, I'm ready."