Name: Yitzhak Mordechai
Age: 53
Occupation: Israeli Defence Minister
Why in the news: The last moderate in Mr Metanyhu's precarious cabinet and popular with the public, he says he will quit if Israeli troops are not withdrawn from the West Bank within three months
When 18-year-old Yitzhak Mordechai, an unremarkable immigrant kid, was inducted into the Israeli army in 1962, he volunteered for the elite paratroop corps. They rejected him. He volunteered for the naval commandos. They turned him down too. He was drafted into a regular infantry unit.
A few months later, after he had proved himself unusually disciplined, hard-working and courageous, he applied again to the paratroops. This time they took him in. Within a decade he was the commanding officer of the battalion that had snubbed him.
Rejection. Hard work. Vindication. That's been the story of Yitzhak Mordechai's life - a saga of hard-earned success that has taken him, at the age of 53, all the way to the second most prestigious job his country has to offer: Minister of Defence.
But second-best has never been good enough. And with Benjamin Netanyahu's premiership looking increasingly vulnerable, opportunity is beckoning for Mr Mordechai.
The Palestinian leadership, frustrated by Mr Netanyahu's unwillingness to speed ahead with peace moves, has long regarded Mr Mordechai as the most decent and most sympathetic member of the Israeli government, and would be delighted to see him force the Prime Minister out and replace him.
The Clinton administration, which identifies in Mr Mordechai traces of the calm pragmatism it so admired in the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, has been assiduously cultivating him. And the Israeli public, impressed by the warmth, common sense and integrity he manages to convey - and evidently unperturbed by his recent (second) marriage to his former office manager, Kokhi, who is 28 years his junior - has been consistently voting him their favourite politician in opinion polls.
Ayal Arad, one of Israel's most respected political strategists, once described Mr Mordechai as "a classic example of the American leadership model: reliable, trustworthy, cares about people like you and me, with vision and clear goals". Mr Arad was a key behind-the-scenes adviser in Mr Netanyahu's successful 1996 election campaign; recently, he's been working for Mr Mordechai.
Born in Kurdistan, brought by his parents to Israel as a five-year-old with his six brothers and sisters, "Itzik" Mordechai didn't have it easy. The family spent their early years at an unsalubrious transit camp. For Mr Mordechai, as for many poor Sephardim - immigrants from Middle Eastern countries - the army offered a way out and up.
During 33 years in uniform, he won medals for valour, a reputation for outstanding command in some of the army's harshest battles, and the reluctant admiration of the overwhelmingly Ashkenazi (Jews of European origin) military elite, eventually rising to the rank of major general.
He supervised the fraught 1980s secret passage of Ethiopian Jews to Israel via Sudan. And he emerged, vindicated, from a vicious 1984 attempt by corrupt Israeli intelligence agents to frame him in the killing of two Palestinian bus hijackers. And yet, true to form, when he sought the position of deputy chief of staff he was brushed aside, and quit the army in a huff in 1995.
Deciding to enter politics, he turned first to the then-governing Labour Party. But Mr Peres declined to guarantee him a ministerial position. So Mr Mordechai went to see Mr Netanyahu, then the leader of the hardline Likud opposition, who recognised the voter appeal of the soft-spoken, war-hardened ex-general.
The new dynamic duo toured the country in the run-up to the 1996 elections. And when Prime Minister Netanyahu formed his government that June, Mr Mordechai was rewarded with the plum Defence post.
Days after taking over as Defence Minister, he invited Amnon Shahak - the army chief of staff who had overlooked him for the deputy's position - to his home outside Jerusalem, cooked him breakfast and told him that he bore no grudges. And so it has proved.
Several times in the past 18 months the pair have managed to restrain the more adventurous impulses of the Netanyahu government; declining to send tanks into Arafat-controlled areas during violent West Bank confrontations and, critically, refusing to authorise a call-up of reservists when tension flared on the Israel-Syrian border in the late summer of 1996.
It has since become clear that he was right, and that Mr Netanyahu was being fed erroneous information by a rogue officer in the Mossad intelligence service.
While Mr Netanyahu rails incessantly against the Oslo accords that Mr Rabin formulated and he inherited, Mr Mordechai, who keeps a picture of the assassinated prime minister on his office wall, calls them "the only agreements we have", and pledges "to improve them and make them work".
Until last week his positions were echoed at the cabinet table by David Levy, the Foreign Minister. But Mr Levy has now resigned, leaving Mr Mordechai as the only influential moderate in the government.
He is now talking publicly about quitting if the next phase of the accords, an overdue Israeli troop withdrawal from the West Bank, is not implemented within three months.
Mr Mordechai has never courted the militants. He refused to start a meeting at a Gaza settlement last year until he'd won a promise that a gate sign proclaiming "No entrance to dogs and Palestinians" would be removed. And he defended the Israeli military pull-out from Hebron last year, in the face of criticism about the security risks to the settlers there, by asking witheringly: "Because of some dump in Hebron, should we set the whole region on fire?".
Polls suggest that most Israelis identify more closely with the Mordechai mindset than the Netanyahu approach, recognising the need to achieve a fair settlement with the Palestinians, and soon, before ill-health, internal opposition or Islamic militancy brings down Mr Arafat.
Now that Mr Netanyahu's parliamentary majority has been reduced to a wafer-thin 61-59, Mr Mordechai could conceivably force new elections simply by voting with the opposition in a no-confidence motion.
But that would be out of character. A more realistic scenario is for him to formally challenge Mr Netanyahu head-on; either for the leadership of the Likud, or by leaving the Likud and taking command of a new centrist party that is beginning to jell.
With Mr Netanyahu's popularity fading, and Labour's new leader Ehud Barak proving a stiff, uncharismatic figure, the middle ground is ripe for him to take. The working-class immigrant kid, blocked from the top spots in the army, could find the ultimate vindication as prime minister and set his troubled country back on the road to peace.